Until his wife's death, not even his children -- Diana's nieces and nephews -- have known about Diana and her lifetime companion Constance. But now David seeks to bridge over those years and recapture the closeness of childhood, to become part of Diana's life, to have her be a major part of his.For the independent, irascible Diana, the overtures from her brother are an unwelcome intrusion. Retired from her medical practice, she spends her days fully occupied with Constance, for whom memory is increasingly a sometime thing.David, growing ever more fond of the enchanting Constance, struggles to win her trust... and Diana is inexorably drawn into the events and drama of David's family life.In Memory Board the incomparable Jane Rule gives us her tenderest, most poignant, most humor-filled novel... and brings to us altogether fresh insights into living and loving and the nature of commitment.

    As she helps guide her family through its discontent, Lucille discovers in herself a woman rich in wisdom, rich in humor, and rich in love.

    Based on Deledda's own life, the work describes a young woman's struggle against the dismay and disapproval of her family and friends at her creative ambitions. Yet it also reads like a charming fable with details of family life, rural traditions and wild bandits, and it is as much a novel of memory as of character or action. Deledda's characters are poor country folk driven by some predetermined force. Their loves are tragic, their lives as hard and as rigidly controlled as nature itself in the hills of Sardinia. Deledda creates memorable figures who play out their lives against this backdrop of mountains and bare plains, sheepfolds and vineyards. Shimmering in the distance is the sea and escape - for a few - to the Continent or America. In 1926 Grazia Deledda became the second woman and the second Italian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She wrote thirty-three novels, including "Reeds in the Wind," and many books of short stories, almost all set on Sardinia. Her work has become well known to English-speaking readers through Martha King's translations for Italica Press.

    A third-generation black nationalist feminist, Pearl Cleage recognizes the pure power of telling the truth — about African-American life and about the fate of the race in racist America. This book will incite any and all thinking people to ponder, argue, rage, reflect, and maybe even riot . . . ."Uncompromising . . . Blistering." — San Francisco Chronicle

    Ana Castillo's groundbreaking first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and is widely studied as a feminist text on the nature of self-conflict.

    Avis is a talented painter, and bucks against the constraints placed on women in the 19th century. She wants to pursue a career as an artist and rejects marriage and motherhood, until she meets the charismatic young professor Philip Ostrander.

    She buys the book and her fate becomes inextricably linked with the four women in the photos.Richly atmospheric and featuring a memorable cast of characters, Out of Time is a delightful novel about history, love, and the persistence of passion.

    Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist who analyzes the bones of victims of state violence and is recovering from an explosion at a work site that almost killed him. Consumed by writer’s block, Ella finds herself wishing that she would become ill, which would provide time for writing and perhaps an excuse for her lack of progress. Then she begins to experience mysterious symptoms that doctors find undiagnosable.As Ella’s anxiety grows, the past begins to exert a strong gravitational pull, and other members of her family come into focus: the widowed Father, the Stepmother, the Twins, and the Firstborn. Each of them has their own experience of illness and violence, and eventually the systems that both hold them together and atomize them are exposed.Lina Meruane’s Nervous System is an extraordinary clinical biography of a family, full of affection and resentment, dark humor and buried secrets, in which illness describes the traumas that can be visited not just upon the body, but on families and on the history of the countries—present and past—that we live in.

    Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

    In these stories, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar, three young friends distract themselves with drugs and pain in the midst a government-enforced blackout; a girl with nothing to lose steps into an abandoned house and never comes back out; to protest a viral form of domestic violence, a group of women set themselves on fire. But alongside the black magic and disturbing disappearances, these stories are fueled by compassion for the frightened and the lost, ultimately bringing these characters—mothers and daughters, husbands and wives—into a surprisingly familiar reality. Written in hypnotic prose that gives grace to the grotesque, Things We Lost in the Fire is a powerful exploration of what happens when our darkest desires are left to roam unchecked, and signals the arrival of an astonishing and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

    Theirs is a world of red dirt and backbreaking chores and roof-raising revival meeting--a far cry from the magnolias and mint juleps of Gone with the Wind.

    Setsuko and Naomi, classmates and friends living in a bombed-out city, sort through their individual beliefs: "two girls, seventeen and fifteen at their next birthday, and though their real lives had yet to begin they were talking like old folk lost in reminiscences. Or perhaps this was their old age, for the hour of their death was near, as they well knew." Everyone close to Setsuko is dead as a result of the war, yet she believes in the war unquestioningly and writes letters to soldiers on the front urging them to fight to the finish. Naomi's father is imprisoned because of his anti-war beliefs and she struggles to find justification for war. Over the course of the novel, through flashbacks that occur within sentences or paragraphs, the horrors of the war are brought painfully to life and each young woman questions her own stand. Who is more patriotic? What are the rules of war when it is in your front yard? Shizuko Go, herself a survivor of the bombing of Yokohama, has written a devastating and important novel. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

    All the stories are set in India, but the people in them seem somehow displaced within their own society—a society in transition but a transition that does not come fast enough to help them. Appachana manages to capture the pervasive humor, poignancy, and self-delusion of the lives of the people she observes, but she does so without seeming to pass judgments on them. She focuses on unexpected moments, as if catching her characters off guard, lovingly exposing the fragile surfaces of respectability and convention that are so much a part of every society, but particularly strong in India, with its caste system, gender privileges, and omnipresent bureaucracies.All life seems to be prescribed; these characters bravely or cautiously confront the rules and regulations or finally give in to them resignedly—any small triumphs they achieve are never clear-cut. One of the most unusual aspects of many of the stories is the way in which they are informed by but never ruled by the author's feminism. She never lectures her readers but lets us see for ourselves: a bride caught in a hopeless marriage where she has given up all rights to any life of her own, a hapless college student who is confined to campus for minor infractions just at the time when she had an appointment for an abortion, a young girl who keeps the dark secret of her sister's rape, a woman executive and a digruntled male clerk both trapped in the intricate bureaucracy of their business firm and the roles they must play to survive there. By turns warm, gullible, arrogant and bigoted, all of these characters live their lives amid contradictions and double standards, superstitions and impossible dreams. Appachana's vision is unique, her writing superb. Readers will thank her for allowing them to enter territory that is at once distant and exotic but also familiar and recognizable.

    An enduring cultural icon, she came to symbolize a new kind of woman, one who successfully combined marriage & motherhood with a career & scholarship with a singular concern for its role in the lives of ordinary people. Even today, when memoirs of successful women scientists & scholars remain scarce, Blackberry Winter, 1st published in '72, provides a rare glimpse of a pioneering woman's formative journey. In her chapters "On Being a Granddaughter" & "The Pattern My Family Made Me," Mead examines the wisdom she gained from her maternal grandmother as well as the inheritance she recieved from her ancestors, & how her upbringing fueled her desire for a fulfilling career that would reflect her own emerging values. We are treated to captivating portraits of bohemian life in NYC in the '20s; her early days at the American Museum of Natural History, where she met her longtime mentor, Franz Boas, & friend, Ruth Benedict; & 1st field trip to study adolescent girls in Samoa. Near the book's end, in "On Being a Grandmother," she reflects on the legacy she leaves her descendants, indeed, all of humanity. This autobiography, reissued for a new generation of readers, will appeal to any eager to discover a woman of our century who made her way in a world seldom hospitable to the dreams & accomplishments of women.

    Now banned in Iran, this small masterpiece was eventually translated into several languages and introduces U.S. readers to the work of a brilliant Persian writer. With a tone that is stark, and bold, Women Without Men creates an evocative allegory of life for contemporary Iranian women. In the interwoven destinies of five women, simple situations such as walking down a road or leaving the house become, in the tumult of post-WWII Iran, horrific and defiant as women escape the narrow confines of family and society only to face daunting new challenges.Now in political exile, Shahrnush Parsipur lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of several short story collections including Touba and the Meaning of Night.