The Encyclopedia of Doris: Stories, Essays and Interviews


Cindy Gretchen Ovenrack Crabb - 2011
    Cindy writes her zine like she is figuring out the human condition. She makes writing about the simplest and most common things--playing music, childhood, cooking, or sex--resonate with universal understanding. She helps us make sense of more complex things like the satisfaction from doing useful work, natural curiosity, the ability to use logic, gender dynamics, introspection, the need for challenge and change, combating depression and creating art and literature. She shares and explores the emotions involved with having an abortion, rape, dealing with the death of family, or sexual harassment in a context that is enlightening and personal, feeling like a close friend opening up to you. What's most impressive though is that she relates these things into every article in her zine seamlessly.

Goodnight, Beautiful Women


Anna Noyes - 2016
    Many of the characters are anchored to coastal Maine, but a particular quality of wildness animates nearly all of them. The stories are energetic, often mysterious, and beautifully written, and they will stay in your memory long after you finish the book."—Charles BaxterMoving along the Maine Coast and beyond, the interconnected stories in Goodnight, Beautiful Women bring us into the sultry, mysterious inner lives of New England women and girls as they navigate the dangers and struggles of their outer worlds. With novelistic breadth and a quicksilver emotional intelligence, Noyes explores the ruptures and vicissitudes of growing up and growing old, and shines a light on our most uncomfortable impulses while masterfully charting the depths of our murky desires.A woman watches her husband throw one by one their earthly possessions into the local quarry, before vanishing himself; two girls from very different social classes find themselves deep in the throes of a punishing affair; a motherless teenager is sexually awakened in the aftermath of a local trauma; and a woman’s guilt from a childhood lie about her intellectually disabled cousin reverberates into her married years.Dark and brilliant, rhythmic and lucid, Goodnight, Beautiful Women marks the arrival of a fearless and unique new young voice in American fiction.

Africa's Child


Maria Nhambu - 2016
    Above all, as a very young child she decided one day that even if there was no other person in the world who loved and wanted her, she was going to love and care for herself—and that decision changed the course of her life. Africa’s Child is the story of a mixed-race girl growing up in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, East Africa. Raised in an orphanage with no knowledge of her origins or family, she endured abandonment, hardships, severe illnesses, and bullying. Her experiences as a child and teenager included physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, social stigma, and racial discrimination.Yet Nhambu tells her inspiring story with warmth and humor. Her questioning mind probes the African tribal realities and multi-cultural complexities that impacted her life both at the orphanage and schools run by German nuns as well as at an African high school with American nuns. Nhambu not only survived her childhood but triumphed. Her faith and resilience, along with a belief in learning and her tenacious pursuit of an education, sustained her through many challenges. Dance, especially African tribal dance, became the way she healed and nourished her spirit. Through the love and commitment of an American teacher she met in Africa, Nhambu was able to pursue her dream of education and a new life for herself. The first book in her three-part memoir ends as she is leaving Africa for university studies in America on a full scholarship.Maria Nhambu is the creator of Aerobics With Soul®, a fitness workout based on African dance.

Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction's Most Beloved Heroines


Samantha Hahn - 2013
    Anna Karenina, Clarissa Dalloway, Daisy Buchanan...each seems to live on the page through celebrated artist Samantha Hahn's evocative portraits and hand-lettered quotations, with the pairing of art and text capturing all the spirit of the character as she was originally written. The book itself evokes vintage grace re-imagined for contemporary taste, with a cloth spine silk-screened in a graphic pattern, debossed cover, and pages that turn with the tactile satisfaction of watercolour paper. In the hand and in the reading, here is a new classic for the book lover's library.

Roar


Cecelia Ahern - 2018
    Ahern takes the familiar aspects of women's lives—the routines, the embarrassments, the desires—and elevates these moments to the outlandish and hilarious with her astute blend of magical realism and social insight.One woman is tortured by sinister bite marks that appear on her skin; another is swallowed up by the floor during a mortifying presentation; yet another resolves to return and exchange her boring husband at the store where she originally acquired him. The women at the center of this curious universe learn that their reality is shaped not only by how others perceive them, but also how they perceive the power within themselves.By turns sly, whimsical, and affecting, these thirty short stories are a dynamic examination of what it means to be a woman in this very moment. Like women themselves, each story can stand alone; yet together, they have a combined power to shift consciousness, inspire others, and create a multi-voiced Roar that will not be ignored.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin


Mary Gaitskill - 1991
    They are superficially a study in contrasts yet share equally haunting sexual burdens carried since youth. With common secrets, they are drawn into a remarkable friendship.

The Boys of My Youth


Jo Ann Beard - 1998
    The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, & it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life -- from childhood to marriage & beyond -- & memorably captures the collision of youthful longing & the hard intransigences of time & fate.

The Last White Ruby: The Vanishing Polar Circles


Ronnie Smith - 2015
    The author was an aviator for many years in the polar regions flying for the US Air Force and resupplying the US scientific research stations on a routine basis. The flying was anything but routine, and he brings those surreal landscapes and flying phenomenon to the reader through his keen sensitivity to the human condition, ever having to adapt to what the polar regions present to the polar operator.Serving the US scientific interests abroad at the poles is the sole facet of why the US Air Force, Air National Guard, US Coast Guard, and US Navy combine to churn out the successful mission year in and year out. It is fraught with danger, beauty, the unusual, and the ever-present foe of the elements. Extreme cold and wilderness combine to confront the aviator and seamen with sometimes uncompromising force. The poles are a region where nature is dominant, but it also gives scientists the earliest clues of global warming and environmental decay. The poet captures all this and more in his portrayal of the places where most of humanity will never see, nor be able to appreciate the pristine beauty (and cooling mechanism of the planet) resident at the icecaps that we are losing as a result of global warming.

Eidos: A Search for Home


Michael J. Krym - 2013
    With no grown-ups around to take care of them, the other kids simply spend their days drinking Silly Juice while playing meaningless games without a care in the world. But unlike them, she has never felt like she has truly belonged. It is not until Harmonia discovers a secret like none other that her life changes forever. For on the far side of the sun sits a planet like none other, a place called Eidos. Joined by runaways from Sky, along with the infamous Captain Jessi and her makeshift crew, they set off across the endless seas of space.Yet before they can reach Eidos, a long journey awaits young Harmonia and her friends. Between a broken planet, a maniacal woman bent on bringing them back, and the sheer boredom, they have a long journey ahead of them. But in the end, Harmonia just might find a place she can finally call home.

It's a Storm Without God... It's the Perfect Journey When You Know the Name of Jesus Is Guaranteed!!!: My Life Testimony: There's No Excuse to Not Be Who You Want to Be... God's So Great!!!


Larry Taylor - 2018
    i just asked the lord to help me... GODS' SO GREAT!!! I just said in the name of JESUS... GODS' SO GREAT!!! GOD used my health problems to pull me out of the real storm, the storm/battle against myself; I was fighting and drowning myself... BUT GOD!!! THANK YOU JESUS!!! my health problems was nothing compared to what i was doing to myself. God allowed me to see why i went through everything i did as a kid, teen, and a younger adult! Just know NO matter what you go through, GOD IS GUARANTEED!!!

UNDER THE BUS


Kyle Keyes - 2021
    Hobbs Creek Police Chief, Alvin Phillips believed it was his lucky silver dollar. The Six-O-Clock news refused comment because the incident did not relate to the Corona virus.

Abandon Me: Memoirs


Melissa Febos - 2017
    First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another.At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer's life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.

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.

Ariel: The Restored Edition


Sylvia Plath - 1965
    When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to life, it garnered worldwide acclaim, though it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript—including handwritten notes—and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will no doubt alter her legacy forever.

Music for Chameleons


Truman Capote - 1980
    Taking place in a small Midwestern town in America, it offers chilling insights into the mind of a killer and the obsession of the man bringing him to justice. Also in this volume are six short stories and seven ‘conversational portraits’ including a touching one of Marilyn Monroe, the ‘beautiful child’ and a hilarious one of a dope-smoking cleaning lady doing her rounds in New York.