books tagged “women writers”

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Anne Tyler: Three Complete Novels
by Anne Tyler

ISBN 0517064596 (0-517-06459-6)
Hardcover, Random House Value Publishing

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- Anne Tyler: Three Complete Novels: ISBN 0517064596 (0-517-06459-6)
  Hardcover, Random House Value Publishing
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin, Pamela Knights

ISBN 0192823000 (0-19-282300-0)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Book summary:
This revision of a widely adopted critical edition presents the 1969 Seyersted text of Kate Chopin's novel along with critical essays that introduce students to The Awakening from the perspectives of feminism, gender (new essay), new historical, deconstructionist, and reader response criticism. An additional new essay demonstrates how various approaches can be combined. The text and essays are complemented by introductions to The Awakening and to the criticism, a glossary of critical terms, and (for the first time) contextual documents. [via]
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The Awakening and Selected Stories
by Kate Chopin

ISBN 1406502278 (1-4065-0227-8)
Softcover, Dodo Pr

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Book summary:
"The Awakening" is the story of Edna Pontellier, an attractive twenty-eight year old woman who is a wife and mother of two sons living in the Creole south in the late 19th century. Edna finds herself trapped in her life as a wife and a mother and feels unable to express her passionate sensuality within the confines of her marriage. She seeks a spiritual and sexual awakening through an affair with a younger man during one summer while her husband is away. Liberated by this experience she sends her children away and is determined to live a more independent and self-determined life. However this new found independence also becomes her downfall as her actions are looked down upon by the members of her society in the late 19th century south. "The Awakening" is a classic modern example of the tragic hero. It illustrates the confines of late 19th century America for women and the beginning of an era of changing social attitudes towards the role of women in society. Chopin's novel was meet with great criticism when it was first published and essentially ended her literary career. The reaction to its publication is indicative of the social attitude towards greater independence and freedom for women at the time. At the same time the novel was a harbinger of the greater independence that was soon to come for women in America. Also contained within this volume is a collection of eight shorter works by the author. [via]
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The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin
by Kate Chopin, Barbara H. Solomon

ISBN 0451524489 (0-451-52448-9)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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Book summary:
I used this book for a college class... But read it again because it was SOOOO good! [via]
More editions of The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin:
- The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin: ISBN 0743487672 (0-7434-8767-2)
  Softcover, Pocket Classics
- The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin: ISBN 0451524489 (0-451-52448-9)
  Softcover, New Amer Library Classics
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison, A. S. Byatt

ISBN 0307264882 (0-307-26488-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Toni Morrison gently reads her own Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the unabridged version of this riveting tale of ex-slave Sethe and the beloved ghost that haunts her. While Morrison makes occasional odd pauses in her reading, what is lost in smoothness is more than made up for in quiet intensity as the author reads words obviously deeply felt. Her intimate knowledge of the characters and their motivations lends this reading an authority that helps the listener sort out the breaks in time and dialogue in this complex story of a woman coming to terms with her enslaved past and the loss of her husband and baby daughter. (Running time: 12 hours, eight cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs [via]
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The Best American Short Stories, 1999
by Amy Tan, Katrina Kenison

ISBN 039592684X (0-395-92684-X)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:
A great story gets its hooks into you right from the start; you know you're in the hands of a good writer when the very first sentence transports you wholly into another world. "Mother preferred Zulu servants." "It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring." "Who would have thought that a war of such proportions would bother to turn in its fury against the fools of Chelm?"
The 21 fictions featured in The Best American Short Stories 1999 have very little in common--but whether they're about ranchers or commuters, romantic seekers or New Age pilgrims, what they do share is a sense of urgency. In each of them, there's a kind of voice that announces its need to be heard. "I'm not a bad guy," pleads the narrator of "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," and even though he cheats on his girlfriend, by the end of Junot Díaz's story you might be tempted to agree anyway. (Especially considering the charming way he turns Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener into a verb--as in, "A lot of the time she Bartlebys me, says, 'No, I'd rather not.'") "Real Estate," by that master of bittersweet comedy Lorrie Moore, starts by repeating "Ha! Ha! Ha!" for two solid pages but becomes a rueful take on marriage, house-hunting, and even death: "The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me too, barked the dog."
Other standouts in this collection include Alice Munro's "Save the Reaper," a kind of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" where no one is killed or saved; Rick Bass's haunting evocation of winter in the north country, "The Hermit's Story"; and Tim Gautreax's "The Piano Tuner," about a manic-depressive Creole princess playing cocktail piano in a motel lounge. (This is one tale that truly does end with a bang, not a whimper.) Taken together, they are ample evidence that the American short story is alive, well, and eminently able to--in the words of guest editor Amy Tan--"help us live interesting lives." --Chloe Byrne [via]
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- The Best American Short Stories, 1999: ISBN 039592684X (0-395-92684-X)
  Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
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The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood

ISBN 0385720955 (0-385-72095-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist. For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin , she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a- novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin , it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be--but, in fact, much more. The Blind Assassin proves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time. Like The Handmaid's Tale , it is destined to become a classic. [via]
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The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
by Angela Carter

ISBN 0575025840 (0-575-02584-0)
Hardcover, Gollancz

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Book summary:
A reissue of a collection of short stories first published ten years ago. They include "The Company of Wolves", on which the prize-winning film of the same name was based. Angela Carter is the author of "Nights at the Circus" and "The Magic Toyshop". [via]
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- The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories: ISBN 0575025840 (0-575-02584-0)
  Hardcover, Gollancz
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Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison

ISBN 0307278441 (0-307-27844-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.
Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.
There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.
This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus [via]
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Breathing Lessons
by Anne Tyler

ISBN 0345485572 (0-345-48557-2)
Softcover, Ballantine Books

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Book summary:
Maggie Moran's mission is to connect and unite people, whether they want to be united or not. Maggie is a meddler and as she and her husband, Ira, drive 90 miles to the funeral of an old friend, Ira contemplates his wasted life and the traffic, while Maggie hatches a plant to reunite her son Jesse with his long-estranged wife and baby. As Ira explains, "She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them." Though everyone criticizes her for being "ordinary," Maggie's ability to see the beauty and potential in others ultimately proves that she is the only one fighting the resignation they all fear. The book captured the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1989. [via]
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The Cayman Islands: The Beach & Beyond
by Martha K. Smith

ISBN 0965034909 (0-9650349-0-9)
Softcover, Cuchipanda Inc

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Book summary:
From the author of the critically acclaimed "The Handmaid's Tale" comes this 2000 novel-within-a-novel centering on entangled relationships in 1930s-40s Ontario, Canada. [via]
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- The Cayman Islands: The Beach & Beyond: ISBN 0965034909 (0-9650349-0-9)
  Softcover, Cuchipanda Inc
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Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel

ISBN 0385721234 (0-385-72123-4)
Softcover, Random House Espanol

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Book summary:
Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.

The Spanish language edition of the best-selling Like Water For Chocolate is a remarkable success in its own right. Now, in this mass market edition, thousands of new readers will be able to partake in the sumptuous, romantic, and hilarious tale of Tita, the terrific cook with an extra special something in her sauce.

From the Paperback edition. [via]
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El Club De LA Buena Estrella
by Amy Tan

ISBN 8472231631 (84-7223-163-1)
Softcover, Ediciones Urano

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Book summary:
En 1949, cuatro mujeres chinas emigradas a San Francisco se reunen regularmente para comer dim sum,jugar al mah-jong y hablar. Unidas por sentimientos de perdida y esperanza, se hacen llamar El Club de laBuena Estrella. Amy Tan explora la conexion entre las protagonistas y sus hijas, ya nacidas en Estados Unidos, un mundo totalmente distinto al suyo. [via]
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- El Club De LA Buena Estrella: ISBN 8472238806 (84-7223-880-6)
  Softcover, Tusquets USA Pub
- El Club De LA Buena Estrella: ISBN 8472231631 (84-7223-163-1)
  Softcover, Ediciones Urano
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Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson

ISBN 1594131244 (1-59413-124-4)
Softcover, Thorndike Press

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Book summary:
Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Writing in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows "even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order" Slate . In the luminous and unforgettable voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, Gilead reveals the human condition and the often unbearable beauty of an ordinary life. Gilead is the winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [via]
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The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan

ISBN 1587248832 (1-58724-883-2)
Softcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. [via]
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Like Water for Chocolate
by Thomas Christensen, Laura Esquivel, Carol Christensen

ISBN 038542017X (0-385-42017-X)
Softcover, Anchor Books

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Despite the fact that she has fallen in love with a young man, Tita, the youngest of three daughters born to a tyrannical rancher, must obey tradition and remain single and at home to care for her mother. Reprint. Movie tie-in. [via]
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Like Water for Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel, Carol Christensen

ISBN 0385420161 (0-385-42016-1)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. This novel includes recipes, romances, and home remedies. [via]
More editions of Like Water for Chocolate:
- Like Water for Chocolate: ISBN 0785721665 (0-7857-2166-5)
  Hardcover, Bt Bound
- Like Water for Chocolate: ISBN 0385420161 (0-385-42016-1)
  Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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My Antonia
by Willa Cather, John J. Murphy, Wladyslaw T. Benda

ISBN 0140187642 (0-14-018764-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.
Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.
As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak [via]
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Orlando: A Biography
by Virginia Woolf

ISBN 1853262390 (1-85326-239-0)
Softcover, Lb May & Assoc Inc

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Book summary:
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Orlando doubles as first an Elizabethan nobleman and then as a Victorian heroine who undergoes all the transitions of history in this novel that examines sex roles and social mores. [via]
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Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver

ISBN 0060512822 (0-06-051282-2)
Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited

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Book summary:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2000: As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?
In fact they can and they do. The first part of The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's intransigent, bullying personality and his effect on both his family and the village they have come to. As political instability grows in the Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years.
The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell their stories in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can grate--teenage Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice their "French congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo.
Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized, three-dimensional characters make The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially in the first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement, and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so successful. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Red Tent
by Anita Diamant

ISBN 1417616466 (1-4176-1646-6)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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The red tent is the place where women gathered during their cycles of birthing, menses, and even illness. Like the conversations and mysteries held within this feminine tent, this sweeping piece of fiction offers an insider's look at the daily life of a biblical sorority of mothers and wives and their one and only daughter, Dinah. Told in the voice of Jacob's daughter Dinah (who only received a glimpse of recognition in the Book of Genesis), we are privy to the fascinating feminine characters who bled within the red tent. In a confiding and poetic voice, Dinah whispers stories of her four mothers, Rachel, Leah, Zilpah, and Bilhah--all wives to Jacob, and each one embodying unique feminine traits. As she reveals these sensual and emotionally charged stories we learn of birthing miracles, slaves, artisans, household gods, and sisterhood secrets. Eventually Dinah delves into her own saga of betrayals, grief, and a call to midwifery.
"Like any sisters who live together and share a husband, my mother and aunties spun a sticky web of loyalties and grudges," Anita Diamant writes in the voice of Dinah. "They traded secrets like bracelets, and these were handed down to me the only surviving girl. They told me things I was too young to hear. They held my face between their hands and made me swear to remember." Remembering women's earthy stories and passionate history is indeed the theme of this magnificent book. In fact, it's been said that The Red Tent is what the Bible might have been had it been written by God's daughters, instead of her sons. --Gail Hudson [via]
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston, Gates, Henry Louis (AFT), Edwidge Danticat

ISBN 0060838671 (0-06-083867-1)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.
Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:
It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."
Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Woman on the Edge of Time
by Marge Piercy

ISBN 0449210820 (0-449-21082-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books

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Book summary:
Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future, and able to communicate with the year 2137. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to the future and its lessons for today....

From the Paperback edition. [via]
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The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Robert Shulman

ISBN 0192834800 (0-19-283480-0)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Book summary:
One of 60 low-priced classic texts published to celebrate Penguin's 60th anniversary. All the titles are extracts from "Penguin Classics" titles. [via]
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The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Julie Bates Dock

ISBN 0271017341 (0-271-01734-1)
Softcover, Pennsylvania State Univ Pr

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Book summary:
Based on the 1892 New England Magazine text, this teaching edition of The Yellow Wallpaper includes a generous selection of historical materials. The documents are organized into thematic units and features nineteenth-century advice manuals for young women and mothers; medical texts discussing the nature of women's sexuality; social reform literature concerning women's rights, the working classes, and immigration; and excerpts from periodicals, diaries, and writers' notebooks that give students a sense of the changing literary scene that Gilman entered. Editorial features designed to help students read the novel in light of the documents include a general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology o Hawthorne's life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a generous selection of illustrations, and a selected bibliography.
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El Club de la Buena Estrella
by Amy Tan

ISBN 1400002370 (1-4000-0237-0)
Softcover, Plaza & Janes Editories, S.A.

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Book summary:
En 1949, cuatro mujeres chinas emigradas a San Francisco se reunen regularmente para comer dim sum,jugar al mah-jong y hablar. Unidas por sentimientos de perdida y esperanza, se hacen llamar El Club de laBuena Estrella. Amy Tan explora la conexion entre las protagonistas y sus hijas, ya nacidas en Estados Unidos, un mundo totalmente distinto al suyo. [via]
More editions of El Club de la Buena Estrella:
- El Club de la Buena Estrella: ISBN 1400002370 (1-4000-0237-0)
  Softcover, Plaza & Janes Editories, S.A.
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Como Agua para Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel

ISBN 0385471378 (0-385-47137-8)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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More editions of Como Agua para Chocolate:
- Como Agua para Chocolate: ISBN 0385471378 (0-385-47137-8)
  Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
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Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel

ISBN 0385471483 (0-385-47148-3)
Softcover, Random House Espanol

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Book summary:
Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.

The Spanish language edition of the best-selling Like Water For Chocolate is a remarkable success in its own right. Now, in this mass market edition, thousands of new readers will be able to partake in the sumptuous, romantic, and hilarious tale of Tita, the terrific cook with an extra special something in her sauce. [via]
More editions of Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate:
- Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate: ISBN 0385471483 (0-385-47148-3)
  Softcover, Random House Espanol
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Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate
by Not Available

ISBN 9706907483 (970-690-748-3)
Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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› Find signed collectible books: 'Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate'
Book summary:
Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.

The Spanish language edition of the best-selling Like Water For Chocolate is a remarkable success in its own right. Now, in this mass market edition, thousands of new readers will be able to partake in the sumptuous, romantic, and hilarious tale of Tita, the terrific cook with an extra special something in her sauce.

From the Paperback edition. [via]
More editions of Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate:
- Como Agua Para Chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate: ISBN 9706907483 (970-690-748-3)
  Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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