books about women & feminism
Items in this hypelist
Books
Inseparable
Simone de Beauvoir · 2021
Finalist for the French-American Florence Gould Translation Prize A novel by the iconic Simone de Beauvoir of an intense and vivid girlhood friendship that, unpublished in her lifetime, displays “Beauvoir's genius as a fiction writer” (Wall Street Journal) From the moment Sylvie and Andrée meet in their Parisian day school, they see in each other an accomplice with whom to confront the mysteries of girlhood. For the next ten years, the two are the closest of friends and confidantes as they explore life in a post-World War One France, and as Andrée becomes increasingly reckless and rebellious, edging closer to peril. Sylvie, insightful and observant, sees a France of clashing ideals and religious hypocrisy—and at an early age is determined to form her own opinions. Andrée, a tempestuous dreamer, is inclined to melodrama and romance. Despite their different natures they rely on each other to safeguard their secrets while entering adulthood in a world that did not pay much attention to the wills and desires of young women. Deemed too intimate to publish during Simone de Beauvoir’s life, Inseparable offers fresh insight into the groundbreaking feminist’s own coming-of-age; her transformative, tragic friendship with her childhood friend Zaza Lacoin; and how her youthful relationships shaped her philosophy. Sandra Smith’s vibrant translation of the novel will be long cherished by de Beauvoir devotees and first-time readers alike.
Uncategorized
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Simone de Beauvoir · 2001
“A book that will leave no one indifferent, and no one affected in quite the same way.” —New York Times<br/>A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century<br/>Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.<br/>Beauvoir vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent political time.
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
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir · 2012
The essential masterwork that has provoked and inspired generations of men and women. “From Eve’s apple to Virginia Woolf’s room of her own, Beauvoir’s treatise remains an essential rallying point, urging self-sufficiency and offering the fruit of knowledge.” —Vogue This unabridged edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as when it was first published, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.
Bad Feminist: Essays
Roxane Gay · 2014
<p>"Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there."—Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?<br></p><p>A New York Times Bestseller<br></p><p>Best Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe • Newsweek • Time Out New York • Oprah.com • Miami Herald • Book Riot • Buzz Feed • Globe and Mail (Toronto) • The Root • Shelf Awareness<br></p><p>A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generation<br></p><p>In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman ( Sweet Valley High ) of color ( The Help ) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years ( Girls, Django in Chains ) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.<br></p><p>Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.<br></p>
The Handmaids Tale
Margaret Atwood · 2017
A look at the near future presents the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they are viable for reproduction.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Penguin Classics)
Joan Lindsay · 2017
A 50th-anniversary edition of the landmark novel about three “gone girls” that inspired the acclaimed 1975 film and an upcoming TV series starring Natalie Dormer<br/>With a foreword by Maile Meloy, author of Do Not Become Alarmed<br/>It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of the secluded volcanic outcropping. Farther, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned. . . .<br/>Mysterious and subtly erotic, Picnic at Hanging Rock inspired the iconic 1975 film of the same name by Peter Weir. A beguiling landmark of Australian literature, it stands with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides as a masterpiece of intrigue.
The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Toni Morrison · 2007
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace.<br/><br/>In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.<br/><br/>Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).
I Who Have Never Known Men
Jacqueline Harpman · 1995
The Inseparables
· 2022
Men Explain Things to Me
Rebecca Solnit · 2023
Blue Sisters: A Novel
Coco Mellors · 2024
Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister’s death in this unforgettable story of grief, hope, and the complexities of family, from the acclaimed author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein.<br/><br/>“Sparkling with wit, shot through with longing, Blue Sisters is a beautiful novel, both dazzlingly joyful and achingly sad.”—Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street<br/><br/>The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left the family reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.<br/><br/>But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize that the greatest secrets they’ve been keeping might not have been from one another but from themselves.<br/><br/>Imbued with Coco Mellors’s signature combination of humor and heart, Blue Sisters is a story of what it takes to keep living after loss—and, ultimately, to fall in love with life again.
Little Women (Puffin in Bloom)
Louisa May Alcott · 2014
<b>Louisa May Alcott's classic tale of four sisters in a deluxe hardcover edition, with beautiful cover illustrations by Anna Bond, the artist behind world-renowned stationery brand Rifle Paper Co.<br></b><br>Grown-up Meg, tomboyish Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. The four March sisters couldn't be more different. But with their father away at war, and their mother working to support the family, they have to rely on one another. Whether they're putting on a play, forming a secret society, or celebrating Christmas, there's one thing they can't help wondering: Will Father return home safely?
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
Amia Srinivasan · 2021
<p>“Laser-cut writing and a stunning intellect. If only every writer made this much beautiful sense.”<br><b>—Lisa Taddeo, author of <i>Three Women</i></b><br><br>“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer—no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. In stripping the new politics of sex and power down to its fundamental and sometimes clashing principles, <i>The Right to Sex </i>is a bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing: Srinivasan is daring, compassionate, and in relentless search of a new frame.”<br><b>—Jia Tolentino, author of <i>Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion</i></b><br><b><br>Thrilling, sharp, and deeply humane, philosopher Amia Srinivasan's <i>The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century</i> upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.</b><br><br>How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.<br><br>How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity<b>—</b>its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power<b>—</b>we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.<br><br>We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.<br><br><i>The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century </i>is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.</p>
The Well of Loneliness / El pozo de la soledad
Radclyffe Hall • 1928
<p>First published in 1928, "The Well of Loneliness" is Radclyffe Hall's semi-autobiographical pioneering work of lesbian literature. The story follows Stephen Gordon, a girl born to upper class parents in late Victorian England. Her parents having expected a boy decided to christen her with the name that they had chosen for him. A strangely coincidental choice as the youth begins to take on a boyish appearance, cutting her hair short and eschewing girly things. Soon it is clear that Stephen sees herself as a man who is attracted to women. This hugely influential work of homosexual or possibly transsexual fiction was harshly criticized by people who were offended by the subject at the time when it was first published. However since then it has been heralded as a seminal and still important work of gay literature. Presented her is the original edition of Radclyffe Hall's most important novel, "The Well of Loneliness". This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.</p><p><br></p>
Sula
Toni Morrison · 2004
Stone butch blues
Leslie Feinberg • 2021
Considerada una obra de culto en la comunidad LGTBQ y una de las novelas más importantes de la literatura estadounidense del siglo XX, Stone Butch Blues cuenta la historia de Jess Goldberg, una lesbiana butch [marimacho] de clase trabajadora del norte de Estados Unidos. Jess no tiene las cosas fáciles. A todo el mundo parece molestarle su aspecto, su identidad, su expresión de género. Tendrá que enfrentarse a la violencia de la policía, a los insultos de los jefes, a la incomprensión de su familia, a las miradas de asco por la calle; a detenciones, internamientos psiquiátricos, palizas, desprecios, despidos. Tendrá que aprender a vivir con las heridas y las cicatrices y a ser quien es por encima de todo. Y al hacerlo conocerá también el apoyo de la comunidad butch, drag y queer, el calor de la familia elegida, el amor de pareja, la militancia política en sindicatos revolucionarios.Comprometida, emocionante, dura, tierna y valiente, Stone Butch Blues es la obra más conocida de Leslie Feinberg, que plasmó en ella muchos elementos de su propia biografía. Como Jess, Feinberg sufrió desprecios y odio por su identidad de género y su clase social, pero también luchó contra ellos durante toda su vida. Militante comunista, sindicalista y activista LGTBQ, la edición por primera vez en castellano de su obra más importante coloca a Feinberg en el lugar de referencia que siempre debería haber tenido.
