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Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Clarissa Pinkola Estés · 1996
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than 2.7 million copies sold! • “A deeply spiritual book [that] honors what is tough, smart and untamed in women.”—The Washington Post Book World<br/><br/>Book club pick for Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf<br/><br/>Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society’s attempt to “civilize” us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.<br/><br/>In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.<br/><br/>Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.

Small is Beautiful
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher · 1993

Conversations with Friends: A Novel
Sally Rooney · 2018
<b>NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • From the <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Normal People</i> . . . “[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—<i>Entertainment Weekly</i><br><br>SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE <i>TIME</i> 100 NEXT LIST • WINNER OF THE <i>SUNDAY TIMES</i> (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • ONE OF <i>BUZZFEED</i>’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE AND <i>THE TELEGRAPH</i>’S 20 BEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>Vogue, Slate</i> • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: <i>Elle</i></b><br><br>Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.<br><br>Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, <i>Conversations with Friends</i> is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.<br><br><b>SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD</b><br><br>“Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”<b>—Celeste Ng, <i>Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast</i></b><br><br>“The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”<b>—Curtis Sittenfeld, <i>The Week</i></b><br><br>“Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions.”<b>—<i>New York</i></b><br><br>“A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”<b>—Alexandra Schwartz, <i>The New Yorker</i></b><br><br>“This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”<b>—Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)</b>

Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir
Dolly Alderton · 2021
New York Times Bestseller<br/>"There is no writer quite like Dolly Alderton working today and very soon the world will know it.” —Lisa Taddeo, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Three Women<br/>“Dolly Alderton has always been a sparkling Roman candle of talent. She is funny, smart, and explosively engaged in the wonders and weirdness of the world. But what makes this memoir more than mere entertainment is the mature and sophisticated evolution that Alderton describes in these pages. It’s a beautifully told journey and a thoughtful, important book. I loved it.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and City of Girls<br/>The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride<br/>When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.<br/>Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.

A Certain Hunger
Chelsea G. Summers · 2021
One of Vanity Fair's Books That Will Get You Through This Winter<br/>“One of the most uniquely fun and campily gory books in my recent memory... A Certain Hunger has the voice of a hard-boiled detective novel, as if metaphor-happy Raymond Chandler handed the reins over to the sexed-up femme fatale and really let her fly." ―The New York Times<br/><br/>Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy’s clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about. Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both.<br/><br/>But there is something within Dorothy that’s different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.<br/><br/>A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world’s most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 2021
Dorian Gray is the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist impressed and infatuated by Dorian's beauty; he believes that Dorian's beauty is responsible for the new mood in his art as a painter. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, and he soon is enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic world view: that beauty and sensual fulfilment are the only things worth pursuing in life.<br/>Newly understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied amoral experiences while staying young and beautiful; all the while, his portrait ages and records every sin.

A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 1989
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”<br/><br/>In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.<br/><br/>In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.<br/><br/>With a Foreword by Mary Gordon

Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner
Patti Smith · 2010
<p> It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. </p> <p> Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. </p> <p> <i>Just Kids</i> begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame. </p>

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion · 2007
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.<br/><br/>Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.<br/><br/>This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
Finished

A Very Easy Death
Simone De Beauvoir · 2013

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong · 2021

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion · 1970
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Carrie by stephen king
Stephen King · 1974

The Rules of Attraction
Bret Easton Ellis · 1988
This novel offers a satirical yet bleak vision of the modern world - a world devoted to conspicuous consumption and consumer-as-king culture - and highlights the feelings of futility and superficiality that mark an entire generation.

Frankenstein
Mary W. Shelley
Originally written as a response to a challenge from Lord Byron, Frankenstein still haunts our minds with images of the dead brought back to hideous life. Mary Shelley's nineteenth-century masterpiece begins with a fateful rescue in the Arctic and slowly evolves into a gripping story of horror -- a contest of wills between Victor Frankenstein and the monster he creates. Wandering through Europe -- the confused creature searches for a father figure in the tortured scientist who stitched him together with body parts stolen from the grave. Themes of revenge, the philosophical limits of science, and forbidden knowledge are deeply explored in the greatest Gothic novel ever written.<br/>This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader contend with Shelley's complex vocabulary and references.
