A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag's writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism

Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. The most interesting ideas are heresies, she remarked, and indeed, her writing rejects the familiar and refuses party lines.

On Women presents seven essays and exchanges, spanning a range of subjects: the challenges and humiliations women face as they age; the relationship between women's liberation and class struggle; beauty, which Sontag calls that over-rich brew of so many familiar opposites; feminism; fascism; and film. Taken together, these pieces--relentlessly curious, historically precise, politically robust, and allergic to easy categorization Sontag's inimitable mind at work.

Sylvia Plath is an object of enduring cultural fascination--the troubled patron saint of confessional poetry, a writer whose genius is buried under the weight of her status as the quintessential literary sad girl. Emily Van Duyne--a superfan and scholar--radically reimagines the last years of Plath's life, confronts her suicide and the construction of her legacy. Drawing from decades of study on Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, the chief architect of Plath's mythology; the life and tragic suicide of Assia Wevill, Hughes's mistress; newly available archival materials; and a deep understanding of intimate partner violence, Van Duyne seeks to undo the silencing of Sylvia Plath and resuscitate her as the hardworking, brilliant writer she was.

To see the SCUM Manifesto's humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. It's not. The truth of the world as seen though Valerie's eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon... It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it's painful. --Michelle Tea

Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, 'morals', the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around... You've got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM's been through it all, and they're now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out. --Valerie Solanas

Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist playwright and social propagandist who was arrested in 1968 after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol. Deemed a paranoid schizophrenic by the state, Solanas was immortalized in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol.

In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its time--predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the arts--but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman.

In this edition, philosopher Avital Ronell's introduction reconsiders the evocative exuberance of this infamous text.

This book re-framed my entire adolescence. I highly recommend you read it. -- LING MA

From the critically acclaimed author of Dead Girls (stylish and inspired--New York Times Book Review), a sharp, engrossing collection of essays that explore the strange career of popular feminism and steady creep of cults and cult-think into our daily lives.

In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.

In The Enumerated Woman, Bolin investigates how digital diet tracking apps have increasingly transformed our relationships to our bodies. Animal Crossing's soothing retail therapy is analyzed in Real Time--a surprisingly powerful portrait of late capitalism. And in the showstopping Foundering, Bolin dissects our buy-in and complicity with mythmaking around iconic founders, from the hubristic fall of Silicon Valley titans, to Enron, Hamilton, and the USA.

For readers of Trick Mirror and How to Do Nothing, Culture Creep is a swirl of nostalgia and visions of the future, questioning why, in the face of seismic cultural, political, and technological shifts as disruptive as the internet, we cling to the icons and ideals of the past. Written with her signature blend of the personal and sharply analytical, each of these keen-eyed essays ask us to reckon with our own participation in all manner of popular cults of being, and cults of believing.

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women's work--spinning, mending, and weaving--is carried out.

Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell's archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office.

In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their mischief making evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard's wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a hero's journey, but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care.

By turns dazzling and chilling (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

In this extraordinary essay, Virginia Woolf examines the limitations of womanhood in the early twentieth century. With the startling prose and poetic license of a novelist, she makes a bid for freedom, emphasising that the lack of an independent income, and the titular room of one's own, prevents most women from reaching their full literary potential.

As relevant in its insight and indignation today as it was when first delivered in those hallowed lecture theatres, A Room of One's Own remains both a beautiful work of literature and an incisive analysis of women and their place in the world.

This Macmillan Collector's Library edition features an afterword by the British art historian Frances Spalding.

I adore her work, and sensibility, writes Claire-Louise Bennett of Amina Cain; and Jenny Offill: Cain writes beautiful precise sentences about what it means to wander through this luminous world. Cain's unique wandering sensibility, her attention to the small and the surprising, finds a profound new expression in her first nonfiction book, a sustained meditation on writers and their work. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, Cain moves associatively through a personal canon of authors-- including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf-- and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. A Horse at Night: On Writing is an intimate reckoning with the contemporary moment, and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf's A Room of One's Own or Gass's On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for--and beautiful demonstrations of--the essential unity of writing and life.

Ashley Lawson's On Edge presents a new picture of postwar American literature, arguing that biases against genre fiction have unfairly disadvantaged the legacies of authors like Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett. Each of these women navigated a male-dominated postwar publishing world without compromising their values. Their category-defying treatment of gender roles and genre classifications created suspense in their work that spoke to the tensions of the Age of Anxiety. Lawson engages with foundational voices in American literature, genre theory, and feminism to argue that, by merging the dominant mode of literary realism with fantastical or heightened elements, Brackett, Jackson, and Highsmith responded to the big questions of their era with startling and unnerving answers. By elevating genre play to a marker of literary skill, Lawson contends, we can secure these writers a more prominent place within the canon of midcentury American literature and open the door for the recovery of their similarly innovative peers.

What does it mean to be an heir, as a woman writer, to colonial and postcolonial cultures in which European language has become so thoroughly ingrained? Examining women writers from India (Toru Dutt), Egypt (Mayy Ziyadah), Algeria (Assia Djebar), and Mauritius (Ananda Devi), White Tongue, Brown Skin sheds light on the essential double nature of the colonial experience.

Maya Boutaghou's latest book--her first in English--treats colonialism as analogous to a disease, manifesting itself in symptoms of multilingualism and cultural pluralism. Boutaghou shows how violently imposed multilingualism engenders in the mind of the colonized subject a state of permanent self-translation between two or more languages with unequal political and emotional power. They must endure a plural perception of the self, defined by the restless movement of self-translation, which becomes reflected in a literary dynamic frequently overlooked or misunderstood by previous scholarship.

Although the object is philosophical, this book is also deeply rooted in history. Understanding postcolonialism from below, as Boutaghou demonstrates, starts with an approach based on close readings in specific historical contexts.

A book-length essay on beauty and revolution as seen through the work of Jean-Luc Godard.

As Joanna Walsh watches the films of Jean-Luc Godard, she considers beauty and desire in life and art. There's a resistance, in Godard's women, writes Walsh, that is at the heart of his work (and theirs). She is captivated by the Paris of his films and the often porous border between the city presented on screen and the one she inhabited herself. With cool precision, and in language that shines with aphoristic wit, Walsh has crafted an exquisitely intimate portrait of the way attention to works of art becomes attention to changes in ourselves. Taut and gem-like, My Life as a Godard Movie is a probing meditation by one of our most observant writers.

My Life as a Godard Movie is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

Qué dicen algunas mujeres madres sobre este libro, #1 Amazon Bestseller en la categoría maternidad 2 años consecutivos:

El mejor libro sobre maternidad que he leído, y he leído varios. Me he sentido como si leyera mi propio diario siendo mamá. Es real, auténtico, natural, directo, sincero, amoroso. Ana Acosta ha puesto voz a mis sentimientos encontrados (...) Gracias por esta metamorfosis. - Susana, España

En esta sociedad es emocionalmente agotador y solitario maternar con respeto y apego. Esta autora pone por escrito reflexiones que muchas madres hacemos, sentimientos y situaciones que vivimos y les da el valor y la normalidad que muchas veces necesitamos sentir. Un libro ideal en especial para madres primerizas.- Alexandra Sánchez Gómez, España

He leído varios libros sobre maternidad antes y después de parir, y sin duda este es mi preferido. Directo, sensible y holístico, te acompaña y ayuda a transitar la mayor revolución de la vida que es maternar. - Aurora, España

Quieres ser, vas a ser o eres mamá, regalate la oportunidad de leerlo, refrescante con energía enfocada en lo que es verdaderamente la maternidad a través de la empatía, cada página está llena de experiencias y sabiduría (...) Uno de mis libros favoritos de este año - Gaby, México

Realmente me trajo gran alivio verme tan identificada, saber que mi realidad es la de muchas mujeres y que no estoy sola... Somos tribu! Ese simple y grandioso hecho ya se expresa en mayor paciencia en mi hogar y autoafirmación en relación a la forma de crianza que dicta mi corazón(...) Sin igual. Gracias Ana por tanto!- Jimena Jaso, Brasil

Ojalá hubiera leído este libro antes de que naciera mi hija, me hubiera quitado tantos estereotipos y expectativas altas que se nos imponen a las madres. Gracias, este libro me ayudó a confiar en mí, para poder maternar de la forma en que yo creo es correcta, siempre buscando lo mejor para mí, mi hija y mi familia. - Mitzi Ibarra, México

No es un aprendizaje para criar, es una lectura de madre a madre, de los sentimientos de una madre hacia otra madre, nos abrazamos - Anónimo

Un libro perfecto que describe lo que se siente ser madre. La autora sabe meterse en la piel de una mujer que acaba de ser mamá. Este libro me ayudó muchísimo a entenderme y a comprender los matices de la maternidad. - Piedad Nino, España

Virginia Woolf's haunting writing, her succinct insights into feminist, artistic, historical, political issues, and her revolutionary experiments with points of view and stream-of-consciousness altered the course of literature.

Here is a collection of twenty-nine of Virginia Woolf's essays. Widely considered one of the finest essayists of the 20th Century, she is also considered to be one of the greatest essay writers in the English language. Included here are all of her finest essays.

2025 Reprint of the 1929 Edition. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister-a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.

In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.

Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism.

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

Motherhood is a recurrent theme in Virginia Woolf's writing yet Woolf scholarship has often overlooked this dynamic subject. Exploring how Woolf engaged with themes of motherhood as a socially and politically motivated writer and a woman, this book grounds her work in the maternal discourses of her time. By reading Woolf's texts in dialogue with contemporary writing, socio-political events and medical and scientific advances, Virginia Woolf and Motherhood establishes the significance of maternity across Woolf's oeuvre and exposes how public and personal matters of motherhood informed the links she drew between maternity, femininity, self-worth and artistry. With novel analysis of Woolf's writing on war, eugenics, food and psychoanalysis, Charlotte Taylor Suppé demonstrates the substantive influence maternal discourses had on shaping Woolf's feminism, political beliefs and creative practices.

This book provides a fresh look at Angela Carter's critical and intertextual engagements with the past.

Examining a broad range of Carter's work (novels, short stories, poetry, as well as stage plays), the essays in this collection explore a stimulating selection of topics, including folk song, medieval literature, and the occult. Frequently drawing on newly available archival material, the volume investigates the ways in which Carter wove allusions into her own narratives, creating a lively and challenging dialogue with the cultural materials of the past and present.

This volume will appeal both to scholars and students of contemporary women's writing, critical theory, gender studies, and British fiction.

Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.

This short summary and analysis of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood includes:

• Historical context
• Part-by-part summaries
• Analysis of the main characters
• Themes and symbols
• Important quotes
• Fascinating trivia
• Glossary of terms
• Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work

Margaret Atwood's dystopian literary masterpiece tells the story of Offred, a Handmaid living in the near future in what was once the United States. A new theocratic regime called the Republic of Gilead has come to power and changed life as she knew it.

Once Offred had a her own name and a loving family--a husband and daughter--both of which were taken from her; now she belongs to the Commander and his hostile wife, and her only value lies in her ability to bear a child for them. She used to read books and learn; now such things are forbidden to all women.

Gripping, disturbing, and so relevant today, The Handmaid's Tale is a brilliant novel and a chilling warning about what can happen when extreme ideas are taken to their logical conclusions.

The summary and analysis in this book are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of fiction.