Two Serious Ladies


Jane Bowles - 1943
    Copperfield at a party. Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels; while Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each changed by her experience. Mysterious, profound, anarchic and very funny, 'Two Serious Ladies' is a daring, original work that defies analysis.

Mistresses of Mayhem: The Book of Women Criminals


Francine Hornberger - 2002
    As detailed here, when it comes to crime, the so-called fairer sex have given men a real run for their money.

Deceptions


Lauren Maddison - 1999
    Devastated by the death of her longtime lover, Connor Hawthorne, a best-selling mystery novelist and former district attorney, is determined to bring her murderer to justice. Yet when the mystery is solved -- almost too easily -- she vows to put the experience behind her and rebuild her life. But someone is determined to make sure she doesn't. While vacationing in the Southwest, Connor finds herself running for her life across the high desert, aided by a beautiful Navajo guide. As the murderer draws closer, they must unravel the web of treachery, some of which lies in Connor's own past, to save their lives and prevent the discovery of a powerful secret someone is willing to kill for. Expertly weaving diverse elements of political intrigue, mystery, and Native American folklore, Lauren Maddison has crafted a tense, riveting thriller while exploring ancient mysteries and secrets.

Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again


Norah Vincent - 2006
    For more than a year and a half she ventured into the world as Ned, with an ever-present five o'clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rim glasses, and her own size 11 1/2 shoes—a perfect disguise that enabled her to observe the world of men as an insider. The result is a sympathetic, shrewd, and thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism that's destined to challenge preconceptions and attract enormous attention. With her buddies on the bowling league she enjoyed the rough and rewarding embrace of male camaraderie undetectable to an outsider. A stint in a high-octane sales job taught her the gut-wrenching pressures endured by men who would do anything to succeed. She frequented sex clubs, dated women hungry for love but bitter about men, and infiltrated all-male communities as hermetically sealed as a men's therapy group, and even a monastery. Narrated in her utterly captivating prose style and with exquisite insight, humor, empathy, nuance, and at great personal cost, Norah uses her intimate firsthand experience to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as well as who men are apart from and in relation to women. Far from becoming bitter or outraged, Vincent ended her journey astounded—and exhausted—by the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Having gone where no woman (who wasn't an aspiring or actual transsexual) has gone for any significant length of time, let alone eighteen months, Norah Vincent's surprising account is an enthralling reading experience and a revelatory piece of anecdotally based gender analysis that is sure to spark fierce and fascinating conversation.

Human Dark with Sugar


Brenda Shaughnessy - 2008
    Or she is and she isn’t. If you just want to boss people around, you’re a control freak, but if you can joke about it, then your bossiness is leavened by a yeast that’s all too infrequent in contemporary poetry, that of humor.”—New York Times“Shaughnessy’s voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy.”—Harvard Review“Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O’Hara.”—Exquisite Corpse"In its worried acceptance of contradiction, its absolute refusal of sentimentality and its acute awareness of time's 'scarce infinity,' this is a brilliant, beautiful and essential continuation of the metaphysical verse tradition." —Publishers Weekly, starred review“Human Dark with Sugar is both wonderfully inventive (studded with the strangenesses of ‘snownovas’ and ‘flukeprints’) and emotionally precise. Her ‘I’ is madly multidexterous—urgent, comic, mischievous—and the result is a new topography of the debates between heart and head.”—Matthea Harvey, a judge for the Laughlin Award"Seriously playful, sexy, sharp-edged, and absolutely commanding throughout....Here you'll meet an 'I' boldly ready to take on the world and just itching to give 'You' some smart directives. So listen up."—Library JournalIn her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. “You’re a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There’s a hero.”Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance—anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin—then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. “I’ll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me.” In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet’s ease in a variety of genres, from “Three Sorries” (in which the speaker concludes, “I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all”), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover’s body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images —not the least of which is human dark with sugar.Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.

The Fosters: Keep Your Frenemies Close


Stacy Kravetz - 2015
    To complicate things, she's thrown together with Talya and the forced relationship between Callie and Talya takes a series of turns over the course of the book. The bright spot is a new guy, Austin, who is really into Callie--no, he's into Talya--no, he's into Callie. Callie and Talya reveal things to each other about their feelings for Austin, find common ground, find confidantes in each other, and bond over the work they're doing.Also, the relationships with the other kids on the weekend trip -- a new cast of characters which will be ongoing in the book series -- both create tension as well as draw Callie and Talya together. Ultimately, they see each other as something other than rivals and find they have more in common than they'd thought. But when they return to school, they're forced to decide whether they're really friends. And the first person they encounter is Austin, who has transferred to their school.

Advanced Sex Tips for Girls: This Time It's Personal


Cynthia Heimel - 2002
    Now, in this eagerly awaited follow-up, Heimel takes us on a journey toward romantic enlightenment and finds it's not all that far from midtown. Should you date a man who's on Prozac? Why is "single" a buzzword that makes us feel like killing ourselves? What's so funny about a man in a dress? Why was the panty girdle the straw that broke the back of the patriarchy? What if your son gets married on MTV? Is the Backlash over? Why does the theory of evolution dictate that every human must get laid as much as humanly possible? Entertaining, erudite, and always irreverent, Heimel's manifesto is a must-have for the twenty-first-century female.

Diving Into the Wreck


Adrienne Rich - 1973
    / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail." These provocative poems move with the power of Rich's distinctive voice.

The Afflicted Girls


Nicole Cooley - 2004
    The historical body of evidence that remains from the Salem witch trials of 1692 touched the hands, mind, and imagination of poet Nicole Cooley, compelling her to seek entry to an inaccessible past of lies. The Afflicted Girls, so named after the young women who claimed to be victims of witchcraft, spans the centuries to give voice to those both audible and silent on history's pages--accusers and accused of several kinds: wife and husband, servant and master, congregant and minister, and, not least, bewitched and witch. Piercing, enchanting, Cooley's poems form a remarkable narrative, one that displays the enormous cultural power the Salem witch trials retain in twenty-first-century America.

The Trouble With Rich Women (Singles Classic)


Gloria Steinem - 1986
    Intimacy and access make rebellion very dangerous.”In The Problem With Rich Women, Gloria Steinem explores how and why feminism failed to reach women in powerful families, and provides an urgent and persuasive argument for rebellion among upper-class women.The Problem With Rich Women was originally published in Ms., June 1986. Cover design by Adil Dara.

The Passion of New Eve


Angela Carter - 1977
    I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself . . . 'New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.

Too Pretty to be Good


Lindsay Byron - 2021
    

Drew


T. Cooper - 2014
    He's finally sporting a haircut he doesn’t hate, has grown two inches since middle school, and can't wait to try out for the soccer team. At last, everything is looking up in life.Until the next morning. When Ethan awakens as a girl.Ethan is a Changer, a little-known, ancient race of humans who live out each of their four years of high school as a different person. After graduation, Changers choose which version of themselves they will be forever--and no, they cannot go back to who they were before the changes began.Ethan must now live as Drew Bohner--a petite blonde with an unfortunate last name--and navigate the treacherous waters of freshman year while also following the rules: Never tell anyone what you are. Never disobey the Changers Council. And never, ever fall in love with another Changer. Oh, and Drew also has to battle a creepy underground syndicate called “Abiders” (as well as the sadistic school queen bee, Chloe). And she can't even confide in her best friend Audrey, who can never know the real her, without risking both of their lives.Fans of the books of John Green, the Joss Whedonverse--and empathy between humans--will find much to love in this first of a four-part series that tracks the journey of an average suburban boy who becomes an incredible young woman . . . who becomes a reluctant hero . . . who becomes the person she was meant to be.Because, while changing the world can kinda suck, it sure beats never knowing who you really are.

Everything I Never Told You: Sidekick


Bibliomaniac - 2016
      In this sidekick you’ll find:   Chapter Summaries   Characterization   Background Information   Quotes for Discussion   Focus Points and Themes   Images, Metaphors and Symbols   And much, much more…   Disclaimer: This book serves as an accompaniment to the bestseller "Everything I Never Told You" by Celeste Ng. It is meant to broaden the reader's understanding of the book and to offer some insights which can easily be overlooked. You should order a copy of the actual book before reading this.

When Sisterhood Was in Flower


Florence King - 1982
    Isabel Fairfax, a conservative Southern gentlewoman and former court reporter turned Regency romance writer, runs into conflict with Polly Bradshaw, a liberal Yankee feminist who embarks on a crusade to raise Isabel's female consciousness.