Efforts to fight back against silencing are central to social justice movements and scholarly fields such as feminist and postcolonial studies. But claiming to give voice to people who have been silenced always risks appropriating those people's stories. Lisa Propst argues that the British novelist and public intellectual Marina Warner offers some of the most provocative contemporary interventions into this dilemma. Tracing her writing from her early journalism to her novels, short stories, and studies of myths and fairy tales, Propst shows that in Warner's work, features such as stylized voices and narrative silences - tales that Warner's books hint at but never tell - question the authority of the writer to tell other people's stories. At the same time they demonstrate the power of literature to make new ethical connections between people, inviting readers to reflect on whom they are responsible to and how they are implicated in social systems that perpetuate silencing. By exploring how to combat silencing through narrative without reproducing it, Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories takes up an issue crucial not just to literature and art but to journalists, policy makers, human rights activists, and all people striving to formulate their own responses to injustice.

Efforts to fight back against silencing are central to social justice movements and scholarly fields such as feminist and postcolonial studies. But claiming to give voice to people who have been silenced always risks appropriating those people's stories. Lisa Propst argues that the British novelist and public intellectual Marina Warner offers some of the most provocative contemporary interventions into this dilemma. Tracing her writing from her early journalism to her novels, short stories, and studies of myths and fairy tales, Propst shows that in Warner's work, features such as stylized voices and narrative silences - tales that Warner's books hint at but never tell - question the authority of the writer to tell other people's stories. At the same time they demonstrate the power of literature to make new ethical connections between people, inviting readers to reflect on whom they are responsible to and how they are implicated in social systems that perpetuate silencing. By exploring how to combat silencing through narrative without reproducing it, Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories takes up an issue crucial not just to literature and art but to journalists, policy makers, human rights activists, and all people striving to formulate their own responses to injustice.

This is the first full-length study of Marina Warner's work.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale—now an Emmy Award-winning Hulu original series—and Alias Grace, now a Netflix original series. Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole.

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending, and weaving—is carried out. Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office. In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care. “By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.

An e-original short story that sets the stage for bestselling author Diane Chamberlain's novel Necessary Lies (September 2013). The First Lie gives readers an early glimpse into the life of thirteen-year-old Ivy Hart. It's 1958 in rural North Carolina, where Ivy lives with her grandmother and sister on a tobacco farm. As tenant farmers, Ivy and her family don't have much freedom, though she and her best friend, Henry, often sneak away in search of adventure...and their truest selves. But life on the farm takes a turn when Ivy's teenage sister gives birth—all the while maintaining her silence about the baby's father. Soon Ivy finds herself navigating the space between adolescence and adulthood as she tries to unravel a dark web of family secrets and make sense of her ever-evolving life in the segregated South. Advance praise for Diane Chamberlain's Necessary Lies: "It will steal your heart."—Katrina Kittle, author of The Blessings of the Animals "An emotional powerhouse." —Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of Beach House Memories "Enthralling...[it] transfixed me from the very first pages, and its vivid and sympathetic characters haunted me long after the last."—Christina Schwarz, New York Times bestselling author of Drowning Ruth

When a mummy in the Museum of Albion is unpacked it is found to contain a bundle of curious objects and documents which tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman, Leto. On the run, in a far-off era of civil strife, Leto gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, survives in a desert stronghold as the lover of its commander, stows away on a ship loaded with plundered antiquities and then works as a maid in a war-torn city. She loses her son but saves her daughter during a long siege. As the novel sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages to the treasure-hunting of Victorian Europe and into the present day, Leto reappears in different guises. Eventually she becomes a servant to a rock singer, and begins to search for her son.

A highly conscious wordsmith, Daniel Defoe used expository styles in his fiction and non-fiction that reflected his ability to perceive material and intellectual phenomena from opposing, but not contradictory perspectives. Moreover, the boundaries of genre within his wide-ranging oeuvre can prove highly fluid. In this study, Robert James Merrett approaches Defoe's body of work using interdisciplinary methods that recognize dialectic in his verbal creativity and cognitive awareness. Examining more than ninety of Defoe's works, Merrett contends that this author's literariness exploits a conscious dialogue that fosters the reciprocity of traditional and progressive authorial procedures. Along the way, he discusses Defoe's lexical and semantic sensibility, his rhetorical and aesthetic theories, his contrarian theology, and more. Merrett proposes that Defoe's contrarian outlook celebrates a view of consciousness that acknowledges the brain's bipartite structure, and in so doing illustrates how cognitive science may be applied to further explorations of narrative art.

Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.