"In nineteenth-century Vienna, a drama of love, fate, and will is played out amid the intellectual ferment that defined the era. Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him. When he agrees to treat Nietzsche with his experimental "talking cure," Breuer never expects that he too will find solace in their sessions. Only through facing his own inner demons can the gifted healer begin to help his patient. In When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom blends fact and fiction, atmosphere and suspense, to unfold an unforgettable story about the redemptive power of friendship."--Back cover of trade paperback.

Once again, the author takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, she has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. The narrator of the story is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless and curious, she yearns after an education that is closed to her by her sex. As often as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observe its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a tentative secret friendship that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia's minister father tries to convert the Wampanoag, awakening the wrath of the tribe's shaman, against whose magic he must test his own beliefs. One of his projects becomes the education of Caleb, and a year later, Caleb is in Cambridge, studying Latin and Greek among the colonial elite. There, Bethia finds herself reluctantly indentured as a housekeeper and can closely observe Caleb's crossing of cultures. Like the author's beloved narrator Anna, in Year of Wonders, Bethia proves an emotionally irresistible guide to the wilds of Martha's Vineyard and the intimate spaces of the human heart.

"In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements had seen enough of the world to know that it was unfair. She's spent her whole life in the coal-mining town of Calumet, Michigan where men risk their lives for meager salaries--and had barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. The women labor in the houses of the elite, and send their husbands and sons deep underground each day, dreading the fateful call of the company man telling them their loved ones aren't coming home. When Annie decides to stand up for herself, and the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle"--

Chana Rochel Werbermacher was a remarkable child, imbued with a love of Torah and a fervent desire to learn. Her destiny beckoned, and she became a scholar-and the focus of great controversy in the shtetl of Ludomir and the Jewish community at large. Many sought her advice. They called her "Rebbe," for that is what she was. The story of her struggle, her courage, and her life will be an inspiration for generations to come. You will not forget her.

An imaginative account of the real-life love affair between Bill Hickok and Sally Ovenshine, in the adventurous days of the American West, follows the two lovers from their strange initial meeting through Hickok's violent death

In this unique memoir, renowned poet, fiction writer, critic, and activist Marjorie Agosin writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, the daughter of European Jewish immigrants, living in Chile in the years before, during, and after World War II. Frida recounts stories from her family's Jewish/Chilean history: of her father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who came to Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great grandmother, an immigrant from Odessa, who learned to speak Spanish in Chile and loved the language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Frida's stories of the past soften the realities of present times, when some immigrants from Germany still display portraits of Hitler m their homes and Jews still remain, after two generations, strangers in their own land. These stories are permeated with the shadow of faraway war in Europe, which haunts Frida's dreams and is a vivid presence in the everyday life in this Chilean town. For Frida the cross and the star of the title come to define two worlds that are for her distinct, yet inexorably entwined. Agosin's poetic reflections reveal a culture and a landscape little-known outside of her native land, explore the boundaries of "voice", and create a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and of words.

From the author of Jezebel comes the story of legendary 16th-century pirate Queen Grace O'Malley, and her tempestuous relationship with Elizabeth I. In the Elizabethan age, when only a handful of women held power by the fortune of their birth, one woman stands out as exceptional. Grace O'Malley, the Irish pirate queen, commanded a dozen ships and thousands of men. She was the first Irish woman ever to take her place as the leader of her nation and was feared and loved as much on sea as on land. A fierce Irish patriot, seductress of men, loyal and loving friend, wife and mother, Grace O'Malley caused nothing but trouble for Elizabethan England. through her piracy, she nearly bankrupted the English treasury. Yet Grace's name has been almost completely erased from history. Skilfully capturing the colour and excitement of life on the high seas and at the glittering English court, Alan Gold shows how the lives of two amazing women were intertwined and how they met and formed an extraordinary friendship.

On the night of May 4, 1886, during a peaceful demonstration of labor activists in Haymarket Square in Chicago, a dynamite bomb was thrown into the ranks of police -trying to disperse the crowd. The officers immediately opened fire, killing a number of protestors and wounding some two hundred others. Albert Parsons was the best-known of those hanged; Haymarket is his story. Parsons, humanist and autodidact, was an ex-Confederate soldier who grew up in Texas in the 1870s, and fell in love with Lucy Gonzalez, a vibrant, outspoken black woman who preferred to describe herself as of Spanish and Creole descent. The novel tells the story of their lives together, of their growing political involvement, of the formation of a colorful circle of "co-conspirators"-immigrants, radical intellectuals, journalists, advocates of the working class-and of the events culminating in bloodshed. More than just a moving story of love and human struggle, more than a faithful account of a watershed event in United States history, Haymarket presents a layered and dynamic revelation of late nineteenth-century Chicago, and of the lives of a handful of remarkable individuals who were willing to risk their lives for the promise of social change.

"This delightful lesbian romp set in Elizabethan England captures the adventures of Moll Cutpurse, a swashbuckling heroine, upholder of the right of women, as she pits her wits against Puritans and tricksters, travels with the gypsies, rescues a near-victim of the anti-witchcraft hysteria, and cheats the wealthy out of their ill-gotten gains - with help from her lifelong friend and lover, Bridget, the apothecary"--P [4] of cover.

Marie de Gournay was eighteen when she read, and was overwhelmed by, the essays of the French philosopher Montaigne. She had to be revived with hellebore. When she finally met Montaigne, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. He made her his adopted daughter for the two months they knew each other. He died four years later, after which, though scorned by intellectuals, she became his editor. Jenny Diski engages with this passionate and confused relationship between 'father and daughter', old writer/young acolyte, possible lovers, using both their voices. Much of their story is about absence of the people they love. In Jenny Diski's hands it becomes a fascinating tale.

"In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow's deluxe Metropole Hotel. They have gathered, not altogether willingly, to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. Each of these ladies loved Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their memories of him, a portrait of the artist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to years as a propagandist for the Revolution, to the censorship battles that turned him against the State, Mayakovsky is revealed as a passionate, complex man who lived at the center of history and fought to hold onto his ideals even in the face of a world changing for the worse. The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that captures the tumultuous life of one of the most significant writers of the Soviet era"--

Winner of the Runners-up Prize for the American Book Award for 1985, this is a novel about America in its youth. The story takes place in 1811-12 in a frontier settlement in Richland County, Ohio, and is told through the diary of Thomas Keene -- an educated New Englander tormented by his past. The heart of the narrative is Tom's love for Fanny, a young widow, and his obsession with John Chapman, the half-crazed mystic who became known as Johnny Appleseed. Tom is not only a terse, powerful diarist, but also an artist, whose poems and paintings illuminate the text. The journal reveals every aspect of the American pioneering experience, and Tom's own spiritual journey. In the presence of violence and death, struggling with the dark aspects of sex, he saves himself through art and love. ISBN 0-06-015143-9 :

PILGRIM STATE is a stunning memoir which tells the story of Dorothy Walker - equal parts beautiful, headstrong, brave and tragic. Her life is lovingly recreated by her daughter Jacqueline in homage to the remarkable woman she was. In the haunting opening pages, set in Pilgrim State mental facility in New York State in 1951, Dorothy has been forcibly sectioned and is battling to keep her children and her sanity. She will struggle all her life to retain both. Dorothy and her children return to Jamaica before finally making a home in post-Windrush London in the early 60s. Dorothy and her children face prejudice and loss but are bound by incredible love and their unique sense of family. This will prove to be Dorothys greatest gift. Stories like PILGRIM STATE dont come along that often. And when they do you recognise you have something very special. And when a voice is this strong and original, you stop to listen. PILGRIM STATE celebrates place, the life-affirming nature of family and the bonds between mothers and daughters that can never be broken. The story is haunting and powerful and speaks for generations of women, resonating long after the story ends. Jacqueline Walker has done her mother proud.

"I have never read a text which goes even half as far as this one in expressing the particular poignancy which lay at the heart of the impressionist movement. I say this as an art critic. As a novelist I would simply like to pay my tribute to the mastery of language, portraiture and storytelling which Figes has now at her command." John Berger ?Reprinted for the first time in nearly 25 years, this shimmering short novel gives an extraordinary portrait of a day in the life of an artist at work and at home. In prose as luminous as the colors Monet is using to portray his beloved garden, Eva Figes guides us through the day, from the dawn ('midnight blueblack growing grey and misty') through midday ('the sun was high now...shrinking what little shadow remained, fading colours, the pink rambler roses on the fence by the railway track looked almost white, and the grass had turned a tired yellow') to evening ('the tide of shadows rising as the sunset glow faded outside and the room grew dark.'). Monet's wife, Alice, grieving for a lost daughter; a living daughter, Germaine, fretting that she will not be able to marry the young man she loves; their friend, the abbe, eating and drinking with them, observing the essential faith of the painter's art; two children, playing, closest to Monet in the freshness and certainty of their vision; all experiencing in very different ways the richness of the light that Monet works unceasingly to pin down in his last, great paintings.

"At eight years old, Gerta Pieters is forced to disguise herself as a boy and sent to work for a genteel Dutch family. When their brilliant and beautiful daughter Maria sees through Gerta's ruse, she insists that Gerta accompany her to Amsterdam and help her enter the elite, male-dominated art world. While Maria rises in the ranks of society as a painting prodigy, Gerta makes herself invaluable in every way: confidante, muse, lover. But as Gerta steps into her own talents, their relationship fractures into a complex web of obsession and rivalry--and the secrets they keep threaten to unravel everything"--