Download or read book Woman on the Edge of Time written by Marge Piercy and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1997-06-23 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow. Praise for Woman on the Edge of Time “This is one of those rare novels that leave us different people at the end than we were at the beginning. Whether you are reading Marge Piercy’s great work again or for the first time, it will remind you that we are creating the future with every choice we make.”—Gloria Steinem “An ambitious, unusual novel about the possibilities for moral courage in contemporary society.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “A stunning, even astonishing novel . . . marvelous and compelling.”—Publishers Weekly “Connie Ramos’s world is cuttingly real.”—Newsweek “Absorbing and exciting.”—The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Gone to Soldiers written by Marge Piercy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 823 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping New York Times bestseller is “the most thorough and most captivating, most engrossing novel ever written about World War II” (Los Angeles Times). Epic in scope, Marge Piercy’s sweeping novel encompasses the wide range of people and places marked by the Second World War. Each of her ten narrators has a unique and compelling story that powerfully depicts his or her personality, desires, and fears. Special attention is given to the women of the war effort, like Bernice, who rebels against her domineering father to become a fighter pilot, and Naomi, a Parisian Jew sent to live with relatives in Detroit, whose twin sister, Jacqueline—still in France—joins the resistance against Nazi rule. The horrors of the concentration camps; the heroism of soldiers on the beaches of Okinawa, the skies above London, and the seas of the Mediterranean; the brilliance of code breakers; and the resilience of families waiting for the return of sons, brothers, and fathers are all conveyed through powerful, poignant prose that resonates beyond the page. Gone to Soldiers is a testament to the ordinary people, with their flaws and inner strife, who rose to defend liberty during the most extraordinary times.

Download or read book He She and It written by Marge Piercy and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A triumph of the imagination. Rich, complex, impossible to put down."—Alice Hoffman In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up. There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions—and the ability to kill. . . . From the imagination of Marge Piercy comes yet another stunning novel of morality and courage, a bold adventure of women, men, and the world of tomorrow.

Download or read book My Mother s Body written by Marge Piercy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 1985-03-12 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume. Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

Download or read book Braided Lives written by Piercy, Marge and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marge Piercy carries her portrait of the American experience back into the Fifties—that closed, repressive time in which forces for the upheavals of the Sixties ticked away underground. Spanning twenty years, and teeming with vivid characters, Braided Lives tells the powerful, unsentimental story of two young women coming of age. Jill, fiercely independent, dark, Jewish, an intellectual with Detroit street smarts, is a poet, curious, avid of life—a “professional student” and sometime thief. Donna, Jill’s cousin and closest friend, is blond, pretty, and alluring. Together, they grow and change at college in Ann Arbor, where the life of poets and painters contrasts sharply with the working-class neighborhood where Jill’s family lives. In Michigan, and afterward in New York City, the two women taste love and betrayal, friendship and pain, independence and fear as they reach a deepening understanding that to control their lives they must fight. And though their fates differ as widely as their personalities, both reflect the danger that sex posed at a time when abortions were illegal and an affair could destroy a woman’s life, making the outcome of a chance encounter or a night of love a matter of life and death. Braided Lives is an enduring portrait of the past that has led to our tenuous present. In her new introduction to this edition, Marge Piercy reflects on both the most autobiographical of her novels, and the ongoing battles to ensure the hard-fought victories of the Sixties and Seventies, particularly around sex and reproductive rights.

Download or read book Circles on the Water written by Marge Piercy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 150 poems from her seven books of poetry written between 1963 and 1982.

Download or read book Moon Is Always Female written by Marge Piercy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Her seventh and most wide ranging collection. In the 1st of 2 sections, the poems move from the amusingly elegiac to the erotic, the classical to the funny. The 2nd section is a series of 15 poems for a calendar based on lunar rather than solar divisions

Download or read book The Longings of Women written by Marge Piercy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “extraordinary” novel of the intertwined lives of three troubled women, by the New York Times–bestselling author of Gone to Soldiers (San Francisco Chronicle). When her best friend’s death rattles her sense of complacency, college professor Leila Landsman decides she’s finally had enough of her cheating husband. Leila throws herself into her work and encounters Becky Burgess, a local woman who climbed her way out of poverty but whose success is completely halted when she becomes the prime suspect in her husband’s murder. Meanwhile, Leila’s housekeeper, Mary Burke, is no stranger to failed marriage. Abandoned by her husband for a younger woman, and unable to support herself on her own income alone, Mary now secretly sleeps in her clients’ houses, hiding her homelessness to remain employed and survive. Flawed but resourceful, frightened yet determined, these three women must draw on an inner strength they never knew existed to make it without the men they’ve come to depend on. Although their situations differ, Leila, Becky, and Mary have all reached their tipping points—and each is about to be pushed to the brink—in this gripping and relatable story of the dangers of dependence and the liberating power of self-reliance.

Download or read book Vida written by Marge Piercy and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1979, Vida is Marge Piercy’s classic bookend to the ’60s. Vida is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters, and victories of an extraordinary band of people. At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the ’60s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement—a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of Life magazine—charismatic, passionate, and totally sure she would prevail. Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. She comes briefly to rest in a safe house on Cape Cod. To her surprise and annoyance, she finds another person in the house, a fugitive, Joel, ten years younger than she, a kid who dropped into the underground out of the army. As they spend the next days together, Vida finds herself warming toward a man for the first time in years, knowing the dangers all too well. As counterpoint to the underground ’70s, Marge Piercy tells the extraordinary tale of the optimistic ’60s, the thousands of people who were members of SAW (Students Against the War) and of the handful who formed a fierce group called the Little Red Wagon. Piercy’s characters make vivid and comprehensible the desperation, the courage, and the blind rage of a time when “action” could appear to some to be a more rational choice than the vote. A new introduction by Marge Piercy situates the book, and the author, in the times from which they emerged.

Download or read book Sleeping with Cats written by Marge Piercy and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marge Piercy, a writer who is highly praised as both a poet and a novelist, turns her gaze inward as she shares her thoughts on life and explores her development as a woman and writer. She pays tribute to the one loving constant that has offered her comfort and meaning even as the faces and events in her life have changed -- her beloved cats. With searing honesty, Piercy tells of her strained childhood growing up in a religiously split, working-class family in Detroit. She examines her myriad friendships and relationships, including two painful early marriages, and reveals their effects on her creativity and career. More than a reminiscence of things past, however, Sleeping With Cats is also a celebration of the present and the future, as Piercy shares her views on aging, creativity, and finding a lasting and improbable love with a man fourteen years younger than herself. A chronicle of the turbulent and exciting journey of one artist's life, Sleeping With Cats is a deeply intimate, unforgettable story.

Download or read book City of Darkness City of Light written by Marge Piercy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel by a New York Times–bestselling author follows three “bold, courageous, and entertaining” women through the tumult of the French Revolution (Booklist). For Claire Lacombe and Pauline Leon, two poor women of eighteenth-century France, the lofty ideals of the coming revolution could not seem more abstract. But when Claire sees the gaping disparity between the poverty she has known and the lavish lives of aristocrats as her theater group performs in their homes, and Pauline witnesses the execution of local bread riot leaders, both are driven to join the uprising. They, along with upper-class women like Madame Manon Roland, who ghostwrites speeches for her politician husband and runs a Parisian salon where revolutionaries gather, will play critical roles in the French people’s bloody battle for liberty and equality. Based on a true story, author Marge Piercy’s thrilling and scrupulously researched account shines with emotional depth and strikingly animated action. By interweaving their tales with the exploits of men whose names have become synonymous with the revolution, like Robespierre and Danton, Piercy reveals how the contributions of these courageous women may be lesser known, but no less important. Rich in detail and broad in scope, City of Darkness, City of Light is a riveting portrayal of an extraordinary era and the women who helped shape an important chapter in history.

Download or read book What Are Big Girls Made Of written by Marge Piercy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 1997-03-04 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opening with a powerful cycle of elegies for her long-distant, half-brother, this major new collection by one of our bestselling poets then goes on to include both serious and funny poems about women and poems about the precarious balance of nature, ending with the beautiful, life-affirming "The Art of Blessing the Day." 160 pp.

Download or read book To be of Use written by Marge Piercy and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Art of Blessing the Day written by Marge Piercy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning collection of old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, about which the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: "An exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship." Lifshin continues, "These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment' and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments, small things become charged with memories and feelings: paper snowflakes, buttons, one bird, a bottle-cap flower made from a ginger ale top and crystal beads. "She celebrates the body in rollicking, gusto-filled poems like 'Belly good' and 'The chuppah,' where 'our bodies open their portals wide.' So much that is richly sensuous: 'hands that caressed you, . . . untied the knot of pleasure and loosened your flesh till it fluttered,' and lush praise for 'life in our spines, our throats, our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.' "I love the humor in poems like 'Eat fruit,' the nostalgia and joy in 'The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree,' the fresh, beautiful images of nature--'In winter . . .the sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.' "I admire Piercy's sense of the past alive in the present, in personal and social history. The poems are memorials, like the yahrtzeit candle in a glass. 'We lose and we go on losing,' but the poems are never far from harsh joy, the joy that is 'the wine of life.' "Growing up haunted by Holocaust ghosts is an echo throughout the book, and some of the strongest poems are about the Holocaust, poems that become the voices of those who had no voice: 'What you carry in your blood is us, the books we did not write, music we could not make, a world gone from gristle to smoke, only as real now as words can make it.' "Marge Piercy's words make such a moving variety of experiences beautifully and forcefully real."

Download or read book Fly Away Home written by Marge Piercy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book: A woman learns the truth about her husband’s deceptions in this “superb” novel by the bestselling author of Gone to Soldiers (Boston Herald). After a cross-country tour promoting her latest cookbook, Daria Walker is ready to return to her beautiful home in an affluent Boston suburb and her beloved husband, Ross, a prominent attorney whose rough-hewn good looks have never stopped charming her. But when she arrives, he blindsides her by announcing he wants a divorce. Surprised and devastated, Daria suspects he may be having an affair, but the reality is far worse and will tear apart the illusion of her perfectly happy family. When a boy dies tragically and a scandal erupts involving a mercenary slumlord, Daria is outraged along with the rest of the city. But when she learns that Ross may have a connection to the case, she sets out on a journey to discover the truth—a quest that will cast a shadow over the comfortable life she once enjoyed. From the New York Times–bestselling author of Woman on the Edge of Time, Fly Away Home is the story of a woman forced to question her values, her relationships, and herself—“a tale of love, betrayal, and revenge set against a backdrop of sterile suburbs, confrontational politics [and] the evils of gentrification” (The New York Times).

Download or read book Small Changes written by Marge Piercy and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1997-06-23 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the choices two different women make, we discover the lives of all women . . . “[Marge] Piercy has proved herself a sensitive champion of women's issues.”—The Charlotte Observer Small Changes is the explosive novel of women struggling to make their places in a man's world. Set against the early days of the feminist movement, it tells of two women and the choices they must face. Intelligent, sensual Miriam Berg trades her doctorate for a marriage and security, only to find herself hungry for a life of her own—but terrified of losing her husband. Shy, frightened Beth ran away from the very life Miriam seeks, ran away to a new world of different ideas, and a different kind of love—the love of another woman. . . .

Download or read book Dance the Eagle to Sleep written by Marge Piercy and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2011-12-30 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1970, Marge Piercy’s second novel follows the lives of four teenagers, in a near-future society, as they rebel against a military draft and “the system.” The occupation of Franklin High School begins, and with it, the open rebellion of America’s youth against their channeled, unrewarding lives and the self-serving, plastic society that directs them. From the disillusionment and alienation of the young at the center of the revolt, to their attempts to build a visionary new society, the nationwide following they gain and the brutally complete repression that inevitably follows, this is a future fiction without a drop of fantasy. As driving, violent, and nuanced today as it was 40 years ago, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction by the author reflecting unapologetically on the novel and the times from which it emerged.