A Study Guide to Alice Walker's Everyday Use, excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

Presents the text of Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use"; contains background essays that provide insight into the story; and features a selection of critical response. Includes a chronology and an interview with the author.

A Study Guide to Alice Walker's Everyday Use, excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

Short fiction about the female experience from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Color Purple, “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post). Here are stories of women traveling with the weight of broken dreams, with kids in tow, with doubt and regret, with memories of lost loves, with lovers who have their own hard pasts and hard edges. Some from the South, some from the North, some rich and some poor, the characters that inhabit InLove & Trouble all seek a measure of self-fulfillment, even as they struggle with difficult circumstances and limiting social conventions. The stories that make up Alice Walker’s debut short fiction collection reflect her tenacious commitment to face brutal and sometimes melancholy truths while also illuminating the ways in which the courageous pursuit of love brings hope to even the most harrowing lives. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Walker's essays and articles written between 1966 and 1982 discuss the concept and influence of art and the artist's life, criticisms of authors such as Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, studies in the civil rights movement and feminist movement, and her own ideas while writing her book "The Color Purple."

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey. In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her finest achievements: the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love. Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love. Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author’s hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker’s most surprising achievement.

The inspiration for the new film adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway musical Alice Walker’s iconic modern classic, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award A powerful cultural touchstone of modern literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey toward redemption and love.

An exceptional ethnography marked by clarity and candor, Sidewalk takes us into the socio-cultural environment of those who, though often seen as threatening or unseemly, work day after day on "the blocks" of one of New York's most diverse neighborhoods. Sociologist Duneier, author of Slim's Table, offers an accessible and compelling group portrait of several poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books and magazines. Duneier spent five years with these individuals, and in Sidewalk he argues that, contrary to the opinion of various city officials, they actually contribute significantly to the order and well-being of the Village. An important study of the heart and mind of the street, Sidewalk also features an insightful afterword by longtime book vendor Hakim Hasan. This fascinating study reveals today's urban life in all its complexity: its vitality, its conflicts about class and race, and its surprising opportunities for empathy among strangers. Sidewalk is an excellent supplementary text for a range of courses: INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY: Shows how to make important links between micro and macro; how a research project works; how sociology can transform common sense. RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS: Untangles race, class, and gender as they work together on the street. URBAN STUDIES: Asks how public space is used and contested by men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor, and how street life and political economy interact. DEVIANCE: Looks at labeling processes in treatment of the homeless; interrogates the "broken windows" theory of policing. LAW AND SOCIETY: Closely examines the connections between formal and informal systems of social control. METHODS: Shows how ethnography works; includes a detailed methodological appendix and an afterword by research subject Hakim Hasan. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: Sidewalk engages the rich terrain of recent developments regarding representation, writing, and authority; in the tradition of Elliot Liebow and Ulf Hannerz, it deals with age old problems of the social and cultural experience of inequality; this is a telling study of culture on the margins of American society. CULTURAL STUDIES: Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, Sidewalk shows how books and magazines are received and interpreted in discussions among working-class people on the sidewalk; it shows how cultural knowledge is deployed by vendors and scavengers to generate subsistence in public space. SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE: Sidewalk demonstrates the connections between culture and human agency and innovation; it interrogates distinctions between legitimate subcultures and deviant collectivities; it illustrates conflicts over cultural diversity in public space; and, ultimately, it shows how conflicts over meaning are central to social life.