"This is a book about the fragility of memory and identity, and the nature of time. It has three parts reflecting the past, present and future of a woman, Anna P, who lives on an island off the coast of Italy but can no longer remember how she got there. She comes from South Africa but has almost no memories of the place or people there, and no attachment to them. The only person she has any relationship with is a sex worker whom she pays by the hour. Her life is meaningless. She has abusive encounters with unknown men, clearly repetitions of traumatic events in the past, during which she dissociates. It is not clear whether she occasionally kills these men or not. It is only when she begins to connect emotionally with a slightly retarded child, and her self begins to coagulate around a tiny centre core of meaning, that she finds some value in herself, some place which she will not allow to be abused. Through connection with another person, she comes into an ethical relationship with the world." -- Description from thesis.

Russia, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the almost-living portrait that the Tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts she wrote just before her death, one of which opens a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairytale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapón, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa lifts the voices of coachmen, sailors, maids, and seamstresses in this playful, polyphonic, and subversive revision of the Russian revolution, told through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.

It’s Crazy Rich Asians meets Gossip Girl! Anna K Away follows the fabulous cast of characters from Anna K over the course of the next summer, when new freedoms lead to life-changing adventures, risks, and self-discovery How the mighty have fallen. Anna K, once the golden girl of Greenwich, CT, and New York City, has been brought low by a scandalous sex tape and the tragic death of her first love, Alexia Vronsky. At the beginning of the summer, her father takes her to the other side of the world, to connect with his family in South Korea and hide her away. Is Anna in exile? Or could this be her chance to figure out who she really is? Back in the U.S., Lolly has forgiven Steven for cheating on her, and their relationship feels stronger than ever. But when Lolly meets a boy at her beloved theater camp, she has to ask herself how well Steven will ever really know her. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, everything between Kimmie and her new boyfriend, Dustin, is easy—except when it comes to finally having sex. And Bea escapes to LA, running away from her grief at her beloved cousin’s death, until a beautiful stranger steals her heart. Is Bea ready to finally forgive Anna, and let herself truly fall in love for the very first time? Set over the course of one unforgettable summer, Jenny Lee's Anna K Away is full of the risk, joy, heartbreak, and adventure that mark the three months between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next.

Anna had everything figured out – she was about to start senior year with her best friend, she had a great weekend job and her huge work crush looked as if it might finally be going somewhere... Until her dad decides to send her 4383 miles away to Paris. On her own. But despite not speaking a word of French, Anna finds herself making new friends, including Étienne St. Clair, the smart, beautiful boy from the floor above. But he's taken – and Anna might be too. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with the French kiss she's been waiting for?

Poetry. Fiction. Jewish Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. THE BOOK OF ANNA is written in the voice of Anna Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jew who spent her adolescence in a concentration camp and now lives in 1950s Prague answering phones for the secret police. This genre-defying book of prose diary entries and autobiographical poems offers intimate glimpses of Anna's present --her writing process, relationships with neighbors, obsessive sexual behavior, chain-smoking, and idiosyncratic exploration of Jewish tradition --while the poems recount her unsparing efforts to reckon with horror, survival, and their aftermath. Written in the midst of Joy Ladin's gender transition, this book asks provocative questions about the meaning of trauma, gender, suffering and empathy that speak to our current historical moment in haunting and indelible ways. This second edition of a classic text of trans literature features a new afterword by the author, "Anna and Me," reflecting on this book's pivotal importance for the development of the author's poetics and identity. "Part novel, part shattering lyric sequence, THE BOOK OF ANNA presents itself as the work of Anna Asher, a Holocaust survivor living in 1950s Prague who looks back on her pre-war love of a Heidegger-reading yeshiva bocher, on the women who saved her life in Barracks 10 (The Rebbetzin, The Physicist, The Whore), and on the Biblical 'song made of songs' where 'God is so utterly absent that the rabbis decided --what else could they do? --to see Him everywhere.' A stunning, sometimes shocking mix of Jewish learning and daring, THE BOOK OF ANNA was Ladin's breakthrough volume, and scarred, sardonic Anna is an unforgettable contribution to Jewish American poetry." --Eric Selinger "It's nearly impossible to capture the magnificence that is Joy Ladin's THE BOOK OF ANNA, what it begins and what it foretells. There is something deeply familiar in the text. I feel as if I am suddenly sitting on the yellow plastic-covered couch in my grandmother's living room, listening to the conversations while she and her friends play bridge or mahjong. The women speak Yiddish or Hungarian, and their talk is filled with cigarettes, gossip, and the kind of dry side-eyed humor that belies their own survival and the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, entire families, in the genocide that occurred not two decades before in the villages and towns of their birth. These were women trying to live. Through poems and accounts of a friendship with another survivor, Ladin follows Anna's efforts to find some sign that will allow her to go on living. 'And something shaped like a woman / As you are shaped like a man / Waiting in the middle of the Charles Bridge / For death or truth / To make her breathe again.' In the end, Ladin's Anna chooses to breathe, and we are grateful for her journey in all of its reckoning, and for this prescient and gorgeous book of becoming." --Samuel Ace

A national indie bestseller! Meet Anna K: every happy teenage girl is the same, while every unhappy teenage girl is miserable in her own special way... At seventeen, Anna K is at the top of Manhattan and Greenwich society (even if she prefers the company of her horses and dogs); she has the perfect (if perfectly boring) boyfriend, Alexander W.; and she has always made her Korean-American father proud (even if he can be a little controlling). Meanwhile, Anna's brother, Steven, and his girlfriend, Lolly, are trying to weather an sexting scandal; Lolly’s little sister, Kimmie, is struggling to recalibrate to normal life after an injury derails her ice dancing career; and Steven’s best friend, Dustin, is madly (and one-sidedly) in love with Kimmie. As her friends struggle with the pitfalls of ordinary teenage life, Anna always seems to be able to sail gracefully above it all. That is...until the night she meets Alexia “Count” Vronsky at Grand Central. A notorious playboy who has bounced around boarding schools and who lives for his own pleasure, Alexia is everything Anna is not. But he has never been in love until he meets Anna, and maybe she hasn’t, either. As Alexia and Anna are pulled irresistibly together, she has to decide how much of her life she is willing to let go for the chance to be with him. And when a shocking revelation threatens to shatter their relationship, she is forced to question if she has ever known herself at all. Dazzlingly opulent and emotionally riveting, Anna K: A Love Story is a brilliant reimagining of Leo Tolstoy's timeless love story, Anna Karenina—but above all, it is a novel about the dizzying, glorious, heart-stopping experience of first love and first heartbreak.

"A young Holocaust survivor arrives in 1946 at a New York yeshiva where he will study and live. His only possession is a small box that he never lets out of his sight. Daniel, the young survivor, rarely talks, but the narrator, a stutterer who bears the taunts of the other boys, comes to consider Daniel his friend"--Provided by publisher.

May is a carefree girl who likes nothing better than singing along to the Spice Girls, roller blading and eating cheese on toast with her friends. But then May’s family moves to a new town and May’s world is turned upside down. Out of the blue, an imaginary friend Anna comes along to help May out of her predicament, but Anna’s ‘solutions’ only isolate May from her family and lead her into unhealthy habits. Author Maddy Tyers knows only too well the pressures faced by children who become overly concerned about their body image and how they are regarded by their peers. Her story encourages children to feel positive about their body image and to accept the love and support offered them by understanding family and friends in times of crisis. The Butterfly Foundation, which is dedicated to helping children overcome eating disorders, is very supportive of the lessons to be gained from this important book. Highly recommended for parents, teachers and health professionals. According to the Butterfly Foundation, over a million Australians are currently experiencing an eating disorder, and less than a quarter of them are getting treatment or support. When Anna Came to Stay centres on a happy young girl called May who falls into heeding advice from her imaginary friend, Anna. Her plight is followed by the family who no longer recognise their daughter and hatch a plan to rescue May from the clutches of Anna. The book will open conversations around eating disorders and how they impact every area of a person’s life. Recognising the signs will help schools and families seek help before the disorder progresses further. The emotions are beautifully captured in a mix of mediums including watercolour and pencil by illustrator Siobhan Skipworth. – Veronica Chapman, TeachEzy Be true to yourself is the message of this book. With its cheerful illustrations, it tells how the support of family helps May get over a damaging obsession, in the form of demanding visitor, Anna. This allows May to slowly build self-esteem as she begins to believe in herself again. A sober but important message. – Libby Hathorn, author, poet, librettist

"Searing . . . explores how identity forms love, and love, identity. Written in engrossing, intimate prose, it makes us rethink how blood’s deep connections relate to the attachments of proximity."—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is a little girl growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother Jacob and parents who, in her words, were "great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them." After her father leaves the family, she is raised among a commune of mothers in a low-income housing complex. Then, no longer able to care for the only daughter she has left at home, Mary's mother sends Mary away to Oklahoma to live with her maternal grandparents, who have also been raising her younger sister, Rebecca. When Mary is legally adopted by her grandparents, the result is a family story like no other. Because Mary was adopted by her grandparents, Mary’s mother, Peggy, is legally her sister, while her brother, Jacob, is legally her nephew. Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she’s sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again. Moving, haunting, and at times wickedly funny, Bastards is about finding one's family and oneself.

Anna Swan dreamed of a life as big as she was. –When I was small, I was already big news,” begins this picture book biography of Anna Swan. –Because when I was small, I was already TREMENDOUS.” Anna was thirteen pounds at her birth in Nova Scotia in 1846. She grew steadily until she was nearly eight feet tall, and never felt that she fit into her small country life. Then, at age seventeen, Anna moved to New York City to be part of P. T. Barnumês Gallery of Wonders ã and her life changed forever. Fame, world travel, true love! This real-life giantess lived a real-life storybook adventure!