Devotion is short enough to devour at one enjoyable sitting and thought-provoking enough to deserve re-reading.--Suzi Feay, Financial Times

Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing. --Katherine Cooper, Hyperallergic

A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic--its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture's beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.

Patti Smith, a National Book Award-winning author, first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession--a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus's house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil's grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano's novels. Whether writing in a café or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing.

The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

What kind of mother abandons her child? During the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who overcame both society's condemnation and their own maternal guilt to leave their children--at will or due to economic or other circumstances.

The Abandoners is sharp, at times slyly humorous, and always deeply empathetic. Using famous examples such as Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Maria Montessori as well as fictional ones like Anna Karenina and the many roles of Meryl Streep, and interrogating modern trends like momfluencers, Gómez Urzaiz reveals what our judgement of these women tells us about our judgement of all women.

A fascinating insight into the debates and controversies about the position of women in medieval culture, written by France's first professional woman of letters

The pioneering Book of the City of Ladies begins when, feeling frustrated and miserable after reading a male writer's tirade against women, Christine de Pizan has a dreamlike vision where three virtues--Reason, Rectitude and Justice--appear to correct this view. They instruct her to build an allegorical city in which womankind can be defended against slander, its walls and towers constructed from examples of female achievement both from her own day and the past: ranging from warriors, inventors and scholars to prophetesses, artists and saints. Christine de Pizan's spirited defence of her sex was unique for its direct confrontation of the misogyny of her day, and offers a telling insight into the position of women in medieval culture. The Book of the City of Ladies provides positive images of women, ranging from warriors and inventors, scholars to prophetesses, and artists to saints.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION

The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer, ' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself. --Sally Rooney, author of Normal People

Anne Boyer's radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique. --Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School

A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain dolorists, the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of pink ribbon culture while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others.

A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious.

Includes black-and-white illustrations

There is no lack of talented women in the Catholic literary tradition. Yet these brilliant writers are often unfamiliar to today's readers, or, if widely read, their Catholic identity is unrecognized. This collection introduces a dozen Catholic women novelists from the past two hundred years, presenting their fascinating lives, spiritual biographies, and sacramental vision in essays by twelve Catholic scholars and writers.

Edited by Haley Stewart and with a conclusion by best-selling author Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera, Women of the Catholic Imagination encourages the expansion of the Catholic literary canon by bringing these inspired writers back into the spotlight, laying the foundation for the reader's discovery (or rediscovery) of their masterful works.

An NPR Best Book of 2017

Celebrate the witchiest women writers with an inventive guidebook that pairs imaginative vignettes with whimsical, folkloric illustrations.

Literary Witches reimagines visionary writers as witches: both are figures of formidable creativity, empowerment, and general badassery. Through a series of thirty lyrical portraits, Taisia Kitaiskaia and Katy Horan honor the witchy qualities of well-known and obscure authors alike, including Virginia Woolf, Mira Bai, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Octavia E. Butler, Sandra Cisneros, and many more.

Perfect for both book lovers and coven members, Literary Witches is a treasure trove of creative and courageous women who aren't afraid to be alone in the woods of their imagination. Kitaiskaia and Horan conjure evocative, highly stylized depictions of history's most beloved female authors, introduce enchanting new writers, and invite you to rediscover the magic of literature.

An anthology of the lives, writings and secrets of the women of the Beat Generation, this book contains biographies poetry and prose by Hettie Jones, Joyce Johnson, Ruth Weiss, Jan Kerouac, and others. It contains commentary by American poet of the year Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg.

Re-centers and gives voice to a diversity of women naturalists and writers across time. --Cultivating Place

In Writing Wild, Kathryn Aalto celebrates 25 women whose influential writing helps deepen our connection to and understanding of the natural world. These inspiring wordsmiths are scholars, spiritual seekers, conservationists, scientists, novelists, and explorers. They defy easy categorization, yet they all share a bold authenticity that makes their work both distinct and universal. Part travel essay, literary biography, and cultural history, Writing Wild ventures into the landscapes and lives of extraordinary writers and encourages a new generation of women to pick up their pens, head outdoors, and start writing wild.

The National Book Award-winning author of Year of the Monkey, Just Kids, and M Train offers a rare, intimate account of her own creative process

Devotion is short enough to devour at one enjoyable sitting and thought-provoking enough to deserve re-reading.--Suzi Feay, Financial Times

Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing.--Katherine Cooper, Hyperallergic

A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic--its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture's beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.

Patti Smith, a National Book Award-winning author, first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession--a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus's house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard, where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil's grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano's novels. Whether writing in a café or on a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book.

The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

A Genealogy of the Gentleman argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through their narrative constructions of the gentleman. It challenges two latent critical assumptions: first, that the gentleman's masculinity is normative, private, and therefore oppositional to concepts of performance; and second, that women writers, from their disadvantaged position within a patriarchal society, had no real means of influencing dominant structures of masculinity. By placing writers such as Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Robinson in dialogue with canonical representatives of the gentleman author--Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Richardson--Mary Beth Harris shows how these women carved out a space for their literary authority not by overtly opposing their male critics and society's patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose very desirability and appeal were dependent on women's influence. Ultimately, this project considers the import of these women writers' legacy, both progressive and conservative, on hegemonic standards of masculinity that persist to this day.

New edition (revised and expanded) available 8/13/02.

Fairy tales are one of the most enduring forms of literature, their plots retold and characters reimagined for centuries. In this elegant and thought-provoking collection of original essays, Kate Bernheimer brings together twenty-eight leading women writers to discuss how these stories helped shape their imaginations, their craft, and our culture. In poetic narratives, personal histories, and penetrating commentary, the assembled authors bare their soul and challenge received wisdom. Eclectic and wide-ranging, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall is essential reading for anyone who has ever been bewitched by the strange and fanciful realm of fairy tales.

Contributors include: Alice Adams, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, Rosellen Brown, A. S. Byatt, Kathryn Davis, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Deborah Eisenberg, Maria Flook, Patricia Foster, Vivian Gornick, Lucy Grealy, bell hooks, Fanny Howe, Fern Kupfer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carole Maso, Jane Miller, Lydia Millet, Joyce Carol Oates, Connie Porter, Francine Prose, Linda Gray Sexton, Midori Snyder, Fay Weldon, Joy Williams, Terri Windling.

An unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to the present.

In a narrative of immense scope and fascination, here are more than 250 female writers, including the famous--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison, among others--and the little known, from the early American bestselling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter integrates women's contributions into our nation's literary heritage with brilliance and flair, making the case for the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place.

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) spent the majority of her prolific career as the only major black female author of science fiction. Winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards as well as a MacArthur genius grant, the first for a science fiction writer, Butler created worlds that challenged notions of race, sex, gender, and humanity. Whether in the postapocalyptic future of the Parable stories, in the human inability to assimilate change and difference in the Xenogenesis books, or in the destructive sense of superiority in the Patternist series, Butler held up a mirror, reflecting what is beautiful, corrupt, worthwhile, and damning about the world we inhabit. In interviews ranging from 1980 until just before her sudden death in 2006, Conversations with Octavia Butler reveals a writer very much aware of herself as the rare bird of science fiction even as she shows frustration with the constant question, How does it feel to be the only one? Whether discussing humanity's biological imperatives or the difference between science fiction and fantasy or the plight of the working poor in America, Butler emerges in these interviews as funny, intelligent, complicated, and intensely original. Conseula Francis is associate professor of English and director of African American studies at the College of Charleston. Her work has been published in the Langston Hughes Review.

Situates the work of four women writers who were part of Borges's circle in the history of women's writing generally, drawing on feminist theory from Europe and North America as well as from Latin American perspectives.

Against Borges examines four women writers--Norah Lange, Silvina Ocampo, Estela Canto, and Silvina Bullrich--who are not often considered together, but who each had their literary start within the close-knit circles dominated by Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires's mid-twentieth century. The title plays with the double meaning of the word against, signifying opposed or resistant, but also touching or supported by. In each case, the writers benefited from early support by Borges, but eventually found their own voices, different from his and also from each other's. These writers struggled as much as their nineteenth-century counterparts to find ways to represent in fiction a particularly feminine subjectivity. This study acknowledges their similarities and also highlights their originality. More importantly, it seeks to undo some of the misperceptions about them that persist to the present day, especially regarding their paths through the fraught politics of Argentina's twentieth century.

Virginia Woolf and Capitalism explores Woolf's engagement with and critiques of capitalism throughout her life, arguing for its central importance in our understanding of her as an author, activist and publisher. Galvanised by existing scholarship on the place of economics, class, gender and empire in Woolf's writing, this collection draws attention to her thinking about history, labour and economics and gives space for understandings of Woolf in the context of our own late-capitalist moment. Chapters by leading and emerging scholars range across Woolf's oeuvre in all its generic diversity, from her earliest short fiction and Night and Day to Three Guineas and Between the Acts, showcasing a range of critical approaches from the archival to the creative to the pedagogical. This collection demonstrates how productive and provocative thinking about Woolf's fiction and non-fiction through the lens of capitalism can be for Woolf scholars.

A devout Catholic, a visionary--and some say prophetic--writer, Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) has gained a growing presence in contemporary popular culture. While O'Connor professed that she did not have an ear for music, allusions to her writing appear in the lyrics and narrative form of some of the most celebrated musicians on the contemporary music scene. Flannery at the Grammys sounds the extensive influence of this southern author on the art and vision of a suite of American and British singer-songwriters and pop groups.

Author Irwin H. Streight invites critical awareness of O'Connor's resonance in the products of popular music culture--in folk, blues, rock, gospel, punk, heavy metal, and indie pop songs by some of the most notable figures in the popular music business. Streight examines O'Connor's influence on the art and vision of multiple Grammy Award winners Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, R.E.M., and U2, along with celebrated songwriters Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Sufjan Stevens, Mary Gauthier, Tom Waits, and others.

Despite her orthodox religious, and at times controversial, views and limited literary output, O'Connor has left a curiously indelible mark on the careers of the successful musicians discussed in this volume. Still, her acknowledged influence and remarkable presence in contemporary pop and rock songs has not been well noted by pop music critics and/or literary scholars. Many years in the making, Flannery at the Grammys achieves groundbreaking work in cultural studies and combines in-depth literary and pop music scholarship to engage the informed devotee and the casual reader alike.

Special 25th anniversary edition of the landmark survey that revolutionized the view of literary history.

Introduction by Shelley Fisher Fishkin

First published in 1978, Silences single-handedly revolutionized the literary canon. In this classic work, now back in print, Olsen broke open the study of literature and discovered a lost continent--the writing of women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors' letters and diaries we learn the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles of Virginia Woolf, Olsen's heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that would silence her. This twenty-fifth-anniversary edition includes Olsen's now infamous reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction and author preface.

This Norton Critical Edition is the most extensively annotated student edition available.

Backgrounds features material carefully chosen to enhance readers' appreciation of the novel, including biographical commentary, early works and correspondence related to Northanger Abbey, and excerpts by Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and William Wordsworth, among others, tracing Austen's connection to her Romantic contemporaries.

Criticism collects thirteen assessments of Northanger Abbey from a wide range of voices and periods, including essays by Margaret Oliphant and Rebecca West and critics Patricia Meyer Spacks, Claudia L. Johnson, Lee Erickson, and Joseph Litvak.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

. . . methodologically innovative . . . precise and perceptive and conscious . . . --Text and Performance Quarterly

Woman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color. --Chandra Talpade Mohanty

The idea of Trinh T. Minh-ha is as powerful as her films . . . formidable . . . --Village Voice

. . . its very forms invite the reader to participate in the effort to understand how language structures lived possibilities. --Artpaper

Highly recommended for anyone struggling to understand voices and experiences of those 'we' label 'other'. --Religious Studies Review

Audio book narrated by Betty Miller. Produced by Speechki in 2021.