Download or read book Cassandra Speaks written by Elizabeth Lesser and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers? Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human. Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate. Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers “A Toolbox for Inner Strength.” Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted. Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.
Download or read book The Closed Doors and Other Stories written by Dorothy Whipple and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dorothy Whipple's key theme is `Live and Let Live'. And what she describes throughout her short stories are people, and particularly parents, who defy this maxim. For this reason her work is timeless, like all great writing. It is irrelevant that Dorothy Whipple's novels were set in an era when middle-class women expected to have a maid; when fish knives were used for eating fish; when children did what they were told. The moral universe she creates has not changed: there are bullies in every part of society; people try their best but often fail; they would like to be unselfish but sometimes are greedy. Like George Eliot, like Mrs Gaskell, like EM Forster, Dorothy Whipple describes men and women in their social milieu, which in her case is the inter-war period, and shows them being all- too human. But her books are not nostalgia reads either, any more than reading George Eliot or Forster is a nostalgia read, nor are they old-fashioned or simplistic. Her prose, it is true, is pure, uncluttered, straightforward, pared down to the bone and never labours the point; her subtlety is the reason why so many people - generally those who have not read her - overlook her excellence.
Download or read book The Woman Who Tried to Be Good and Other Stories written by Edna Ferber and published by . This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman' so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the street with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at' in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length mink coat in our town, and Ganz's shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women. Also includes "The Gay Old Dog," "That's Marriage," "Farmer in the Dell," "Un Morso doo Pang," "Long Distance," "The Maternal Feminine."
Download or read book Dear Life written by Alice Munro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE© IN LITERATURE 2013 A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction A Best Book of the Year: The Atlantic, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, AV Club In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer. Illumined by Munro’s unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro’s own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.
Download or read book The Woman who Thought She was a Planet written by Vandana Singh and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 2008 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Already A Name In The World Of Science Fiction And Fantasy Writing, Vandana Singh Brings Her Unique Imagination To A Wider Audience With Her First Collection Of Stories. In The Title Story, A Woman Tells Her Husband Of Her Curious Discovery: That She Is Inhabited By Small Alien Creatures. In Another, A Young Girl, Making Her Way To College Through The Streets Of Delhi Comes Across A Mysterious Tetrahedron: Is It A Spaceship? Or A Secret Weapon? Each Story In This Fabulous Collection Opens Up New Vistas &Mdash; From Outer Space To The Inner World&Mdash;And Takes The Reader On An Incredible Journey To Both. The Book Also Includes The Author&Rsquo;S Own Critical Essay On The Future And Importance Of Speculative Fiction As A Genre.
Download or read book Woman Hollering Creek written by Sandra Cisneros and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
Download or read book The Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories written by Renée Vivien and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Woman of the Wolf, written in 1904, is probably Renée Vivien's finest achievement, the one work in which she combines powerful characters and exciting narratives with the poetic clarity of style and vision so apparent in her other works. In this collection of short stories and prose poems, Vivien manages to touch on all the themes and ideas that obsessed her throughout her short life." --from back cover
Download or read book Growing Things and Other Stories written by Paul Tremblay and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Bram Stoker Award "One of the best collections of the 21st century." — Stephen King A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national bestseller The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts. A masterful anthology featuring nineteen pieces of short fiction, Growing Things is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay’s fantastically fertile imagination. In “The Teacher,” a Bram Stoker Award nominee for best short story, a student is forced to watch a disturbing video that will haunt and torment her and her classmates’ lives. Four men rob a pawn shop at gunpoint only to vanish, one-by-one, as they speed away from the crime scene in “The Getaway.” In “Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks,” a meth addict kidnaps her daughter from her estranged mother as their town is terrorized by a giant monster . . . or not. Joining these haunting works are stories linked to Tremblay’s previous novels. The tour de force metafictional novella “Notes from the Dog Walkers” deconstructs horror and publishing, possibly bringing in a character from A Head Full of Ghosts, all while serving as a prequel to Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. “The Thirteenth Temple” follows another character from A Head Full of Ghosts—Merry, who has published a tell-all memoir written years after the events of the novel. And the title story, “Growing Things,” a shivery tale loosely shared between the sisters in A Head Full of Ghosts, is told here in full. From global catastrophe to the demons inside our heads, Tremblay illuminates our primal fears and darkest dreams in startlingly original fiction that leaves us unmoored. As he lowers the sky and yanks the ground from beneath our feet, we are compelled to contemplate the darkness inside our own hearts and minds.
Download or read book The Hidden Girl and Other Stories written by Ken Liu and published by Gallery / Saga Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning author Ken Liu comes his much anticipated second volume of short stories. Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years—sixteen of his best—plus a new novelette. In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from book three in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne.
Download or read book Falling Women and Other Stories written by Ellen Herbert and published by . This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son. Braxton, North Carolina is the where in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton's babysitters are dangerous, snooping, stealing secrets - and husbands. But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend. "The World As I Know It" won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize; "The Yellow Sneakers" won a Dexter Review Short Story Prize; "Jazzland" won the Lip Service Prose Prize; and an earlier version of "Falling Women" won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship for Ms. Herbert.
Download or read book Girls of a Certain Age written by Maria Adelmann and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fearless, darkly playful debut exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness. What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness? Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls, women, and non-binary characters in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition. Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, Girls of a Certain Age captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.
Download or read book Lust written by Susan Minot and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV DIVDIVTwelve stories of women caught in the emotional turbulence of romance in Manhattan/divDIV /div/divDIVFor the twelve narrators of Susan Minot’s breathtaking collection—artists and lawyers, teenagers and thirty-somethings—love in New York doesn’t come easy. And as they struggle to reconcile their yearnings for romance with their needs for independence, they face resistance to emotional commitment at every turn. /divDIV /divDIVIn intense snapshots of these women’s most intimate moments, Minot brings to life their dreams and disappointments, hopes and heartbreaks, and highlights the emotional fissures that divide women and men./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features a new illustrated biography of Susan Minot, including artwork by the author and rare documents and photos from her personal collection./div /div
Download or read book The Wise Woman and Other Stories The Best of Mannu Bhandari written by Mannu Bhandari and published by Roli Books Private Limited. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mannu Bhandari's genius lies not in elevating women to heroines or superior beings; rather, she forces us to acknowledge that flawed, confused, and self-centered women are as worthy of agency and respect. She wrote among literary giants who were mostly men, but carved a singular space for herself with her unflinching gaze at the hypocrisy of a society that claims to venerate women yet balks at giving them the keys to their shackles. These 18 stories are representative of her wonderful insights into the inner life of women – her characters span the spectrum from rural to urban, illiterate to educated, homemakers to career professionals. Through all the stories runs a vein of gentle mockery – the inimitable Mannu Bhandari style.
Download or read book The Little Woman Wanted Noise written by Val Teal and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lost classic from the illustrator of The Story of Ferdinand and Mr. Popper’s Penguins. CLANG! THUMP! WHOOSH! BANG! The big city is a noisy place. But the little woman doesn’t mind, the big city is her home. Then one day she is given a wonderful gift, a “pleasant, peaceful farm” in the country. The farm is nearly perfect—only with all the quiet, the little woman can’t relax. So she buys a cow, she buys a dog, a cat and a duck, a rooster, a pig. Now the farm is noisy indeed. Still, something’s missing. She decides to return to the city for that one special thing she knows will make her farm feel just like home. And by the end of her tale the little woman is happy to find that even though she has no rest, she has peace of mind. Published only seven years after The Story of Ferdinand, The Little Woman Wanted Noise shows Robert Lawson at the peak of his talent and contains some of the most stunning and innovative black-and-white drawings in all of American picture-book history. They are the joyous accompaniment to Val Teal’s story, which reminds us that a life without a little chaos is no life at all.
Download or read book Virgin and Other Stories written by April Ayers Lawson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A confident and mesmerizing fiction debut, from the winner of the Plimpton Prize Set in the South, at the crossroads of a world that is both secular and devoutly Christian, April Ayers Lawson's stories evoke the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings. In "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," Conner, sixteen, accompanies his grieving mother to the funeral of her best friend, Charlene, a woman who was once a man. In "The Way You Must Play Always," Gretchen, who looks young even for thirteen, heads into her weekly piano lesson in nervous anticipation of her next illicit meeting with her teacher's brother, Wesley. Thin and sickly, wasting from a brain tumor, Wesley spends his days watching pornography and smoking pot, and yet Gretchen can only interpret his advances as the first budding of love. And in the title story, Jake grapples with the growing chasm between him and his wife, Sheila, who was still a virgin when they wed. At a cocktail party thrown by a wealthy donor to his hospital, he ponders the intertwining imperatives of marriage--sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire--even as he finds himself succumbing to the temptations of his host. Self-assured and sensual, Virgin and Other Stories is the first work of a young writer of unusual mastery.
Download or read book The Burning Woman and Other Stories written by Frank Roger and published by . This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of fantastic and surreal short stories.
Download or read book Fado and Other Stories written by Katherine Vaz and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2013-11-27 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden's fruit: "In the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen."Vaz's beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. "Listen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose," on character sings, "that the song might be more beautiful." Such a verse might describe Vaz's own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject's ambiguities and her characters' conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life's discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.
