In this groundbreaking classic essay collection, Alice Walker speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist on topics ranging from the personal to the political.
This edition includes a new Letter to the Reader by Alice Walker.
Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker's first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that remains both timely and relevant. In these thirty-six essays, Walker contemplates her own work and that of other writers, considers the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and writes vividly and courageously about a scarring childhood injury. Throughout, Walker explores the theories and practices of feminism, incorporating what she calls the womanist tradition of black women--insights that are vital to understanding our lives and society today.
When I graduated from college, my father gave me Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. It was a beaten-up paperback in 1999, and it's even more battered now. --Jesmyn Ward
The New York Times bestselling book that both galvanizes progressives for action and is a balm-from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author
A light in darkness, Alice Walker awakens us to our own power as only she can. . . . Once again, Walker has exceeded our expectations. --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When the United States recently exploded with unprecedented demonstrations challenging racial violence and hatred, Alice Walker's New York Times bestselling We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For was one of the books to which people turned for inspiration and solace. Called stunningly insightful and a book that will inspire hope by Publishers Weekly, this work by the author of The Color Purple is a clarion call to activism--spiritual ruminations with a progressive political edge, that offer a moment of care and solace.
Walker encourages readers to take faith in the fact that, despite our daunting predicaments, we are uniquely prepared to create positive change. Drawing on Walker's spiritual grounding and her progressive political convictions, the book offers a cornucopia of the Pulitzer Prize winner's writings and speeches on advocacy, struggle, and hope. Each chapter concludes with a recommended meditation to teach patience, compassion, and forgiveness.
Walker's clear vision and calm meditative voice--truly a light in darkness--has struck a deep chord among a large and devoted readership.
In this brilliant (Essence) sequel to The Color Purple, Alice Walker weaves an intricate, rich tapestry of interrelated lives.
This edition includes a new Letter to the Reader by Alice Walker.
Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of the dozens of astonishing characters in The Temple of My Familiar, all of whom are dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America to Celie's own granddaughter living in modern-day San Francisco, they must come to terms with the brutal stories of their ancestors in order to confront their own troubled lives.
Described by the author as a romance of the last 500,000 years, The Temple of My Familiar creates a new mythology from old fables and history, and along with it a profoundly spiritual explanation for centuries of shared African American experience.
The richness of [this] novel is amazing, overwhelming. A hundred themes and subjects spin through it, dozens of characters, a whirl of time and places. None is touched superficially: all the people are passionate actors and sufferers, and everything they talk about is urgent, a matter truly of life and death. They're like Dostoyevsky's characters, relentlessly raising the great moral questions and pushing one another towards self-knowledge, honesty, engagement. --Ursula K. LeGuin
From the author the New York Times Book Review calls a lavishly gifted writer, this is the searing story of Tashi, a tribal African woman first glimpsed in The Color Purple whose fateful decision to submit to the tsunga's knife and be genitally mutilated leads to a trauma that informs her life and fatefully alters her existence. Possessing the Secret of Joy, out of print for a number of years, was the first novel to deal with this controversial topic and managed to do so in a manner that Cosmopolitan called masterful, honorable, and unforgettable storytelling. The New Press is proud to bring the book back into print with a new preface by the author addressing the book's initial reception and the changed attitudes toward female genital mutilation that have come about in part because of this book.
.A poignant and powerful story of the American South in the 1960s and of one woman who risks her life for the people she loves from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, now available in a new edition featuring an introduction by Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage.
A classic novel of both feminism and the Civil Rights movement. --Ms. Magazine
My life suddenly made sense when I encountered Alice Walker's fiction. --Tayari Jones
Meridian Hill, a dedicated and courageous young activist in the 1960s, works to create peace and understanding through her civil rights work, touching the lives of all those she meets even when her health begins to deteriorate. With the old rules of Southern society collapsing around her, her coworkers quitting and moving to comfortable homes and lives, and others turning to more violent means of achieving change, Meridian fights a lonely battle to reaffirm her own humanity--and that of all her people.
In this brilliant (Essence) sequel to The Color Purple, Alice Walker weaves an intricate, rich tapestry of interrelated lives.
This edition includes a new Letter to the Reader by Alice Walker.
Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of the dozens of astonishing characters in The Temple of My Familiar, all of whom are dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America to Celie's own granddaughter living in modern-day San Francisco, they must come to terms with the brutal stories of their ancestors in order to confront their own troubled lives.
Described by the author as a romance of the last 500,000 years, The Temple of My Familiar creates a new mythology from old fables and history, and along with it a profoundly spiritual explanation for centuries of shared African American experience.
The richness of [this] novel is amazing, overwhelming. A hundred themes and subjects spin through it, dozens of characters, a whirl of time and places. None is touched superficially: all the people are passionate actors and sufferers, and everything they talk about is urgent, a matter truly of life and death. They're like Dostoyevsky's characters, relentlessly raising the great moral questions and pushing one another towards self-knowledge, honesty, engagement. --Ursula K. LeGuin