In No Matter the Wreckage , Sarah Kay takes you on a profound journey through her self-discovery in New York. Following her breakout poem "B," this debut poetry collection showcases her accessible brilliance. With each verse, Kay transports readers to a world of love, nostalgia, and life's wonders. Her elegant words celebrate family bonds, young love, travel, and the echoes of history shaping our present. What sets No Matter the Wreckage apart is Kay's ability to find magic in the ordinary, painting intimate portraits of unlikely love affairs between objects and exploring whimsical topics. This collection's transformative helps readers to find a sanctuary of words that uplift your spirit and ignite imagination. No Matter the Wreckage is a must-have for poetry lovers, an unforgettable journey.

Two Lives is Janet Malcolm's stunning portrait of a legendary couple: Gertrude Stein, the modernist master, and Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,' she writes. The portrait of their relationship that emerges is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Janet Malcolm is at her finest in this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism.

Although Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy probably only met once in their lives, their names will be linked forever in the history of American literary feuds: they were legendary enemies, especially after McCarthy famously announced to the world that every word Hellman wrote was a lie, "including 'and' and 'the.'" The public battle, and the legal squabbling, that ensued ended, unsatisfactorily for all, with Hellman's death. In Imaginary Friends," Nora Ephron brilliantly and hilariously resuscitates these two bigger-than-life women to give them a post-mortem second act, and the chance to really air their differences.

“As far as the education of children is concerned,” states Natalia Ginzburg in this collection of her finest and best-known short essays, “I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of one’s neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.” Whether she writes of the loss of a friend, Cesare Pavese; or what is inexpugnable of World War II; or the Abruzzi, where she and her first husband lived in forced residence under Fascist rule; or the importance of silence in our society; or her vocation as a writer; or even a pair of worn-out shoes, Ginzburg brings to her reflections the wisdom of a survivor and the spare, wry, and poetically resonant style her readers have come to recognize. “A glowing light of modern Italian literature . . . Ginzburg’s magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning streak of a plain phrase. . . . As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.” — The New York Times Book Review

"Sharona Muir's Heredity and Other Inventions radiate like elements discovered late at night after years of searching ... a rocket in a museum in another country is both public knowledge and family secret; a daughter's umbilical cord in her father's lab sparks questions about the uses of love; the body of an airplane holds the imagined gestures of humans in their fi nal moments of life ... Muir renders the physical world so unfl inchingly that the metaphysical blows back, in equal and opposite reaction ... these poems are an act of postmortem collaboration: daughter as witness to history, using language to weld and spark familial bonds and to summon up their mysteries." --Rebecca Klaver, author of Empire Wasted "... Muir has a gift for conjuring beauty in the least expected places, dazzling audiences with rich imagery ... While the speaker's narrative is particular to her unique experience, in many ways this chapbook's poems transcend place and time, and resonate with all who have looked to the past for a way of understanding the present." --Mary Biddinger, author of Small Enterprise

"Funny, moving, and undeniably sexy. The heady blend of smart dialogue and characters. . .makes it a candidate to be the "Angels in America" of the Bush II decade."--"San Francisco Chronicle" "The two works ["Angels in America" and "In the Wake"] use a volatile chapter in American history as background in their exploration of how the sociopolitical maladies of an age play out in the personal conduct of characters."-- Charles McNulty, "Los Angeles Times" Lisa Kron, author of Broadway's "Well" and the OBIE-winning solo show "2.5 Minute Ride," has taken on the big question of our country's character. On the Thanksgiving after the controversial 2000 election, political junkie Ellen gathers with family and friends in her cramped New York apartment. But she soon discovers--with an unexpected passionate encounter--that ideas about America and our own selves are not as fixed as they once seemed. A play with plenty of humor and passion to go with its politics, Kron's work premiered last year at Berkeley Rep and Los Angeles' Center Theater Group, and debuted at The Public Theater in New York this fall. Lisa Kron's plays have been performed on Broadway, off-Broadway, and around the world. She is a founding member of the award-winning theater group The Five Lesbian Brothers, and teaches playwriting at Yale University.

Jewish women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived with a sense of painful connection to a culture that rejected their aspirations. Raised in a Jewish environment wary of female aspirations and in a wider world that was only marginally more sympathetic to their ambitions, this diverse group often found that a life devoted to literary expression required sacrifices and painful choices. Writing, however, enabled them to reclaim and explore their Jewish heritage. Responding to a variety of Jewish women's voices in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and Spanish, this collection of seventeen essays surveys the achievements of Jewish women writers from the Middle Ages to the present. Scholars of Jewish literature chronicle the Jewish encounter with modernity and document female strategies for constructing intellectual and emotional identities amidst the competing demands of traditional norms, familial obligations, and economic survival. The themes of repression and equivocal liberation resonate throughout, as the authors reflect on the silencing of the female voice in a traditional Jewish culture that most often denied women the education and the empowerment requisite for recording their thoughts and feelings. While individual essays reveal literary discoveries of self and forgings of identity by women rising to the opportunities and challenges of drastically altered Jewish social realities, a significant number also show the sad decline of women writers upon whom silence was reimposed. Several chapters consider how Jewish women were depicted by male writers from the Middle Ages through the mid-nineteenth century. A final essay documents the ways in which memory, testimony, and survival affect the writing of women who survived the Holocaust, a perspective frequently marginalized in studies of Holocaust literature. Women of the Word is part of an emerging effort to listen to the voices of Jewish women both past and present. Written in a period when Jewish women writers internationally are creating a wealth of diverse literary works, these essays take note of the short time during which Jewish women's writing has flourished and inspire readers with the richness of the literature that such writers have already produced.

Elana Sztokman arrived in Israel in 1993 as a young religious mother wearing a long skirt and a hat covering her hair. Today, nearly 30 years later, after spending years fighting for women's rights in Orthodoxy, writing books about gender in religion, and eventually leaving that world behind, she confronts the personal struggles behind the public persona, revealing the traumas from her past that affected her entire relationship with her body. From two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Council Award comes a refreshing and very personal exploration of cultures of the female body in Jewish life. This collection of essays - marking the 25-year anniversary of her feminist awakening and spanning a diverse career of research, writing, and advocacy around Jewish women's experiences - offers political and personal insights and retrospectives on some of the most burning issues today. Topics include: sexuality, relationships, body-image, body-cover, ritual immersion, fat-shaming, slut-shaming, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. Elana brings her characteristic honesty, courage, wit, and profound insight into her writing, and shares some of her own traumas that set her on a sometimes tortuous life path.

Examines the personal values and philosophies of Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum in relation to the pressures and conditions under which they lived in the Nazi era. All had "strong Christian affinities." Under the challenge of terror they were "Christians by choice, Jews by decree." Each responded to her Jewishness in a distinct way: Stein felt close to the Jews; Weil had a hateful attitude toward them and tried to obliterate herself as a Jew; Frank and Hillesum both affirmed their Jewish identities. In the face of Hitler, each, in her own way, resisted.

"To Write Like a Woman is a rare example of a feminist tackling science fictuion using postmodern theory, which makes for a much more sophisticated and nuanced appraisal than the usual fare." ―Passion"Russ’ essays are witty and insightful. An excellent book for any writer or reader." ―Feminist Bookstore News"In her new book of essays... Russ continues to debunk and demand, edify and entertain.... Appreciative of surface aesthetics, she continually delves deeper than most critics, yet in terms so simple and accessible that her essays read like lively, angry, humorous dialogues conducted face-to-face with the author. Russ is the antithesis of the distant critic in her ivory tower." ―Paul Di Filippo, The Washington Post Book World"... 20 years of the author’s feisty reports from the front lines of literature." ―The San Francisco Review of Books"This is a book of imaginative and provoking essays, but you should read it for the sheer fun of it." ―The Women’s Review of Books"Collects more than two decades of criticism by Joanna Russ, one of the most perceptive, forthright and eloquent feminist commentators around." ―Feminist Bookstore News"... a super book....This is a book that, for once, really will appeal to readers of all kinds." ―Utopian Studies"If you enjoy science fiction, this is definitely a book that you’ll want to talk about. I found myself sneaking a few pages at times when I really didn’t have time to read." ―Jan Catano, AtlantisClassic essays on science fiction and feminism by Nebula and Hugo award-winning Joanna Russ. Here she ranges from a consideration of the aesthetic of science fiction to a reading of the lesbian identity of Willa Cather. To Write Like a Woman includes essays on horror stories and the supernatural, feminist utopias, popular literature for women (the "modern gothic"), and the feminist education of graduate students in English.

Poetry arises from the search for sacred language that describes the awe and mystery of the real world. Deena Metzger is a contemporary poet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, that includes selections from her earlier books of poetry Dark Milk, The Axis Mundi Poems, Looking For the Faces of God , A Sabbath Among the Ruins and Skin: Shadows/Silence draws on her life s work, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself with such a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritual and political ruins of our time. It is no longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledged legislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with full heart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom and the natural world. Here we meet the articulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, the land and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them. This book combines a searing look at the horrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, and indulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write on behalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair is acknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task of reconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward a viable future and all its unexpected possibilities. Poetry arises from the search for sacred language thatdescribes the awe and mystery of the realworld.Deena Metzger is a contemporarypoet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, thatincludes selections from her earlier books of poetry, and draws on her life swork, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself withsuch a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritualand political ruins of our time.It isno longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledgedlegislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with fullheart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom andthe natural world.Here we meet thearticulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, theland and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them.This book combines a searing look at thehorrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, andindulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write onbehalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair isacknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task ofreconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward aviable future and all its unexpected possibilities. "

From the beginning, myths have told of women who lived apart from men -- the Sirens who sang on the Aegean rocks, the Amazons of the Brazilian jungle, the self-reproducing women on islands in Polynesia, to mention only a few. As this theme emerged in her own fiction, Batya Weinbaum became intrigued by its persistence across time and cultures and began tracing it in literature and mythology, as well as in actual locales that are or were said to be islands of women. In this fascinating, interdisciplinary book, she explores how the myth of Amazons has served varying psychological needs in different cultures over time. Weinbaum first analyzes various historical interpretations and uses of the Amazon archetype, some designed to empower women, others created by men to disempower them. She next turns to the original Greek context, in Homer's epics and other aspects of Greek culture, and then traces how Amazons eventually evolved into negative representations of paganism. Moving from Rodriguez de Montalvo's fifteenth-century Sergas de Esplandian, which imagined an island of women in the New World, Weinbaum concludes with revealing fieldwork she conducted on Isla Mujeres (Island of Women) off the Yucatan Peninsula, which included giving birth with the participation of a native Maya midwife. Batya Weinbaum is Assistant Professor of English at Cleveland State University. She founded and edits the journal Femspec.

Explore the life and legacy of one of France's most celebrated women writers with "Famous Women: George Sand," a biography by Bertha Thomas. This meticulously prepared edition offers a window into the 19th century and the extraordinary life of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, known to the world as George Sand. Delve into the story of a woman who defied societal expectations and carved her own path as a novelist, challenging conventions and captivating readers with her passionate prose. This biography examines Sand's literary contributions and her significant role in French literature. Discover the key moments and influences that shaped Sand's life and work, solidifying her place as a prominent figure and enduring symbol of female authorship. "Famous Women: George Sand" is a valuable resource for those interested in biography, women's studies, and the rich tapestry of 19th-century literary history. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.