"Bringing together the work of five highly accomplished contemporary Indian women writers - Mrinal Pande, Saniya, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Vaidehi, and B. M. Zuhara - this collection of novellas from five Indian languages revolves around the lives of women from various walks of life. With the novellas translated in English for the first time, the book includes a critical introduction by Uma Chakravarti." "This book will be of value not only to general readers interested in Indian writing in translation, but also to students of modern Indian literature, gender studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies." --Book Jacket.

Prodigy, visionary, 'outlaw,' orator and explorer. As society's outsiders, the exceptional subjects of this study inspired a new breed of women—and one another. Finalist of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Literature by the Association of American Publishers Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf: they all wrote dazzling books that forever changed the way we see history. In Outsiders, award-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon shows how these five novelists shared more than talent. In a time when a woman's reputation was her security, each of these women lost hers. They were unconstrained by convention, writing against the grain of their contemporaries, prophetically imagining a different future. We have long known the individual greatness of each of these writers, but in linking their creativity to their lives as outcasts, Gordon throws new light on the genius they share. All five lost their mothers in childbirth or at a young age. With no female role model present, they learned from books—and sometimes from an enlightened mentor. Crucially, each had to imagine what a woman could be in order to invent a voice of her own. The passion in their own lives infused their fiction. Writing with passionate intelligence of her own, Gordon reveals that these renegade writers inspired a new breed of women who wished to change a world locked in war, violence, exploitation, and sexual abuse. Gordon's biographies have always shown the indelible connection between life and art: an intuitive, exciting and revealing approach that has been highly praised. In Outsiders, she crafts nuanced portraits of Shelley, Brontë, Eliot, Schreiner and Woolf, naming each of these writers as prodigy, visionary, 'outlaw,' orator, and explorer, and shows how they came, they saw, and they left us changed. Today, following the tsunami of women's protest at widespread abuse, we do more than read them; we listen and live with their astonishing bravery and eloquence.

Chandrabati, the first woman poet in Bangla, lived in the sixteenth century in Mymensingh district in present day Bangladesh. She was also the first poet in the Bangla language to present a retelling of the Ram story from the point of view of Sita. Idolised as a model of marital obedience and chastity in Valmiki’s Ramayan, Chandrabati’s lyrical retelling of Sita’s story offers us a fresh perspective. Written in order to be sung before a non-courtly audience, mainly of womenfolk of rural Bengal, Chandrabati’s Ramayan adds new characters and situations to the story to provide new interpretations of already known events drawing richly on elements of existing genres. Its location in the tales of everyday life has ensured that Chandrabati’s Ramayan lives on in the hearts of village women of modern-day India.

A new edition of the acclaimed novel about a Puerto Rican girl coming of age in New York City during WWII.

United by a common focus on writing by and about women, this collection of contemporary essays, spanning the novel, poetry, drama, film and criticism, emphasises some of the problems of theory and practice posed by writing as a woman and by women's representation in literature. The subjects of individual essays range from the nineteenth and twentieth century novel to avant-garde film, and from Victorian women poets to Russian women poets of today. Drawing on structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, socio-linguistics and Marxist analyses of literature, the diverse essays suggest the variety and vigour of contemporary feminist literary criticism, as well as representing the debates animating it. Successfully bridging the gap between literary criticism and literary production, the scope of this collection will be of considerable interest to those concerned with developments in literary criticism as well as to those in the field of women's studies.

It includes introductions to the life and work of female authors who are not very well known in the Anglophone world due to the lack of translations of their works. This critical work with a feminist focus will provide a helpful framework for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the UK and US. A wide-ranging bibliography will be of great assistance to those looking to pursue research on the fantastic or on any of the specific writers and texts. This book is endorsed by the British Academy as part of the project Gender and the Fantastic in Hispanic Studies, and by an established international network, namely the Grupo de Estudios sobre lo Fantástico, based in the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.

A chilling noir collection featuring fifteen crime and mystery tales and six poems from female authors. Joyce Carol Oates, a queen-pin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy readers who are sick and tired of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more. With stories by: Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood (poems), Valerie Martin, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, Sheila Kohler, S.A. Solomon, S.J. Rozan, Lucy Taylor, Cassandra Khaw, Bernice L. McFadden, Jennifer Morales, Elizabeth McCracken, Livia Llewellyn, Lisa Lim, and Steph Cha. Praise for Cutting Edge “The indefatigable Joyce Carol Oates gathers a strong list of names . . . . Emerging and established authors provide attention-grabbing short works: especially notable are Edwidge Danticat's story on the quotidian horror of domestic violence, Bernice L. McFadden’s comic take on the appropriation of racial friendship, and Lisa Lim’s illustrations of a grotesque marriage.” —Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine “But of course, in the end, it isn't the themes or the innovations on the format of the short story anthology that make the tales collected in Cutting Edge most “feel” as if you were reading Joyce Carol Oates herself. It is the writing. The tight plots and fresh, flowing prose that go about their business until—snap!—the story’s well-oiled mousetrap does its job.” —New York Journal of Books “The 15 stories and six poems in this slim yet weighty all-original noir anthology . . . are razor-sharp and relentless in their portrayal of life, offering snapshots of dysfunction, everyday toil, and brief joy. It is unusual, however, in its scope, zeroing in not only on what the female characters endure but what they dish out . . . . Each story sears but does not cauterize, leaving protagonists and readers raw . . . . Fans of contemporary crime fiction won’t want to miss this one.” —Publishers Weekly

A deeply humane new collection by a luminary of Bengali literature A radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politic that together evokes the arc of an ordinary life. Nabaneeta Dev Sen's rhythmic lines explore the joys and agonies of first love, childbirth, and decay with a restless, tactile imagination, both picking apart and celebrating the rituals that make us human. When she warns, "know that blood can be easily drawn by lips," her words tune to the fierce and biting depths of language, to the "treachery that lingers on tongue tips." At once compassionate and unsparing, conversational and symphonic, these poems tell of a rope shivering beneath an acrobat's nimble feet or of a twisted, blood-soaked umbilical cord -- they pluck the invisible threads that bind us together.

Part fairy-tale, part magic, yet always savagely realistic Claire Fuller's haunting and powerful debut Our Endless Numbered Days will appeal to fans of Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child and Christian Baker Kline's Orphan Train . Peggy Hillcoat is eight years old when her survivalist father, James, takes her from their home in London to a remote hut in the woods and tells her that the rest of the world has been destroyed. Deep in the wilderness, Peggy and James make a life for themselves. They repair the hut, bathe in water from the river, hunt and gather food in the summers and almost starve in the harsh winters. They mark their days only by the sun and the seasons. When Peggy finds a pair of boots in the forest and begins a search for their owner, she unwittingly begins to unravel the series of events that brought her to the woods and, in doing so, discovers the strength she needs to go back to the home and mother she thought she’d lost. After Peggy's return to civilization, her mother learns the truth of her escape, of what happened to James on the last night out in the woods, and of the secret that Peggy has carried with her ever since.

Since publishing A Woman’s World in 1995, Travelers’ Tales has been the recognized leader in women’s travel literature, and with the launch of the annual series The Best Travel Writing in 2004, the obvious next step was an annual collection of the best women’s travel writing of the year. This title is the seventh in an annual series—The Best Women’s Travel Writing—that presents inspiring and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads are a woman’s perspective and compelling storytelling to make the reader laugh, weep, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn’t. In The Best Women's Travel Writing 2011, readers Have lunch with a mobster in Japan and drinks with an IRA member in Ireland Learn the secrets of flamenco in Spain and the magic of samba in Brazil Deliver a trophy for best testicles in a small town in rural Serbia Fall in love while riding a camel through the Syrian Desert Ski a first descent of over 5,000 feet in Northern India Discover the joy of getting naked in South Korea Leave it all behind to slop pigs on a farm in Ecuador...and much more.