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books tagged “women”
books tagged “women”
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Bachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules-A Social History of Living Singleby Betsy IsraelISBN 038079778X (0-380-79778-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Beautyby Sheri S. TepperISBN 0385419406 (0-385-41940-6)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beauty'Book summary:With the critically acclaimed novels The Gate To Women's Country, Raising The Stones, and the Hugo-nominated Grass, Sheri Tepper has established herself as one of the major science fiction writers of out Time. In Beauty, she broadens her territory even further, with a novel that evokes all the richness of fairy tale and fable. Drawing on the wellspring of tales such as "Sleeping Beauty," Beauty is a moving novel of love and loss, hope and despair, magic and nature. Set against a backdrop both enchanted and frightening, the story begins with a wicked aunt's curse that will afflict a young woman named Beauty on her sixteenth birthday. Though Beauty is able to sidestep tragedy, she soon finds herself embarked on an adventure of vast consequences. For it becomes clear that the enchanted places of this fantastic world--a place not unlike our own--are in danger and must be saved before it is too late.
From the Paperback edition. [via] -
Black and Blueby Anna QuindlenISBN 0385333137 (0-385-33313-7)
Softcover, Delta
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black and Blue'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 1998: "The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old," begins Fran Benedetto, the broken heroine of Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue. With one sweeping sentence, the door to an abused and tortured world is swung wide open and the psyche of a crushed and tattered self-image exposed. "Frannie, Frannie, Fran"--as Bobby Benedetto liked to call her before smashing her into kitchen appliances--was a young, energetic nursing student when she met her husband-to-be at a local Brooklyn bar. She was instantly captivated by his dark, brooding looks and magnetic personality, but her fascination soon solidified into a marital prison sentence of incessant abuse and the destruction of her own identity. After an especially horrific beating and rape, Fran realizes that the next attack could be the last. Fearing her son would be left alone with Bobby, she escapes one morning with her child. Fran's salvation comes in the form of Patty Bancroft and Co., a relocation agency for abused women that touts better service than the witness protection program. Armed only with a phone number, a few hundred dollars, and the help of several anonymous volunteers, Fran begins a new life. The agency relocates her to Florida, where she becomes Beth Crenshaw, a recently divorced home-care assistant from Delaware. Fran and her son adapt, meeting challenges with unexpected resilience and resolve until their past returns to haunt them. Quindlen renders the intricacies of spousal abuse with eerie accuracy, taking the reader deep within the realm of dysfunctional human ties. However, her vivid descriptions of abuse, emotional disintegration, and acute loneliness at times numb the reader with their realism. [via]
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Black Trilliumby Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian MayISBN 0385261853 (0-385-26185-3)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Trillium'Book summary:Ruwenda is a pleasant, peaceful land-but the magic of its guardian, the Archimage Binah, is waning. Binah must pass along her protectorship to the triplet princess of Ruwenda. She bestows upon the infant girls the power of the rare and mystical Black Trillium-badge of the royal house, symbol of an ancient magic. While the sisters blossom into beautiful young women, neighboring Labornok use a dark magician to sunder Binah's protection. As invaders pour into Ruwenda, the Archimage orders the princesses to flee-and changes them to search for three magical talismans which when brought together will be their only chance to regain their kingdom and free its people. Each must accomplish her task separately-and to succeed, each must also confront and conquer the limits of her own soul. [via]
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Bloody Maryby Carolly EricksonISBN 0385116632 (0-385-11663-2)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bloody Mary'Book summary:Here is the tragic, stormy life of Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. Her story is a chronicle of courage and faith, betrayal and treachery-set amidst the splendor, pageantry, squalor, and intrigue of sixteenth-century Europe.[via]
The history of Mary Tudor is an improbable blend of triumph, humiliation, heartbreak, and devotion-and Ms. Erickson recounts it all against the turbulent background of European politics, war, and religious strife of the mid-1500s. The result is a rare portrait of the times and of a woman elevated to unprecedented power in a world ruled and defined by men.More editions of Bloody Mary:
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Breathing Lessonsby Anne TylerISBN 0345485572 (0-345-48557-2)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Breathing Lessons'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]
Buffalo Woman Comes Singingby Brooke Medicine EagleISBN 0345361431 (0-345-36143-1)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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Butterflyby Kathryn HarveyISBN 0380708353 (0-380-70835-3)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
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The Cairo Trilogy : Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Streetby Naguib Mahfouz, Edward W. SaidISBN 0375413316 (0-375-41331-6)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cairo Trilogy : Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street'Book summary:Naguib Mahfouzs magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time. The Nobel Prizewinning writers masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britains occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sonsthe tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmads rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace of Desire, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Sugar Street brings Mahfouzs vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician.
Throughout the trilogy, the familys trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two World Wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.
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Can You Keep a Secret?by Sophie KinsellaISBN 0385338082 (0-385-33808-2)
Softcover, Delta
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Can You Keep a Secret?'Book summary:With the same wicked humor, buoyant charm, and optimism that have made her Shopaholic novels beloved international bestsellers, Sophie Kinsella delivers a hilarious new novel and an unforgettable new character. Meet Emma Corrigan, a young woman with a huge heart, an irrepressible spirit, and a few little secrets:
Secrets from her mother:
I lost my virginity in the spare bedroom with Danny Nussbaum while Mum and Dad were downstairs watching Ben-Hur.
Sammy the goldfish in my parents' kitchen is not the same goldfish that Mum gave me to look after when she and Dad were in Egypt.
Secrets from her boyfriend:
I weigh one hundred and twenty-eight pounds. Not one eighteen, like Connor thinks.
I've always thought Connor looks a bit like Ken. As in Barbie and Ken.
From her colleagues:
When Artemis really annoys me, I feed her plant orange juice. (Which is pretty much every day.) It was me who jammed the copier that time. In fact, all the times.
Secrets she wouldn't share with anyone in the world:
My G-string is hurting me.
I have no idea what NATO stands for. Or even what it is.
Until she spills them all to a handsome stranger on a plane. At least, she thought he was a stranger.
But come Monday morning, Emma's office is abuzz about the arrival of Jack Harper, the company's elusive CEO. Suddenly Emma is face-to-face with the stranger from
the plane, a man who knows every single humiliating detail about her. Things couldn't possibly get worse-Until they do. [via]More editions of Can You Keep a Secret?:
Celia, a Slaveby Melton A. McLaurinISBN 0380719355 (0-380-71935-5)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Celia, a Slave: A True Storyby Melton A. McLaurinISBN 0380803364 (0-380-80336-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Celia, a Slave: A True Story'Book summary:The True Story of Celia, a Slave. Paperback. [via]
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The Colossusby Sylvia PlathISBN 0375704469 (0-375-70446-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Colossus'Book summary:With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock. [via]
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The Complete Storiesby Flannery O'ConnorISBN 0374515360 (0-374-51536-0)
Softcover, Noonday Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete Stories'Book summary:Winner of the National Book Award[via]
The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her deathis a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux. 
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Storiesby Sarah Orne Jewett, Suzannah LessardISBN 037575671X (0-375-75671-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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- Country of the Pointed Firs: ISBN 0385092148 (0-385-09214-8)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group - The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories: ISBN 0393000486 (0-393-00048-6)
Softcover, Norton - The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories: ISBN 037575671X (0-375-75671-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
- Country of the Pointed Firs: ISBN 0385092148 (0-385-09214-8)
Country Women: A Handbook for the New Farmerby Sherry ThomasISBN 0385030622 (0-385-03062-2)
Softcover, Bookthrift Co
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Darkspellby Katharine KerrISBN 0345344316 (0-345-34431-6)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Deborah, Golda, and Meby Letty C. PogrebinISBN 0385425120 (0-385-42512-0)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Devil's Dreamby Lee SmithISBN 0345382919 (0-345-38291-9)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Devil's Dream'Book summary:"She writes lyric, luminous prose; her craft is so strong it becomes transparent, and, like the best of storytellers, she knows how to get out of the way so that the story can tell itself."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Moses Bailey, a preacher's son, forbade his fiddle-loving wife Kate Malone to play. But while he was gone on his travels, looking for God, Kate couldn't help herself, and began fiddling for her three children. For the love of music, Kate is willing to defy anyone who tries to stop her. From generation to generation, the gift and love of music cannot be stopped, and no Malone is immune from its spell. [via]More editions of The Devil's Dream:
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon : The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of a Legendary Victorianby Brian ThompsonISBN 0385500904 (0-385-50090-4)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
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The Dress Lodgerby Sheri HolmanISBN 0345436911 (0-345-43691-1)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dress Lodger'Book summary:The Dress Lodger, a prostitute's passion for her vulnerable baby and the disgraced doctor who might save him, is engrossing historical fiction. As with all the best fictional history, Sheri Holman's atmospheric, miasmic tale of cholera-struck Sunderland in 1831 is based on fact. "Grave: A place where the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student": this epigraph casts the novel's thematic lodestone, steering the reader into a deathly plot pursued through streets emanating the sounds, insufferable smells, humour, adversities and disease of an early 19th-century industrial town.
Gustine--the dress lodger--is a potter's assistant by day, sex worker by night. Her overbearing pimp and landlord has her permanently shadowed by the indefatigable, mysterious old woman known only as Eye to guard his investment in the startling blue dress in which she rents herself, explaining that: "dress lodging works on this basic principle: a cheap whore is given a fancy dress as a higher class of prostitute, the higher the station of the clientèle; the higher the station, the higher the price." Gustine's dress beckons a high-class punter pursued by a dubious fallen past in the figure of Dr Henry Chiver, an ambitious young surgeon who has fled Edinburgh to escape the professional scandal attending on his implication in the convictions of infamous pioneer anatomists Burke and Hare for murder and graverobbing. The heart is the favourite organ, "the singular fascination of his life", for Henry Chiver, desperate to re-establish his tarnished reputation through medical discovery. For this, and his paying students restless for induction into the arts of the scalpel, Chiver requires dead bodies for dissection, to the horror of his naïve, philanthropic fiancée Audrey Place. But it is 1831: the Anatomy Act has yet to pass through parliament to enable medics to legally obtain the corpses so critical to their accurate practice, and a suspicious public is terrifying itself with stories of murderous "burkers".
Streetsmart Gustine, "a rented self", hostile pragmatist trapped in unrelenting poverty, is all heart for her nameless little son who wears--literally--his heart on the outside, a rare case of ectopia cordis; just the kind of anatomical anomaly whose study would make the name of the aspirant but stigmatised Henry. Amid the gathering momentum of cholera epidemic, the two strike up a fatal pact: life for Gustine's son in exchange for a fresh supply of dead bodies for Chiver's scientific dissection. With mordant Dickensian wit and Elizabeth Gaskell's deft touch for gutsy outcast women seizing control of their destiny, Holman carves out a richly imaginative adventure as incisive and gruesomely fascinating as a 19th-century operating theatre. --Rachel Holmes [via]
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Drinking the Rainby Alix Kates ShulmanISBN 0374144036 (0-374-14403-6)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Ellen Fosterby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0375703055 (0-375-70305-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ellen Foster'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1997: Kaye Gibbons is a writer who brings a short story sensibility to her novels. Rather than take advantage of the novel's longer form to paint her visions in broad, sweeping strokes, Gibbons prefers to concentrate on just one corner of the canvas and only a few colors to produce her small masterpieces. In Gibbons's case, her canvas is the American South and her colors are all the shades of gray.
In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old Ellen," an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong. There is something almost Dickensian about Ellen's tribulations; like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or a host of other literary child heroes, Ellen is at the mercy of predatory adults, with only her own wit and courage--and the occasional kindness of others--to help her through. That she does, in fact, survive her childhood and even rise above it is the book's bittersweet victory. [via]
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Fair and Tender Ladiesby Lee SmithISBN 034536208X (0-345-36208-X)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fair and Tender Ladies'Book summary:"A tour de force."
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Ivy Rowe may not have much education, but her thoughts are classic, and her experiences are fascinating. Born near the turn of the century in the Virginia Mountains, Ivy's story is told completely through letters she is forever writing, and that you will forever want to read....
"Few readers will be dry-eyed as they watch this extraordinary woman disappear around that last bend in the road."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE [via]More editions of Fair and Tender Ladies:
The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadershipby Sally HelgesenISBN 0385419112 (0-385-41911-2)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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The Feminization of American Cultureby Ann DouglasISBN 0374525587 (0-374-52558-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Feminization of American Culture'Book summary:This classic of modern feminism is an ambitious attempt to trace certain present-day values back to cultural shifts of the 19th century. Historian Ann Douglas entwines the fate of American women, most notably those of the white middle class, with that of clergy marginalized by the rise in religious denominations and consequent dilution of their power base. No longer invited to wield influence in vital (some might say traditionally masculine) political and economic arenas, clergy were pushed toward more feminine spheres and rules of expression. Likewise, as growing numbers of middle-class white women lost their place as the indispensable center of household production, and many lower-class women became easily replaced industrial cogs, a none-too-subtle shift in perceptions about women's strengths and abilities occurred. Women lost voting rights and other legal privileges; barred from healing and midwifery, they were also less likely to appear in other increasingly male professions. Academies for wealthier girls imparted skills deemed to entice and soothe men without taxing supposedly tiny feminine brains; when Emma Willard offered geometry lessons to girls in the 1820s, one opponent harrumphed: "They'll be educating cows next." Douglas chronicles the rise of an overwhelmingly sentimental "feminization" of mass culture--in which writers of both sexes underscored popular convictions about women's weaknesses, desires, and proper place in the world--with erudite and well-argued scholarship. --Francesca Coltrera [via]
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- The Feminization of American Culture: ISBN 038001968X (0-380-01968-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins - The Feminization of American Culture: ISBN 0385242417 (0-385-24241-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group - The Feminization of American Culture: ISBN 0374525587 (0-374-52558-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
- The Feminization of American Culture: ISBN 038001968X (0-380-01968-X)
Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Dollby M. G. LordISBN 0380720493 (0-380-72049-3)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women's True Life Tales of Friendships that Blew up, Burned Out or Faded Awayby Jenny Offill, Elissa Schappell, Francine ProseISBN 0385511868 (0-385-51186-8)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
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The Gate of Angelsby Penelope FitzgeraldISBN 0385421508 (0-385-42150-8)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
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Girls' Poker Nightby Jill DavisISBN 0345469674 (0-345-46967-4)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tankby Erma BombeckISBN 0345471725 (0-345-47172-5)
Softcover, Fawcett Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank'Book summary:"She is marvelously funny, direct as a hypodermic, a virtuoso in the field of suburban living....Lovely stuff."
VOGUE
It's the expose to end all exposes--the truth about the suburbs: where they planted trees and crabgrass came up, where they planted the schools and taxes came up, where they died of old age trying to merge onto the freeway and where they finally got sex out of the schools and back into the gutters. [via]More editions of The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank:
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Grassroots: A Field Guide For Feminist Activismby Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy RichardsISBN 0374528659 (0-374-52865-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Grassroots: A Field Guide For Feminist Activism'Book summary:From the authors of Manifesta, an activism handbook that illustrates how to truly make the personal political.Grassroots is an activism handbook for social justice. Aimed at everyone from students to professionals, stay-at-home moms to artists, Grassroots answers the perennial question: What can I do? Whether you are concerned about the environment, human rights violations in Tibet, campus sexual assault policies, sweatshop labor, gay marriage, or the ongoing repercussions from 9-11, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards believe that we all have something to offer in the fight against injustice. Based on the authors' own experiences, and the stories of both the large number of activists they work with as well as the countless everyday people they have encountered over the years, Grassroots encourages people to move beyond the "generic three" check writing, calling congresspeople, and volunteering and make a difference with clear guidelines and models for activism. The authors draw heavily on individual stories as examples, inspiring readers to recognize the tools right in front of them--be it the office copier or the family living room--in order to make change. Activism is accessible to all, and Grassroots shows how anyone, no matter how much or little time they have to offer, can create a world that more clearly reflects their values. [via]
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Hanna's Daughtersby Marianne FredrikssonISBN 0345433491 (0-345-43349-1)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hanna's Daughters'Book summary:Hanna. Johanna. Anna. Three women, three generations, one family.
A #1 international bestseller in Europe, this luminous, heartfelt novel spans more than a hundred years in the lives of three remarkable women--a daughter, mother, and grandmother--lives shaped by the epic sweep of history and linked through a century of great love and great loss.
As Anna holds vigil at her mother's bedside, she longs for reconciliation--not just with her mother, Johanna, but with her grandmother, Hanna, a woman she never really knew. Determined to piece together the fragments of her past, Anna sifts through tattered letters, cracked diaries, and old photographs, as the vivid lives of Hanna and Johanna at last begin to unfold.
Through shades of memory and history, longing to join the ancient threads of the family tapestry, Anna begins searching for answers to questions that have haunted her for a lifetime. What was it like for her grandmother, Hanna, more than one hundred years ago, when she married a miller and raised an illegitimate child in a staunch, rural community? What drove Anna's own mother, Johanna, once a fiery revolutionary, to settle down and become a housewife? And why did the ties binding Anna to her mother and grandmother drive all three apart--only to bring them back together again?
Rich in insight, and resonating with truth and revelation, Hanna's Daughters is an unforgettable story, exploring the volatile ties of mothers and daughters. If you have ever wanted to connect with the past, or rediscover family, this novel will strike a chord in your heart. Marianne Fredriksson has created nothing short of a masterpiece. [via] 
Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitmentby Barbara EhrenreichISBN 0385176155 (0-385-17615-5)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment'Book summary:An explanation of recent sexual culture and the loosening of marriage bonds over the past 20 years. [via]
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Howards Endby E. M. ForsterISBN 0375753761 (0-375-75376-1)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Howards End'Book summary:Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber [via]
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I'm the One That I Wantby Margaret ChoISBN 0345440145 (0-345-44014-5)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I'm the One That I Want'Book summary:Don't come to this bitter, engrossing memoir for a quick and easy laugh. The material that Margaret Cho has turned to such riotous ends in her stand-up act has a very different flavor on the page. An unpopular child (okay, hated and reviled), Cho made friends with the drag queens who worked in her father's bookstore, soon becoming a fag hag, and finding this mutual attraction "both nurturing and powerful, sweet and sour, retail and wholesale." "Drag queens are strong because they have so much to fight against," writes Cho, "homophobia, sexism, pink eye." To support herself at the beginning of her comedy career, Cho worked at FAO Schwarz, sometimes moonlighting in phone sex. Occasionally the jobs would overlap, and she would find herself doing phone sex dressed as Raggedy Ann. There isn't much here about Cho's early success, but she does delve at length into her disastrous sitcom, and devotes many pages to her battles with her weight, with drugs, and with alcohol, and her hopeless relationships with men (none of the bisexual material from her stage act is included here). Cho's message is about self-esteem in the face of consistent opposition from her family, the network that aired a "Margaret Cho" sitcom but permitted her no creative control, and a society that rewards women for thinness, whiteness, meekness, and a shut mouth. --Regina Marler [via]
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I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salemby Maryse Conde, Richard PhilcoxISBN 0345384202 (0-345-38420-2)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem'Book summary:"Stunning...Maryse Conde's imaginative subversion of historical records forms a critque of contemporary American society and its ingrained racism and sexism."
THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
At the age of seven, Tituba watched as her mother was hanged for daring to wound a plantation owner who tried to rape her. She was raised from then on by Mama Yaya, a gifted woman who shared with her the secrets of healing and magic. But it was Tituba's love of the slave John Indian that led her from safety into slavery, and the bitter, vengeful religion practiced by the good citizens of Salem, Massachusetts. Though protected by the spirits, Tituba could not escape the lies and accusations of that hysterical time.
As history and fantasy merge, Maryse Conde, acclaimed author of TREE OF LIFE and SEGU, creates the richly imagined life of a fascinating woman. [via]More editions of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem:
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Imperial Womanby Pearl S. BuckISBN 0381980375 (0-381-98037-5)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Imperial Woman'Book summary:Imperial Woman is the fictionalized biography of the last Empress in China, Ci-xi, who began as a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor and on his death became the de facto head of the Qing Dynasty until her death in 1908.Buck recreates the life of one of the most intriguing rulers during a time of intense turbulence.Tzu Hsi was born into one of the lowly ranks of the Imperial dynasty. According to custom, she moved to the Forbidden City at the age of seventeen to become one of hundreds of concubines. But her singular beauty and powers of manipulation quickly moved her into the position of Second Consort.Tzu Hsi was feared and hated by many in the court, but adored by the people. The Empress's rise to power (even during her husband's life) parallels the story of China's transition from the ancient to the modern way. [via]
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Instances of the Number 3by Salley VickersISBN 0374177023 (0-374-17702-3)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Instances of the Number 3'Book summary:When a man dies and leaves behind a wife and a mistress, we expect certain responses to follow. But as the narrator of Salley Vickers's second novel explains, "this is not an account of feminine jealousy, or even revenge, and not all human beings (not even women) conform to the attitudes generally expected." Indeed, in this ironic and witty novel nothing is quite as we expect to find it. Telling the story of Bridget Hansome and Frances Slater, Vickers brings to life a loving marriage and a love affair that exist side by side for years - and continue to reverberate after secretive, generous, sexually prodigal Peter Hansome dies suddenly in a car accident, on his way home from an assignation with yet another lover, about whom neither woman knows.[via]
While Frances, a London art dealer and sometime artists' model, gradually makes friends with the older, Shakespeare-loving Bridget, these two unconventional women start to learn the whole truth (or almost the whole truth) about the man whose death brought them together and whose ghost watches over them still.
Wise, wry, and intellectually playful, Instances of the Number 3 explores the mysterious power of triangles in love, art, and theology. It confirms Salley Vickers as one of the most intelligent new voices in British fiction.More editions of Instances of the Number 3:
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Kindredby Octavia E. ButlerISBN 0385150598 (0-385-15059-8)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kindred'Book summary:FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. An African American woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the 19th-century and the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. [via]
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Ladies of Missalonghiby Colleen McCulloughISBN 0380704587 (0-380-70458-7)
Softcover, Avon Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ladies of Missalonghi'Book summary:Sometimes fairy toles can come true-even for plain,shy spinsters like Missy Wright. Neither as pretty as cousin Alicianor as domineering as mother Drusilla, she seems doomed to aquiet life of near poverty at Missalonghi, her family's pitifullysmall homestead in Australia's Blue Mountains. But It's a brandnew century-the twentieth-a time for new thoughts and boldnew actions. And Missy Wright is about to set every self-righteous tongue in the town of Byron wagging. Because she hasjust set her sights on a mysterious, mistrusted and unsuspectingstranger ... who just might be Prince-Charming in disguise. [via]
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Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding And Losing Myself in Booksby Maureen CorriganISBN 0375709037 (0-375-70903-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding And Losing Myself in Books'Book summary:As book reviewer for NPRs Fresh Air and contributor to many publications, Maureen Corrigan literally reads for a living. For as long as she can remember, books have been at the center of her life, a never-failing source of astonishment, hard truths, new horizons, and welcome companionship. Now Corrigan has added a volume of her own to the shelf of classics, by reading her life of reading with all the attention to complexity, wit, and intelligence that any good bookor lifedeserves.
Part memoir, part coming-of-age story, and part reflection on favorite and influential books, Leave Me Alone, Im Reading views the world through an open book. From her unpretentious girlhood in the working-class neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens, to her bemused years in an Ivy League Ph.D. program, from the whirl of falling in love and marrying (a fellow bookworm, of course), to the ordeal of adopting a baby overseas, Corrigan has always had a book at her side.
We read this life in reverse as Corrigan begins the book as a professional reader always conscious of the many people, like her own mother, who dont get the power of reading, and we end up as a fly on the wall of this only child in Queens, transported to exciting yet threatening worlds beyond her small apartment, a block from the #7 subway.
Corrigans references range from Richard Wright to Philip Roth to Chekhov, but certain themes emerge. Corrigan subverts the classic man conquers mountain or ocean or battlefield genre by juxtaposing it with what she calls female extreme adventure novels books such as Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre, the Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, and Anna Quindlens Black and Blue, which feature women quietly fighting for their lives.
Hard-boiled detective stories that cloak social criticisms of work and family beneath their protagonists trench coat-Dashiell Hammetts The Maltese Falcon, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, Sara Paretskys mysteriesare another abiding passion. More surprising, and perhaps more revealing, is her taste for tales of Catholic martyrs and secular saints, a holdover from her days in parochial school that left an indelible impression.
Moving from page to life and back again, Corrigan writes ultimately of fashioning a complicated, sometimes contradictory self out of her class background, her classroom teaching, and her own classics of literature; a list of favorite books is also included. In Leave Me Alone, Im Reading, Maureen Corrigan invites us to accompany her on the journey of a lifetime. [via]More editions of Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding And Losing Myself in Books:
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Madam Secretaryby Madeleine AlbrightISBN 0375432159 (0-375-43215-9)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Madam Secretary'Book summary:Madeleine Albright is one of the most deeply admired women of our time, and the first female in our nation's history to achieve the title Secretary of State. For eight years during the first and second Clinton terms, she was privy to some of the most fascinating and controversial episodes in memory. Now, in this outspoken memoir, Madeleine Albright shares her personal story, and provides an insider's look into the White House and world affairs during an era of unprecedented change. From a difficult start as a political refugee from Czechoslovakia, Albright went on to become a tireless advocate of civil and women's rights, and pursued a life in politics that ultimately landed her in the upper stratosphere of diplomacy and policy-making in her adopted country. Refreshingly candid, Madam Secretary brings to life the world leaders Albright worked with intimately in her years of service, and the battles she fought to prove her worth in a male-dominated arena. We also get to know Albright, the private woman: her life raising three daughters, the painful breakup of her marriage, and the discovery late in life of her own Jewish background and that her grandparents had died in concentration [via]
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Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnleyby Alison WeirISBN 034543658X (0-345-43658-X)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Moral Disorder: And Other Storiesby Margaret AtwoodISBN 0385503849 (0-385-50384-9)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moral Disorder: And Other Stories'Book summary:Margaret Atwood is acknowledged as one of the foremost writers of our time. In Moral Disorder, she has created a series of interconnected stories that trace the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with itthose of parents, of siblings, of children, of friends, of enemies, of teachers, and even of animals. As in a photograph album, time is measured in sharp, clearly observed moments. The 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and the present all are here. The settings vary: large cities, suburbs, farms, northern forests.
The Bad News is set in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. The narrative then switches time as the central character moves through childhood and adolescence in The Art of Cooking and Serving, The Headless Horseman, and My Last Duchess. We follow her into young adulthood in The Other Place and then through a complex relationship, traced in four of the stories: Monopoly, Moral Disorder, White Horse, and The Entities. The last two stories, "The Labrador Fiasco" and "The Boys at the Lab," deal with the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.
By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwoods celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. As the New York Times has said: "The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people's emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imaginations. [via]More editions of Moral Disorder: And Other Stories:
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No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knittingby Anne L. MacDonaldISBN 0345362535 (0-345-36253-5)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting'Book summary:Examines the history of the nation from the perspective of women and knitting, tracing the changes in day-to-day life and in women's roles in society from colonial times to the present. [via]
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On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978by Adrienne RichISBN 0393012336 (0-393-01233-6)
Hardcover, Norton
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978'Book summary:In this collection of prose writings, one of America's foremost poets and feminist theorists reflects upon themes that have shaped her life and work.
At issue are the politics of language; the uses of scholarship; and the topics of racism, history, and motherhood among others called forth by Rich as "part of the effort to define a female consciousness which is political, aesthetic, and erotic, and which refuses to be included or contained in the culture of passivity." [via]More editions of On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978:
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On the Occasion of My Last Afternoonby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0380732149 (0-380-73214-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon'Book summary:Polly Holliday of TV's Home Improvement won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, "aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously." Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that "effused" as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.
Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried Cold Mountain from his grip and got it into publishers' hands.
But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.
Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, "a pluperfect son of Satan." Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.
The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period.
One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.--Tim Appelo [via]
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Palace Walkby Naguib MahfouzISBN 0385264666 (0-385-26466-6)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Palace Walk'Book summary:Volume I of the masterful Cairo Trilogy. A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s. [via]
Phenomenal Womanby Linda Sunshine, Maya Angelou, Paul GauguinISBN 0375504060 (0-375-50406-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval Englandby Alison WeirISBN 0345453204 (0-345-45320-4)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England'Book summary:Isabella arrived in London in 1308, the spirited twelve-year-old daughter of King Philip IV of France. Her marriage to the heir to Englands throne was designed to heal old political wounds between the two countries, and in the years that followed, she would become an important figure, a determined and clever woman whose influence would come to last centuries. But Queen Isabellas political machinations led generations of historians to malign her, earning her a reputation as a ruthless schemer and an odious nickname, the She-Wolf of France.
Now the acclaimed author of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir, reexamines the life of Isabella of England, historys other notorious and charismatic medieval queen. Praised for her fair looks, the newly wed Isabella was denied the attentions of Edward II, a weak, sexually ambiguous monarch with scant taste for his royal duties. As their marriage progressed, Isabella was neglected by her dissolute husband and slighted by his favored male courtiers. Humiliated and deprived of her income, her children, and her liberty, Isabella escaped to France, where she entered into a passionate affair with Edward IIs mortal enemy, Roger Mortimer. Together, Isabella and Mortimer led the only successful invasion of English soil since the Norman Conquest of 1066, deposing Edward and ruling in his stead as co-regents for Isabellas young son, Edward III. Fate, however, was soon to catch up with Isabella and her lover.
Many mysteries and legends have been woven around Isabellas story. She was long condemned as an accessory to Edward IIs brutal murder in 1327, but recent research has cast doubt on whether that murder even took place.
Isabellas reputation, then, rests largely on the prejudices of monkish chroniclers and prudish Victorian scholars. Here Alison Weir gives a startling, groundbreaking new perspective on Isabella, in this first full biography in more than 150 years. In a work of extraordinary original research, Weir effectively strips away centuries of propaganda, legend, and romantic myth, and reveals a truly remarkable woman who had a profound influence upon the age in which she lived and the history of western Europe.
Engaging, vibrant, alive with breathtaking detail and unforgettable characters, Queen Isabella is biographical history at its finest. [via]More editions of Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England:
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Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millayby Nancy MilfordISBN 0375760814 (0-375-76081-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay'Book summary:Fans of Zelda, Nancy Milford's groundbreaking (and bestselling) biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tortured wife and muse, have been waiting impatiently since 1970 for Milford's promised follow-up about poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). It's finally here, and they will not be disappointed. Milford's vivid narrative limns an electric personality with psychological acuity while capturing the freewheeling atmosphere of America in the turbulent years following World War I. After "Renascence" was published (when she was only 20) and she moved to Greenwich Village, Millay was the queen of bohemia, taking lovers with zest and voicing the reckless gaiety of a generation in her famous lyric, "My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends-- / It gives a lovely light." With her flame-red hair, milk-white skin, and a voice that thrilled audiences (making her poetry readings a welcome source of income), Millay was the archetypal "new woman": powerful, passionate, and not to be ignored. But Milford makes it clear that her first loyalty was to her mother and sisters, and her deepest commitment to her writing. This juicy chronicle has famous names aplenty--critic Edmund Wilson and Masses editor Floyd Dell were among the men devastated by her refusal to be faithful--and lots of dissipation: Millay drank heavily and became addicted to morphine. It also takes a perceptive look at how an artist draws material from her life and at the strategies she uses to protect the wellsprings of creativity. Brief passages interspersed throughout delineating Milford's interactions with Norma Millay, the poet's younger sister and literary executor, might have been self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing; instead they offer intriguing snapshots of the complex process by which biography is made. The resulting book is a tour de force, and wildly entertaining as well. --Wendy Smith [via]
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The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Womanby Elizabeth WurtzelISBN 0345476751 (0-345-47675-1)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman'Book summary:Though she might not always follow her own advice, Elizabeth Wurtzel knows certain things to be true: Doing copious amounts of drugs leads nowhere you want to be; trying to be friends with your ex is always a bad idea; if you cant afford to hire a mover, you cant afford to move; and always doing the best you can is always good enough.
Here are Wurtzels succinct and clever rules for living your best life. Fulfillment is within everyones reach. Grasping it takes enjoying your mistakes, being strong, and having opinions. Todays woman should:
" Be Gorgeous. Make the absolute most of what youve got. Believe that you are gorgeous, and you will be. Its the only trick that really works.
" Embrace Fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others.
" Use All Available Resources. Let the M.D.s and the Ph.D.s help you solve your problems so that you dont become everyone elses problem.
" Never Clear the Table at a Dinner Party Unless the Men Get Up to Help First. Cleanup should not be gendered. Change the world, one dinner table at a time. Hold a sit-in.
One of the fiercest, funniest, and best-known essayists of her generation, Elizabeth Wurtzel infuses this modest gem of a rule book with a sharp wit and a real candor. [via]More editions of The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman:
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Selected Poetry of Emily Dickinsonby Emily Dickinson, Billy CollinsISBN 0345472411 (0-345-47241-1)
Softcover, Bantam Classic & Loveswept
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson'Book summary:The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish has noted the "curious energy" which pervades Emily Dickinson's work. She, along with Walt Whitman, helps make up the very foundation of American poetry. This Modern Library edition from Random House is an excellent overview of Dickinson's work, divided by theme, including "Life," "Nature," "Love," and so forth. This volume of selected poems is a must for any serious reader of American poetry. [via]
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Speakby Laurie Halse AndersonISBN 0374371520 (0-374-37152-0)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Speak'Book summary:Since the beginning of the school year, high school freshman Melinda has found that it's been getting harder and harder for her to speak out loud: "My throat is always sore, my lips raw.... Every time I try to talk to my parents or a teacher, I sputter or freeze.... It's like I have some kind of spastic laryngitis." What could have caused Melinda to suddenly fall mute? Could it be due to the fact that no one at school is speaking to her because she called the cops and got everyone busted at the seniors' big end-of-summer party? Or maybe it's because her parents' only form of communication is Post-It notes written on their way out the door to their nine-to-whenever jobs. While Melinda is bothered by these things, deep down she knows the real reason why she's been struck mute: Andy Evans. He's a senior at Melinda's high school, and Melinda hasn't been able to speak clearly since he raped her at the senior party last August.
Laurie Halse Anderson's first novel is a stunning and sympathetic tribute to the teenage outcast. The triumphant ending, in which Melinda finds her voice and loudly confronts her rapist, is cause for cheering (while many readers might also shed a tear or two). After reading Speak, it will be hard for any teen to look at the class scapegoat again without a measure of compassion and understanding for that person--who may be screaming beneath the silence. (Ages 13 and older) --Jennifer Hubert [via]
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Story of My Lifeby Helen KellerISBN 0385044534 (0-385-04453-4)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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The Tale of Murasakiby Liza Crihfield DalbyISBN 0385497954 (0-385-49795-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tale of Murasaki'Book summary:Liza Dalby's novel is a brilliantly imagined chronicle of the 11th-century Japanese writer Murasaki Shikibu. As we soon discover, our narrator has a good many doubts about the writing life. "As I pondered this question of how to be a success at court," she muses, "I came to the conclusion that literary ambition was more likely than not to bring a woman to a bad end." Happily, the real-life Murasaki persisted, and went on to become the author of the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji. For The Tale of Murasaki, Dalby draws on this groundbreaking masterpiece and on the surviving fragments of Murasaki's own diary and poetry, along with another masterpiece of the Heian period, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The result is a vivid and emotionally detailed portrait of an intelligent, sensitive, and complex woman.
In Dalby's novel, Murasaki writes her first stories about Prince Genji's amorous encounters in order to entertain her friends, and to express her own creative temperament. As the stories gain a wider public, however, they are transformed into a conduit for observations on the mores and intrigues of court life. And in the end, as the narrator struggles to stay true to her literary vision, her tales are inflected by Buddhist thought and become parables on the transience and beauty of the world:
I have always felt compelled to set down a vision of things I have heard and seen. Life itself has never been enough. It only became real for me when I fashioned it into stories. Yet, somehow, despite all I've written, the true nature of things I've tried to grasp in my fiction still manages to drift through the words and sit, like little piles of dust, between the lines.
Dalby is an anthropologist by trade, who has produced two previous nonfiction studies: Kimono and Geisha. And given that her research for Geisha gained her the distinction of being the only Westerner ever to have trained in that much misunderstood profession, it's no surprise that she is able to reconstruct 11th-century Japan with meticulous fidelity. It's all there--the political and sexual machinations, the preoccupations with clothing and custom, the difficult and tenuous position of courtiers, the intensity of female friendships in a male-dominated society--and the author shows us precisely how Murasaki's sensibilities were shaped by the culture in which she lived. This is a rich and convincing debut, and another chapter in the current resurrection of the historical novel. --Burhan Tufail [via]More editions of The Tale of Murasaki:
The Tale of Murasaki: A Novelby Liza DalbyISBN 0385497946 (0-385-49794-6)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
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Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men in the Workplace Language, Sex, and Powerby Deborah TannenISBN 0380717832 (0-380-71783-2)
Softcover, Quill
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men in the Workplace Language, Sex, and Power'Book summary:Your project went off without a hitch--but somebody else got the credit...You averted a crisis brilliantly--but no one noticed...You came to the meeting with a sensational idea--but it was ignored until someone else said the same thing...
HOW CAN YOU GET CREDIT & GET AHEAD?
In her extraordinary international bestseller, You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen transformed forever the way we look at intimate relationships between women and men. Now she turns her keen ear and observant eye toward the workplace--where the ways in which men and women communicate can determine who gets heard, who gets ahead, and what gets done.
An instant classic, Talking From 9 to 5 brilliantly explains women's and men's conversational rituals--and the language barriers we unintentionally erect in the business world. It is a unique and invaluable guide to recognizing the verbal power games and miscommunications that cause good work to be underappreciated or go unnoticed--an essential tool for promoting more positive and productive professional relationships among men and women.
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A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrancesby Laura SchenoneISBN 0393016714 (0-393-01671-4)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances'More editions of A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances:
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Trumpetby Jackie KayISBN 0375704639 (0-375-70463-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Trumpet'Book summary:"It was our secret. That's all it was. Lots of people have secrets, don't they? The world runs on secrets. What kind of place would the world be without them? Our secret was harmless. It did not hurt anybody."
The secret that Millicent Moody, widow of jazz great Joss Moody, refers to may have been harmless in life, but when Joss dies and the truth is exposed, it ends up affecting more people than she ever imagined. It gives nothing away to reveal right off that Millicent's late husband was, in fact, a woman--something Millie has known all along but that the Moodys' adopted son, Colman, only discovers after his father's death. Titillating as the subject matter initially seems, in Jackie Kay's capable hands Joss's gender-bending becomes almost a side issue in a novel that is, at its heart, concerned with the essential nature of love.
Kay tells her story from many different perspectives--the doctor who signs the death certificate, the mortician who prepares the body, the opportunistic biographer looking to make a buck and a name for herself, the musicians who knew Joss--but it is Millicent and Colman who bear the brunt of both the pain and the responsibility for telling the tale. Millie Moody is a tremendously sympathetic character; her love for Joss is so powerful, so right that the reader never questions the decisions this odd couple made in life. "I didn't feel like I was living a lie," Millie tells us. "I felt like I was living a life." Colman, on the other hand, is more difficult to like. Though it's easy to understand his anger and confusion upon suddenly learning that the man he regarded as his father for 30 years was actually a woman, one also has the sneaking suspicion that he wasn't a particularly lovable guy before the revelation, either. Still, by the end of Trumpet, there's hope for Colman, peace of mind for Millie, and a satisfying rendering of love in all its permutations for the reader. --Alix Wilber [via]
The Vagabondby Colette, Enid McLeod, Judith ThurmanISBN 0374528047 (0-374-52804-7)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Veronicaby Mary GaitskillISBN 037572785X (0-375-72785-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary Americaby Richard Buel, Joy Day BuelISBN 0393017672 (0-393-01767-2)
Hardcover, Norton
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America'Book summary:Combining the skills of a gifted writer and a scholar's grasp of early America, The Way of Duty draws readers into a vividly evoked world.
The Buels have used a rich trove of documents to tell the story of a Connecticut woman, Mary Fish Silliman (17361818), whose adventures illuminate the day-to-day realities of living through the American Revolution. [via]More editions of The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America:
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What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Dayby Pearl CleageISBN 038079487X (0-380-79487-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1998: What makes Pearl Cleage's novel so damned enjoyable? At first glance, after all, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day seems pretty heavy going: HIV, suicide, sudden infant death syndrome, and drunk driving all figure prominently in the lives of narrator Ava Johnson and her older sister Joyce. It isn't long before crack addiction, domestic violence, and unwed motherhood have joined the list--so, where's the pleasure? The answer lies in the sharp and funny attitude Cleage brings to her depiction of one African American community in the troubled '90s. Ava Johnson, for example, might be HIV-positive, but she's refreshingly forthright about it: "Most of us got it from the boys. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty good argument for cutting men loose, but if I could work up a strong physical reaction to women, I would already be having sex with them. I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying I can't be a witness. Too many titties in one place to suit me."
Ada has spent the last 10 years living in Atlanta. When she discovers she's infected, she sells her hairdressing business and heads back to her childhood home of Idlewild, Michigan, to spend the summer with her recently widowed sister before moving on to San Francisco. Once there, however, she finds herself embroiled in big-city problems--drugs, violence, teen pregnancy, and an abandoned crack-addicted baby, to name just a few--in a small-town setting. Ava also meets Eddie Jefferson, a man with a past who just might change her mind about the imprudence of falling in love.
In less assured hands, such a catalog of disasters would make for maudlin, melodramatic reading indeed. But Cleage, an accomplished playwright, has a way both with characters and with language that lifts this tale above its movie-of-the-week tendencies. In Ava she has created a character who not only effortlessly carries the weight of the story but also provides entertaining commentary on African American life as she goes. Discussing the insular nature of the black community in Atlanta, she recalls, "I'd walk into a reception room and there'd be a room full of brothers, power-brokering their asses off, and I'd realize I'd seen them all naked. I'd watch them striding around, talking to each other in those phony-ass voices men use when they want to make it clear they got juice, and it was so depressing, all I'd want to do was go home and get drunk." Later, she describes the preacher's wife's hair as "pressed and hot-curled within an inch of its life.... Hardly anybody asks for that kind of hard press anymore. Sister seems to have missed the moment when we decided it was okay for the hair to move."
As the trials and tribulations pile on, the experiences of Cleage's characters prove to be universal: death, love, second chances. Ava's acerbic, smart-mouthed narrative keeps the story buoyant; by the time this endearingly imperfect heroine and her cohorts have negotiated the rocky road to a happy ending, readers will be sorry to see her go, even as they wish her well. --Alix Wilber [via]
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When Heaven and Earth Changed Places : A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peaceby Le Ly Hayslip, Jay WurtsISBN 0385247583 (0-385-24758-3)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
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A Whistling Womanby A. S. ByattISBN 0375415343 (0-375-41534-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Whistling Woman'Book summary:This electrifying new novel forms the triumphant conclusion to the great Frederica quartet depicting the forces in English life from the early 50s to 1970.
While Frederica -- the spirited heroine of Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower -- falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life and those of the people she loves. In the late 1960s the world begins to split. Near the university, where the scientists Luk and Jacqueline are studying snails and neurons and the working of the brain, an anti-university springs up. On the high moors nearby, a gentle therapeutic community is taken over by a turbulent, charismatic leader. Visions of blood and flames, of mirrors and doubles, share the refracting energy of Fredericas mosaic-like television shows. The languages of religion, myth and fairy-tale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. Darkness and light are in perpetual tension and the meaning of love itself seems to vanish; people flounder, often comically, to find their true sexual, intellectual and emotional identity.
The focus of these novels first widened from the old nuclear family to the experimental group and now narrows again to reveal the different, modern patterns of intimacy which emerged in these years. Through her wayward, lovingly drawn characters and breath-taking twists of plot, Byatt illuminates the effervescence of the 1960s -- both its excitements and its dangers -- as no one has done before. A Whistling Woman is the ultimate novel of ideas made flesh -- gloriously sensual, sexy and scary, bursting with ideas, contradictions, scientific discoveries, ethical conflicts, sly humour and wonderful humanity. [via]More editions of A Whistling Woman:
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White Teeth: A Novelby Zadie SmithISBN 0375703861 (0-375-70386-1)
Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'White Teeth: Reader's Companion'Book summary:On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie--working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt--is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel. Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families--one headed by Archie, the other by Archie's best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for "no problem"). Samad--devoutly Muslim, hopelessly "foreign"--weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope.Zadie Smith's dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant café, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes--faith, race, gender, history, and culture--and triumphs. [via]
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Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Womanby Alice SteinbachISBN 0375758453 (0-375-75845-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman'Book summary:
Paris
Dear Alice,
Each morning I am awakened by the sound of a tinkling bell. A cheerful sound, it reminds me of the bells that shopkeepers attach to their doors at Christmastime. In this case, the bell marks the opening of the hotel door. From my room, which is just off the winding staircase, I can hear it clearly. It reminds me of the bell that calls to worship the novice embarking on a new life. In a way I too am a novice, leaving, temporarily, one life for another.
Love,
Alice
In the tradition of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea and Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun, in Without Reservations we take time off with Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Steinbach as she explores the world and rediscovers what it means to be a woman on her own.
"In many ways, I was an independent woman," writes Alice Steinbach, a single working mother, in this captivating book. "For years I'd made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow, and had relationships that allowed for a lot of freedom on both sides." Slowly, however, she saw that she had become quite dependent in another way: "I had fallen into the habit . . . of defining myself in terms of who I was to other people and what they expected of me." Who am I, she wanted to know, away from the things that define me--my family, children, job, friends? Steinbach searches for the answer to this provocative question in some of the most exciting places in the world: Paris, where she finds a soul mate in a Japanese man; Oxford, where she takes a course on the English village; Milan, where she befriends a young woman about to be married. Beautifully illustrated with postcards Steinbach wrote home to herself to preserve her spontaneous impressions, this revealing and witty book will transport readers instantly into a fascinating inner and outer journey, an unforgettable voyage of discovery. [via]More editions of Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman:
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A Wrinkle in Time: Library Editionby Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0374386137 (0-374-38613-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Wrinkle in Time: Library Edition'Book summary:Everyone in town thinks Meg is volatile and dull-witted and that her younger brother Charles Wallace is dumb. People are also saying that their father has run off and left their brilliant scientist mother. Spurred on by these rumors, Meg and Charles Wallace, along with their new friend Calvin, embark on a perilous quest through space to find their father. In doing so they must travel behind the shadow of an evil power that is darkening the cosmos, one planet at a time.
Young people who have trouble finding their place in the world will connect with the "misfit" characters in this provocative story. This is no superhero tale, nor is it science fiction, although it shares elements of both. The travelers must rely on their individual and collective strengths, delving deep into their characters to find answers.
A classic since 1962, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is sophisticated in concept yet warm in tone, with mystery and love coursing through its pages. Meg's shattering yet ultimately freeing discovery that her father is not omnipotent provides a satisfying coming-of-age element. Readers will feel a sense of power as they travel with these three children, challenging concepts of time, space, and the power of good over evil. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]
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Zeldaby Nancy MilfordISBN 0380007843 (0-380-00784-3)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zelda'Book summary:Zelda Sayre began as a Southern beauty, became an international wonder, and died by fire in a madhouse. With her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, she moved in a golden aura of excitement, romance, and promise. The epitome of the Jazz Age, together they rode the crest of the era: to its collapse and their own.
From years of exhaustive research, Nancy Milford brings alive the tormented, elusive personality of Zelda and clarifies as never before her relationship with` Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda traces the inner disintegration of a gifted, despairing woman, torn by the clash between her husband's career and her own talent.
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Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technocultureby Sadie PlantISBN 0385482604 (0-385-48260-4)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture'Book summary:Meet Ada Lovelace, daughter of mathematician Annabella Byron and poet Lord Byron, and a major contributor to Charles Babbage's famous Analytic Engine. Lovelace is in many ways the patron saint of Sadie Plant's exploration of women's roles in the creation of modern technology. The book begins with Lovelace's story, and elements of her writings appear throughout the book--sometimes to emphasize points but often to exemplify attitude. They also serve to anchor Plant's dynamic, almost stream-of-conscious approach as we travel to 19th-century Europe to meet the nameless women who laid the foundation of modern technology with the development of weaving, survey the major female technological innovators of today, and even explore female figures in technology-based fiction.
Plant's "cyberfeminist rant," as William Gibson calls it, attempts to demonstrate that women have always used technology. You won't find victims here, rather women who were empowered by the technological innovations in their lives. What emerges is a very nontraditional feminist picture, one in which women are neither bystanders nor victims but are in many ways the unsung heroes of technical innovation. The author also points to a future where, within zeros and ones of cyberspace many such dichotomies of life/machine, let alone male/female, may blur in unexpected ways. [via]
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Caramelo : En Españolby Sandra Cisneros, Liliana ValenzuelaISBN 0375415092 (0-375-41509-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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