Download or read book Women Talking written by Miriam Toews and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.” -Margaret Atwood, on Twitter "Scorching . . . a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women-all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

Download or read book Old Women Talking written by Wilderness Sarchild and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies. In OLD WOMEN TALKING, Wilderness Sarchild celebrates growing old without denying the difficulties. Shouting, divulging, gossiping, sobbing, ranting, keening, Sarchild's old women awaken us with their passion for living and loving.

Download or read book Swing Low written by Miriam Toews and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular school teacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. Now his daughter Miriam, an award-winning writer, has given her father a voice for his whole story. In Swing Low, Miriam recounts Mel's life as she imagines he would have told it, right up to the day he took his final walk. Toews takes us deep inside the experience of depression, but she also gives us winsome and hilarious tales of country life: growing up on a farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a strong, happy family in the midst of private torment." --

Download or read book Nasty women talk back written by Joy Watson and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, womyn & womxn: Are they really nasty? This collection contains humour and pathos; it an easy read, despite being academically grounded and completely relevant. Wonderful doodles at the start of each essay soften the page. This is a want-to-read book on an extremely important topic. In South Africa the Fallist movement became an extremely important platform to discuss gender, while #metoo has become a global phenomenon. Ashanti Kunene, a Fallist-leader, is one of the contributors. Other essays include “Pussies are not for grabbing” (Joy Watson), “My arms are tired of holding this sign” (Amanda Gouws), “Oh, no you can’t go to heaven in a broke down car” (Anastasia Slamat), “I’m with her” (Zama Khanyile), “To Womb it may concern” (Christi van der Westhuizen), “Womb with a (very strong) view” (Helen Moffet) and “Diary of an Indian woman” (Aarti Narse); but there are many more – twenty eight in total. The idea for the collection was born, cradled and nurtured between friends who wanted to create a space for writing and thinking about the marches. The group of feminists who contributed to this collection used the marches and the posters inspired by the marches as a vehicle which galvanised women into action to put pen to paper and show fervour for ongoing feminist activism. The nexus of this beautifully written and evocatively illustrated collection is telling narratives that link very personal stories with deeply political issues. These are the stories told by nasty women who are making the personal political, who are seeking to live their lives in ways that resist and challenge patriarchy. Through their very intimate nature these are stories that speak to the creation of a different kind of social order, one based on equity, the promotion of human rights and social justice. The presidential campaign in the USA grabbed the global imagination. It also grabbed the feminist imagination, presenting the hope that if a woman could become the president of the USA, women throughout the world would finally break through the reinforced glass ceiling. However, when it didn’t happen, the lost opportunity became the metaphorical kick in the feminist gut on a global scale. Through the subsequent misogyny, vulgarity, lewd comments, the pussy grabbing video, and the threats of the erosion of feminist activism in the trenches, worldwide a deep mourning arose from the feminist community. It was the name calling of “nasty women” that really smarted. Initial feelings of anger gave rise to empowerment of women — those who talk back to patriarchy — to embrace the label of “nasty women”.

Download or read book Listening to Old Woman Speak written by Laura Smyth Groening and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2005-01-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Groening argues that what Frantz Fanon terms the "manichean allegory" has shaped European understanding of the New World to such an extent that the image patterns fundamental to the allegory continue to dominate depictions of Native characters. Although a world separated into two categories defined by light and dark, reason and emotion, mind and body, technology and nature, future and past is no longer also characterized as good and evil, revaluing the tropes has not made them disappear. And without their disappearance, good intentions notwithstanding, nonaboriginal Canadian writers will continue to portray Native characters as part of a dead and dying culture. Groening demonstrates that the real issue cannot be about censorship as censorship involves the abrogation of freedom, and the imagination is never truly free.

Download or read book All My Puny Sorrows written by Miriam Toews and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Women Talking, a "wrenchingly honest, darkly funny novel" (Entertainment Weekly). Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close-raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life. After Elf's latest attempt, Yoli must quickly determine how to keep her family from falling apart while facing a profound question: what do you do for a loved one who truly wants to die? All My Puny Sorrows is a deeply personal story that is as much comedy as it is tragedy, a goodbye grin from the friend who taught you how to live.

Download or read book Two Old Women written by Velma Wallis and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2004-06-29 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine. Though these women have been known to complain more than contribute, they now must either survive on their own or die trying. In simple but vivid detail, Velma Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful. In her old women, she has created two heroines of steely determination whose story of betrayal, friendship, community and forgiveness "speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness and wisdom" (Ursula K. Le Guin).

Download or read book Grandfather s Mandolin written by Fran Markover and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-25 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Jewish Studies. GRANDFATHER'S MANDOLIN; by Fran Markover; is a collection of poems deeply rooted in family and what has come before. David Keplinger notes that "in these poems languages and names and articles of clothing seem to have lives; hats are thought to be alive; and names deserve elegies and memorials because they are breathing things that can pass away from this world; if we do not take care. Poem by poem; Markover creates a rich landscape of lives remembered; honored and loved."

Download or read book Women Talk written by Jennifer Coates and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1991-01-16 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the age-old myth that women's talk is trivial and unimportant. Drawing on a corpus of spontaneous conversation between friends, Jennifer Coates demonstrates the richness and complexity of the language used in such talk, focusing on women's use of hedges, questions and repetition.

Download or read book The Stager written by Susan Coll and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stager is a comedy of rabbits and real estate in the D.C. suburbs from Susan Coll, the author of Acceptance and Beach Week Dominique is one very bitter rabbit. His owner, Lars Jorgenson, is a former tennis pro who has blown out both knees, become obese, and is now addicted to a cocktail of prescription drugs containing the letters X and Z, one weird side-effect of which is that he has developed an omniscient point of view. Both Dominique and Lars are going crazy in the affluent Maryland suburbs where their faux Tudor home is up for sale. Idle on the market for months, the home is now being staged: A professional has come in to redecorate and depersonalize the house so that others can imagine themselves living there. Into the messy personal life of Lars and his beautiful wife Bella comes Eve, an unemployed journalist-turned stager who immediately realizes, as she steps into the foyer, that she is in the home of her former best friend. Eve knows way too much about Bella, including the questionable paternity of the meddling young child who lives in this house. Questions of friendship, loyalty, fidelity, sobriety, and sanity are raised to hilarious effect in this dark comedy of how we live now in the age of planned communities, cookie-cutter mansions, and cutthroat careerism.

Download or read book No One Tells You This written by Glynnis MacNicol and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featured in multiple “must-read” lists, No One Tells You This is “sharp, intimate…A funny, frank, and fearless memoir…and a refreshing view of the possibilities—and pitfalls—personal freedom can offer modern women” (Kirkus Reviews). If the story doesn’t end with marriage or a child, what then? This question plagued Glynnis MacNicol on the eve of her fortieth birthday. Despite a successful career as a writer, and an exciting life in New York City, Glynnis was constantly reminded she had neither of the things the world expected of a woman her age: a partner or a baby. She knew she was supposed to feel bad about this. After all, single women and those without children are often seen as objects of pity or indulgent spoiled creatures who think only of themselves. Glynnis refused to be cast into either of those roles, and yet the question remained: What now? There was no good blueprint for how to be a woman alone in the world. It was time to create one. Over the course of her fortieth year, which this ​“beguiling” (The Washington Post) memoir chronicles, Glynnis embarks on a revealing journey of self-discovery that continually contradicts everything she’d been led to expect. Through the trials of family illness and turmoil, and the thrills of far-flung travel and adventures with men, young and old (and sometimes wearing cowboy hats), she wrestles with her biggest hopes and fears about love, death, sex, friendship, and loneliness. In doing so, she discovers that holding the power to determine her own fate requires a resilience and courage that no one talks about, and is more rewarding than anyone imagines. “Amid the raft of motherhood memoirs out this summer, it’s refreshing to read a book unapologetically dedicated to the fulfillment of single life” (Vogue). No One Tells You This is an “honest” (Huffington Post) reckoning with modern womanhood and “a perfect balance between edgy and poignant” (People)—an exhilarating journey that will resonate with anyone determined to live by their own rules.

Download or read book The Women I Think About at Night written by Mia Kankimäki and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “thought-provoking blend of history, biography, women’s studies, and travelogue” (Library Journal) Mia Kankimäki recounts her enchanting travels in Japan, Kenya, and Italy while retracing the steps of ten remarkable female pioneers from history. What can a forty-something childless woman do? Bored with her life and feeling stuck, Mia Kankimäki leaves her job, sells her apartment, and decides to travel the world, following the paths of the female explorers and artists from history who have long inspired her. She flies to Tanzania and then to Kenya to see where Karen Blixen—of Out of Africa fame—lived in the 1920s. In Japan, Mia attempts to cure her depression while researching Yayoi Kusama, the contemporary artist who has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades. In Italy, Mia spends her days looking for the works of forgotten Renaissance women painters of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and finally finds her heroines in the portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Atremisia Gentileschi. If these women could make it in the world hundreds of years ago, why can’t Mia? The Women I Think About at Night is “an astute, entertaining…[and] insightful” (Publishers Weekly) exploration of the lost women adventurers of history who defied expectations in order to see—and change—the world.

Download or read book Talking to Women written by Nell Dunn and published by . This book was released on 2018-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dunn transcribes nine informal interviews she recorded with young women she happened to be near and around in the year 1964. They are friends across the class system, from factory worker Kathy to socialite Suna, with a particular eye to women marking themselves out creatively and against the odds. Dunn describes these women as sharing more than a common time and age; they've "severed themselves from some of the conventional forms of living and thinking."

Download or read book No Stopping Us Now written by Gail Collins and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beloved New York Times columnist "inspires women to embrace aging and look at it with a new sense of hope" in this lively, fascinating, eye-opening look at women and aging in America (Parade Magazine). "You're not getting older, you're getting better," or so promised the famous 1970's ad -- for women's hair dye. Americans have always had a complicated relationship with aging: embrace it, deny it, defer it -- and women have been on the front lines of the battle, willingly or not. In her lively social history of American women and aging, acclaimed New York Times columnist Gail Collins illustrates the ways in which age is an arbitrary concept that has swung back and forth over the centuries. From Plymouth Rock (when a woman was considered marriageable if "civil and under fifty years of age"), to a few generations later, when they were quietly retired to elderdom once they had passed the optimum age for reproduction, to recent decades when freedom from striving in the workplace and caretaking at home is often celebrated, to the first female nominee for president, American attitudes towards age have been a moving target. Gail Collins gives women reason to expect the best of their golden years.

Download or read book Women Rowing North written by Mary Pipher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller * USA Today Bestseller* Los Angeles Times Bestseller * Publishers Weekly Bestseller A guide to wisdom, authenticity, and bliss for women as they age by the author of Reviving Ophelia. Women growing older contend with ageism, misogyny, and loss. Yet as Mary Pipher shows, most older women are deeply happy and filled with gratitude for the gifts of life. Their struggles help them grow into the authentic, empathetic, and wise people they have always wanted to be. In Women Rowing North, Pipher offers a timely examination of the cultural and developmental issues women face as they age. Drawing on her own experience as daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, caregiver, clinical psychologist, and cultural anthropologist, she explores ways women can cultivate resilient responses to the challenges they face. “If we can keep our wits about us, think clearly, and manage our emotions skillfully,” Pipher writes, “we will experience a joyous time of our lives. If we have planned carefully and packed properly, if we have good maps and guides, the journey can be transcendent.”

Download or read book A Complicated Kindness written by Miriam Toews and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award In this stunning coming-of-age novel, the award-winning author of Women Talking balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity "Half of our family, the better–looking half, is missing," Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen–year–old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart. “Brilliant.” —New York Times Book Review “A darkly funny and provocative novel.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

Download or read book Bright Lights Prairie Dust written by Karen Grassle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karen Grassle, the beloved actress who played Ma on Little House on the Prairie, grew up at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in a family where love was plentiful but alcohol wreaked havoc. In this candid memoir, Grassle reveals her journey to succeed as an actress even as she struggles to overcome depression, combat her own dependence on alcohol, and find true love. With humor and hard-won wisdom, Grassle takes readers on an inspiring journey through the political turmoil on ’60s campuses, on to studies with some of the most celebrated artists at the famed London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and ultimately behind the curtains of Broadway stages and storied Hollywood sets. In these pages, readers meet actors and directors who have captivated us on screen and stage as they fall in love, betray and befriend, and don costumes only to reveal themselves. We know Karen Grassle best as the proud prairie woman Caroline Ingalls, with her quiet strength and devotion to family, but this memoir introduces readers to the complex, funny, rebellious, and soulful woman who, in addition to being the force behind those many strong women she played, fought passionately—as a writer, producer, and activist—on behalf of equal rights for women. Raw, emotional, and tender, Bright Lights celebrates and honors womanhood, in all its complexity.