“Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize • An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her complicated Southern family—and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves—in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” (The Boston Globe). ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Esquire, Garden & Gun Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind. She set out to research her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to make peace with the secrets and contradictions of her family's past and face its reverberations in the present, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

A "stylish and sharp" character-driven suspense novel, "with wicked hairpin turns," about a famous novelist and a small-town striver locked in a struggle for fortune and fame. (Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette?) Florence Darrow is a low-level publishing employee who believes that she's destined to be a famous writer. When she stumbles into a job the assistant to the brilliant, enigmatic novelist known as Maud Dixon -- whose true identity is a secret -- it appears that the universe is finally providing Florence's big chance. The arrangement seems perfect. Maud Dixon (whose real name, Florence discovers, is Helen Wilcox) can be prickly, but she is full of pointed wisdom -- not only on how to write, but also on how to live. Florence quickly falls under Helen's spell and eagerly accompanies her to Morocco, where Helen's new novel is set. Amidst the colorful streets of Marrakesh and the wind-swept beaches of the coast, Florence's life at last feels interesting enough to inspire a novel of her own. But when Florence wakes up in the hospital after a terrible car accident, with no memory of the previous night -- and no sign of Helen -- she's tempted to take a shortcut. Instead of hiding in Helen's shadow, why not upgrade into Helen's life? Not to mention her bestselling pseudonym . . . Taut, twisty, and viciously entertaining, Who is Maud Dixon is a stylish psychological thriller about how far into the darkness you're willing to go to claim the life you always wanted. One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021 GoodReads * LitHub * CrimeReads * Town & Country * New York Post * Wall Street Journal

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.

Maud Gonne, the legendary woman known as the Irish Joan of Arc, left her mark on everyone she met. She famously won the devotion of one of the greatest poets of the age, William Butler Yeats. Born into tremendous privilege, she allied herself with rebels and the downtrodden and openly defied what was at the time the world's most powerful empire. She was an actress, a journalist and an activist for the cause of Irish independence. Ignoring the threat of social ostracism, she had several children out of wedlock. She was an independent woman who charted her own course. Yet Maud Gonne was also a lifelong anti-semite, someone who, even after the horrors of the Second World War, could not summon sympathy for the millions murdered by the Nazis. A believer in the occult and in reincarnation, she took mescaline with Yeats to enhance visions of mythic Irish heroes and heroines, and in mid-life converted to Catholicism in order to marry her husband, the Irish Catholic war hero John MacBride. What motivated this extraordinary person? Kim Bendheim has long been fascinated by Maud Gonne's perplexing character, and here gives us an intensely personal assessment of her thrilling life. The product of much original research, including interviews with Gonne's equally vivid, unconventional descendants, The Fascination of What's Difficult is a portrait of a powerful woman who, despite her considerable flaws, continues to inspire.

English gentry go in for bean farming in Minnesota after the Civil War.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Canada's most beloved author, not only gave the world the classic novel Anne of Green Gables, but she was also a devoted minister's wife, mother, neighbour, and friend to many, who in turn were honoured to have know this great lady. In Remembering Lucy Maud Montgomery, the writer is remembered through first-hand reminiscences of the people who knew her. Her Sunday school students, neighbours, maids, family, and friends paint a portrait of Montgomery as she has never before been seen. Not only does this book uncover fascinating sides of the author and provide fresh anecdotes, but it includes many photographs that are published for the first time. Even Montgomery's most devoted fans will find stories to surprise, delight, and at times even shock them.

Maud and The Tea of Dume Magic, Tea & Witches, Book 1 Magic, Tea and Witches, what would the world be without them? Maud Twangle, a Professional Witch, lives in a world full of magic and mystery with her best friend, Henrietta, who is a Magical Moon Spider. Henrietta lives under Maud’s floppy and rather bedraggled felt pointed ‘going out’ Witches’ hat, which was not to be confused with Maud’s floppy and rather bedraggled, felt pointed ‘gardening’ Witches’ hat, of course. Whilst going about her daily magical life, full of trips to the city by Owl (she much prefers to travel that way, rather than by Dragon) for Tea Symposiums, Maud stumbles headlong into three mysteries which she vows, upon the said floppy and rather bedraggled, felt pointed ‘going out’ Witches’ hat, to solve all of them. The Three Mysteries: 1. Witches & Wizards of the First Order are dying and it’s changing the magical world. 2. A child has appeared in Maud’s cottage, where has she come from and why? 3. What is wrong with the Tea of Dume and why does Maud instinctively fear it? With a swish of magic, a smattering of luck and an ingenious brain, Maud endeavours to solve all these mysteries. However, what will happen to the magical world and its varied inhabitants, if she fails? ‘Tis a horror too terrible to contemplate, without a copious amount of tea, of course.

"This book was born out of the curiosity aroused in me by Tennyson's Maud and "Locksley Hall," ostensibly dramatic poems which were strangely flawed, I always felt, by some hidden emotional connection with the poet's own life. What was it? . . . The final result of my inquiry is this book." --From the Preface by the Author This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Symbolising some of the author's most provocative writing, this novel captures the essence of Black life, and recognises the beauty and strength that lies within each of us.