How to Be a Heroine


Samantha Ellis - 2014
    From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Here a life-long reader explores how heroines shape all our lives.

Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World


Kelly JensenNova Ren Suma - 2017
    Forty-four writers, dancers, actors, and artists contribute essays, lists, poems, comics, and illustrations about everything from body positivity to romance to gender identity to intersectionality to the greatest girl friendships in fiction. Together, they share diverse perspectives on and insights into what feminism means and what it looks like. Come on in, turn the pages, and be inspired to find your own path to feminism by the awesome individuals in Here We Are.Welcome to one of the most life-changing parties around!

Small Cures


Della Hicks-Wilson - 2020
    Using the stages of pathology as an extended metaphor, this book-length poem skilfully takes the reader on a persuasively healing journey in three parts. In what reads like an effortlessly honest and lyrical conversation, Hicks-Wilson works through the complexities of pain, love, loss, self-love, acceptance, growth and repair with both sensitivity and confidence. Featuring never-before-seen poems and follower favourites, Small Cures is the transformative and soothing bite-sized prescription every person craving to fall in love after love with themselves has been waiting for.

Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus


Craig D. Idso - 2015
    This claim is not only false, but its presence in the debate is an insult to science." With these words, the authors begin a detailed analysis of one of the most controversial topics of the day. The authors make a compelling case against claims of a scientific consensus. The purported proof of such a consensus consists of sloppy research by nonscientists, college students, and a highly partisan Australian blogger. Surveys of climate scientists, even those heavily biased in favor of climate alarmism, find extensive disagreement on the underlying science and doubts about its reliability. The authors point to four reasons why scientists disagree about global warming: a conflict among scientists in different and often competing disciplines; fundamental scientific uncertainties concerning how the global climate responds to the human presence; failure of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide objective guidance to the complex science; and bias among researchers. The authors offer a succinct summary of the real science of climate change based on their previously published comprehensive review of climate science in a volume titled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. They recommend that policymakers resist pressure from lobby groups to silence scientists who question the authority of the IPCC to claim to speak for climate science. More than 50,000 copies of the first edition were sold or given away in five months to elected officials, civic and business leaders, scientists, and other opinion leaders. The response from the science community and experts on climate change has been overwhelmingly positive. To meet demand for more copies, we have produced this second revised edition. Changes include a foreword by Marita Noon, at the time executive director of Energy Makes America Great, Inc. Some of the discussion in Chapter 1 has been revised and expanded thanks to feedback from readers of the first edition. Graphs in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are now full color, and new graphs have been added.

Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession


Rachel Monroe - 2019
    In the 1940s, a bored heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. Known as the “Mother of Forensic Science,” she revolutionized the field of what was then called legal medicine. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own.Each woman, Monroe argues, represents and identifies with a particular archetype that provides an entryway into true crime. Through these four cases, she traces the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. In a combination of personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Savage Appetites scrupulously explores empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of violence.

The Making of Jane Austen


Devoney Looser - 2017
    The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen's reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet's audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead.Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen's reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen's evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen's literary and cultural power. Whether you're a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.

American Housewife


Helen Ellis - 2016
    They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These twelve irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam, from the gallery opening of a tinfoil artist to the fitting room of a legendary lingerie shop. Vicious, fresh, and nutty as a poisoned Goo Goo Cluster, American Housewife is an uproarious, pointed commentary on womanhood.

Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction


Lisa Kröger - 2019
    From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction. Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband’s heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of Margaret “Mad Madge” Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)? If you know the astounding work of Shirley Jackson, whose novel The Haunting of Hill House was reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era. You’ll meet celebrated icons (Ann Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews), forgotten wordsmiths (Eli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen), and today’s vanguard (Helen Oyeyemi). Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales.Part biography, part reader’s guide, the engaging write-ups and detailed reading lists will introduce you to more than a hundred authors and over two hundred of their mysterious and spooky novels, novellas, and stories.

The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation


Rainer Maria Rilke - 2018
    The result is a profound vision of the mourning process and a meditation on death's place in our lives, as well as a compilation of sensitive and moving expressions of consolation and condolence. Following the format of Rilke's classic, Letters to a Young Poet, this volume arranges a series of letters to Rilke's mourning friends, composed into a continuous, uninterrupted sequence, showcasing the full range of Rilke's thoughts on finding meaning and, perhaps, some form of comfort in the process of grieving.

Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled through the Joys of Single Living


Marion Winik - 2005
    Her stories of being single in middle age, marked by stylish writing and stunning candor, left readers bent double with laughter when they appeared in her column, rated "Best of Baltimore" by Baltimore Magazine.Highs in the Low Fifties follows Winik’s attempt to rebuild her world as a once-widowed, once-divorced single mom. With her signature optimism, resilience, and poor judgment, Winik dives into a series of ill-starred romantic experiences. Her clarity about her mistakes and ability to find humor in the darkest moments—in love, and in all parts of life—has won her a growing crowd of devoted followers . . . and a few voyeurs.

The History of England


Jane Austen - 1791
    She sees nothing reprehensible in Richard III, yet burns with contempt for Elizabeth I, and documents several reigns with breezy nonchalance.This volume also contains 'Lesley Castle', a delightful and often hilarious correspondence detailing the mishaps and misapprehensions that befall five young ladies.

Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen


Fay Weldon - 1984
    By turns passionate and ironic, "Aunt Fay" makes Alice think--not only about books and literature, but also life and culture.

The Lost and the Damned (The Banlieues Trilogy)


Olivier Norek - 2020
    Anonymous letters addressed to him personally have begun to arrive, highlighting the fates of two women, invisible victims whose deaths were never explained. Just two more blurred faces among the ranks of the lost and the damned.Olivier Norek's first novel draws on all his experience as a police officer in one of France's toughest suburbs - the same experience he drew on as a writer for the hit TV series Spiral.Translated from the French by Nick Caistor

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women


Kate Manne - 2020
    Ranging widely across the culture, from Harvey Weinstein and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to “Cat Person” and the political misfortunes of Elizabeth Warren, Manne’s book shows how privileged men’s sense of entitlement—to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power—is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.In clear, lucid prose, Manne argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are “unelectable.” Moreover, Manne implicates each of us in toxic masculinity: It’s not just a product of a few bad actors; it’s something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural mores of our time. The only way to combat it, she says, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them.With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern.

Asshole Nation: Trump and the Rise of Scum America


Scott McMurrey - 2017
     The result is thorough lambasting of the people who put Trump in place and the even more reprehensible people who have come out of the shadows since Trump's election. McMurrey takes on the whole cadre of cretinous creatures who flocked to Trump, from the right-wing nutjobs left over from the Tea Party years to the slime who admired him from playing a mogul on TV to the bottom-dwelling Republicans who just saw him as a thug and a bully who would get them what they wanted. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Trump, King of Assholes 2. Asshole Nation: Trump’s Natural Constituency 3. Why Trumpist Assholes are Republicans 4. Why Assholes are Comfortable in the Republican Party 5. Why Asshole Nation Adores Trump 6. Don’t Feel Bad for Trumpists 7. Beating Back Trump’s Asshole Nation 8. Even “Never-Trump” Republicans are Responsible for the Rise of Asshole Nation 9. Trump, Roy Moore, and the Rise of Scum America 10. Crush Scum America and Stop the Careening Eighteen-Wheeler of Democracy If you are disgusted by Trump and by knuckle-dragging conservatism, this book will be a pick-me-up during these dispiriting times. McMurrey speaks the language of anti-Trumpers. He recognizes that Trump mania is just the latests (and let's hope the last!) manifestation of conservatism—a worthless, unnecessary, and fear-filled ideology that promotes selfishness and anti-social attitudes. Pick up Asshole Nation for yourself and give copies to all your Trump-hating friends!