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

    She has a fine ear, a fine eye, and a magician's impeccable timing."—Judith Foosaner, Los Angeles Times"The day-to-day lives in The Lover of Horses are mined wth small, extraordinary moments of epiphany and unsettling insight."—Elizabeth Alexander, Washington Post Book WorldTess Gallagher's previous publications include Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, A Concert of Tenses (essays on poetry), and Moon Crossing Bridge. She lives in Port Angeles, Washington, where she has recently completed the introduction to No Heroics, Please, the first of two volumes of The Uncollected Works of Raymond Carver, edited by William Stull.

    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.

    The selections are arranged not by date of compostion, but in biographical order, such that reading this volume greatly enriches one's understanding of Bishop's life--and thus her poetry as well. "Bishop's admirers will want to consult her Collected Prose for the light it sheds on her poetry," as David Lehman wrote in Newsweek. "They will discover, however, that it is more than just a handsome companion volume to [her] Complete Poems. . . . Bishop's clean, limpid prose makes her stories and memoirs a delight to read. . . . One regrets only that this volume cannot be added to in years to come."

    Their erotic encounter, which has a profound effect on both, is explored with poetic, imaginative intensity. Amongst the Caribs, Inkle is a mere child whose survival depends entirely on Yarico's favor and protection. When he is rescued and taken with Yarico to the slave island of Barbados, however, she is entirely at his mercy. Loosely based on a popular narrative in the 17th and 18th centuries, this version of the tale's mythic dimensions are reinterpreted from both a female and a black perspective, engaging the reader in the psychological truths of the characters' experiences while laying the past bare as a text for the present.

    A revealing novel of childhood about Tee who is being made socially acceptable by her Aunt Beatrice so that she can cope with the caste system of Trinidad.

    

    She was also pregnant. When her boyfriend’s family opposed their marrying, her parents sequestered her in a Catholic home for unwed mothers a state away, where she was isolated and where secrecy prevailed. She had only to give up her baby for her sin to be forgiven and then all would soon be forgotten she was told. The child, in turn, would be placed with a “good” family, instead of having his life ruined by the stigma of illegitimacy. Carol tried to find the strength to oppose this dogma but her shame had become too deep. “The first time I looked deep into my son’s eyes, I felt like a criminal. As I unwrapped his hospital blanket and took in the heady fragrance of a newborn, I feared the nurses or the sisters would come in and slap me for contaminating my own son.” Finding no way out, she signed the fateful papers leaving her son in the hands of strangers, but with a vow to her baby she would find him one day. For years, Carol struggled to forget and live the “normal” life promised, not understanding the consequences of the trauma she’d endured. On his eighteenth birthday, she set out to find him, although the law denied access to records. Her search became a spiritual quest to reclaim her own lost self, as she came to understand the emotional and psychological wounds she and other mothers like her had endured. Against all odds she succeeded in finding him and discovered that in many ways they had never really been apart. With her son’s encouragement and his adoptive mother’s cooperation, she tells their story.

    As a little girl in South Carolina, she prefers playing Tarzan to playing Jane. As a teenage beauty queen she spikes her Cokes with spirits of ammonia and baffles her elders with her Freedom Riding sympathies. As a young woman in the 1960s and '70s, she hypnotizes her way to Harvard, finds herself as a lesbian, then very nearly loses herself to booze and shamans. And though the wry, rebellious, and vision-haunted heroine of this exhilarating novel may sometimes seem to be living a magnolia-scented Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Blanche McCrary Boyd's The Revolution of Little Girls is a completely original arid captivating work.

    A non-Jew's bizarre attempt to decipher the reasons for the Holocaust, Eve's tattoo becomes a stigma that will estrange her from her lover and the facile, fashionable world that was once her natural habitat. "Compassionate and informed."--New York Times Book Review.

    (Nancy Pearl)

    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.

    It follows the adolescent plans and dreams of Li as she struggles for independence against the traditional values of her family home, marriage and the lure of the city and all it can offer.

    Enlivened at unexpected moments by sexual exploration, mysticism, and flashes of wit alternately dry and hilarious, her prose is spare and honed, her stories filled with subtly sly characterizations of men and, mostly, women, dissatisfied not so much with the downward spiral of their fortunes as with the hollowness of their neat little lives. Whether focused on the separate emergences of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield from their affluent, airless lives in New York and Panama into a less defined but intense sexual and social maelstrom in the novella Two Serious Ladies, or on the doomed efforts of the neighbors Mr. Drake and Mrs. Perry to form a connection out of their very different loneliness in "Plain Pleasures," or on the bittersweet cultural collision of an American wife and a peasant woman in Morocco in "Everything Is Nice," Jane Bowles creates whole worlds out of the unexpressed longings of individuals, adrift in their own lives, whether residing in their childhood homes or in faraway lands that are somehow both stranger and more familiar than what they left behind.

    She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.