Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women's Lives

Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women's Lives

by Jean Shinoda Bolen

Discover the Goddess Within You Myths are fascinating stories that become even more intriguing when we realize that they can reveal intimate truths about ourselves and others. Esteemed Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen brings the Greek pantheon to life as our inner archetypes and applies the power of myth to our personal lives. Once we understand the natural progression from myth to archetype to personal... (more)

Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman's Life

Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman's Life

by Joan Gould

What’s your favorite fairy tale? Whether it’s “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Hansel and Gretel,” or another story, your answer reveals something significant about you, your experiences, and your soul. In this penetrating book, Joan Gould brings to the surface the hidden meanings in fairy tales and myths, and illuminates what they can tell you about the stages in your own life. As Gould explores the... (more)

The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

"Couargeous...Honest...Powerful." CHICAGO TRIBUNE The classic feminist novel that awakened both women and men speaks to everyone about the deep feelings at the heart of love and relationships. A biting social commentary of an emotional world gone silently haywire, THE WOMEN'S ROOM is a modern allegory that offers piercing insight into the social norms accepted so blindly and revered so completely.

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

by Audre Lorde

essays & speeches

Forbidden Flowers

by Nancy Friday

Finally women can talk about what they used to only dream about.... Forbidden Flowers is Nancy Friday's second collection of sexual fantasies -- and it's even more explicit and outspoken than her original erotic masterpiece, My Secret Garden. The constant refrain from the legions of women across America who read My Secret Garden was, "Thank God I'm not the only one..." who had those wild, exciting... (more)

Clear Light of Day

by Anita Desai

Set in India's Old Delhi, CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY is Anita Desai's tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and tribulations of familial love. At the novel's heart are the moving relationships between the members of the Das family, who have grown apart from each other. Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women's college who lives in her... (more)

Amazons, Bluestockings and Crones: A Feminist Dictionary

Amazons, Bluestockings and Crones: A Feminist Dictionary

by Cheris Kramarae, Paula A. Treichler, Ann Russo

Formerly titled The Feminist Dictionary, Amazons, Bluestockings and Crones now sports a rich, descriptive title much like the words defined within. This colorful and wealthy dictionary examines, explains and redefines many ideas and terms pertaining to women and patriarchal society. Each word is placed within the context of its evolving meaning-dating back to its origin and weaving through the years into... (more)

Daughter of the Hills: A Woman's Part in the Coal Miners' Struggle (Novel of the Thirties)

Daughter of the Hills: A Woman's Part in the Coal Miners' Struggle (Novel of the Thirties)

by Myra Page

This story of a resilient, tough Appalachian woman who, as daughter, wife, and mother, provides strength and inspiration for her family in the face of extreme adversity, was first published in 1950, though it was written during the thirties. The book reflects the central feminist vision that values the strong and intelligent partner in this family life, who, when her husband loses his leg, assumes not only the... (more)

Sappho: A Garland (The Poems & Fragments of Sappho Translated by Jim Powell)

Sappho: A Garland (The Poems & Fragments of Sappho Translated by Jim Powell)

by Sappho

These hundred poems and fragments constitute virtually all of Sappho that survives and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Mary Barnard's translations are lean, incisive, direct--the best ever published. She has rendered the beloved poet's verses, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.

Sappho (Gay & Lesbian Writers)

by Jane McIntosh Snyder

Gr. 9-12. Although just a small fragment of the ancient Greek poet Sappho's work remains, Snyder uses it and other sources to reconstruct the artist's life and give readers a picture of Greek and Aegean Island life around 600 B.C. What emerges is a remarkable portrait of a woman who wrote "songs" of lesbian desire at a time when poetry writing and homosexuality were considered exclusively male domains. She wrote... (more)

The Oxford Book of Women's Writing

Reveling in the awareness that the best U.S. women's writing is, quite simply, some of the best in the world, editors Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson have gathered selections in The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States spanning four centuries and reflecting the rich variety of American women's lives. This volume presents short stories, poems, essays, plays, speeches, performance pieces,... (more)

In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays in the Bondwoman's Narrative

In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays in the Bondwoman's Narrative

by Henry Louis Gates, Hollis Robbins

Three years ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered an unpublished manuscript, The Bondwoman's Narrative, By Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Recently Escaped From North Carolina , which turned out to be the first novel by a female African-American slave ever found, and possibly the first novel written by a black women anywhere. The Bondwoman's Narrative was published in 2002. In Search of Hannah Crafts now brings... (more)

Frangipani House (Caribbean Writers Series, No 37)Beryl Gilroy

Frangipani House (Caribbean Writers Series, No 37)

by Beryl Gilroy

Set in Guyana, this book tells the story of Mama King. Trapped by age and infirmity, Mama becomes too much for her family who send her away to a dreary and claustrophobic rest home - but Mama King does not give in. This book won a GLC Black Literature Competition before publication.

Reflections on Literature and Culture (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Reflections on Literature and Culture (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

by Hannah Arendt

"The late German-Jewish political theorist Arendt returned repeatedly in her work to the effects and proper uses of power and authority. This career-spanning collection of essays will reinforce for any reader that these preoccupations followed her even into literary criticism..." -- Publisher's Weekly " Reflections on Literature and Culture contains fascinating essays on Kafka, Proust, and Brecht."... (more)

Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70

Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70

by Nina Baym

Encyclopedia of Amazons, The

by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Amazons, gladiators, martial nuns, maenads, warrior queens, pirates, guerrillas, furies, and avenging goddesses -- the fighting women who populate the pages of this fabulous encyclopedia marched boldly through the ages armed with swords, axes, bows, and most importantly, their uniquely feminine fortitude. Here is the first work to gather and detail these tales of womanly valor and derring-do. Drawing from... (more)

MY MOTHER MY SELF

by Nancy Friday

This pioneering book by the author of Women on Top plays a major role in our understanding of the powerful influence the mother/daughter bond has on a woman's identity, her relationships with men, and her self-esteem. Through candid self-disclosure and hundreds of interviews, Nancy Friday investigates this feminine legacy and reveals the conflicting feelings of anger, hate, and love that daughters hold for their... (more)

The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965

by Dawn Powell

"The struggle chronicled in The Diaries of Dawn Powell is as brave and feisty a story as any to be found in the novels that made her Ernest Hemingway’s ‘favorite living writer."--James Wilcox, Elle Magazine WHEN DAWN POWELL'S unpublished Diaries first appeared three years ago, the book was proclaimed on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review as "one of the outstanding literary finds of the last... (more)

An Appeal To The Christian Women Of The South

An Appeal To The Christian Women Of The South

by Angelina Emily Grimke

Before going into an examination of the laws by which these servants were protected, I would just ask whether American slaves have become slaves in any of the ways in which the Hebrews became servants. Did they sell themselves into slavery and receive the purchase money into their own hands? No! Did they become insolvent, and by their own imprudence subject themselves to be sold as slaves? No! Did they steal the... (more)

Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist

Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist

by Hazel V. Carby

Reconstructing Womanhood explores the ways in which black women writers represented the prevailing ideological debates of their times.

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: literature-womens

by Jean Shinoda Bolen

by Joan Gould

by Marilyn French

by Audre Lorde

by Nancy Friday

by Anita Desai

by Cheris Kramarae, Paula A. Treichler, Ann Russo

by Myra Page

by Sappho

by Jane McIntosh Snyder

by Henry Louis Gates, Hollis Robbins

by Beryl Gilroy

by Hannah Arendt

by Nina Baym

by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

by Nancy Friday

by Dawn Powell

by Angelina Emily Grimke

by Hazel V. Carby