A poignant and hilarious tour of the last frontier, the ultimate forbidden zone, The Vagina Monologues is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. Hailed as the bible for a new generation of women, it has been performed in cities all across America and at hundreds of college campuses, and has inspired a dynamic grassroots movement--V-Day--to stop violence against women. Witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise, Eve Ensler's Obie Award-winning masterpiece gives voice to real women's deepest fantasies and fears, guaranteeing that no one who reads it will ever look at a woman's body, or think of sex, in quite the same way again.

"It is with great pride and purpose that Ensler invokes the 'V' word. Like a precocious child, she repeats those telltale three syllables guaranteed to get a rise out of the grown-ups. 'I say vagina,' she explains, 'because I want people to respond.' And they respond, she says, because they know they shouldn't. Since learning the word's liberating power for herself as an adult, Ensler has hardly tired of its cryptic joys. 'I say it in my sleep,' she boasts. 'I say it because I'm not supposed to say it. I say it because it's an invisible word – a word that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust.'" Salon

"Women have entrusted Eve with their most intimate experiences, from sex to birthing. . . . I think readers, men as well as women, will emerge from these pages feeling more free within themselves--and about each other."         --Gloria Steinem

"Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving . . . it is both a work of art and an incisive piece of cultural history, a poem and a polemic, a performance and a balm and a benediction."         --Variety

"Often wrenching, frequently riotous. . . . Ensler is an impassioned wit."
-Los Angeles Times

"A compelling rhapsody of the female essence. . . . Ultimately Ensler achieves something extraordinary."         --Chicago Tribune

Join the V-Day movement! Visit www.vday.org.

"Women have entrusted Eve with their most intimate experiences, from sex to birthing. . . . I think readers, men as well as women, will emerge from these pages feeling more free within themselves—and about each other."         —Gloria Steinem

"Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving . . . it is both a work of art and an incisive piece of cultural history, a poem and a polemic, a performance and a balm and a benediction."         —Variety

"Often wrenching, frequently riotous. . . . Ensler is an impassioned wit." —Los Angeles Times

"A compelling rhapsody of the female essence. . . . Ultimately Ensler achieves something extraordinary."         —Chicago Tribune

Join the V-Day movement! Visit www.vday.org.

EVE ENSLER is an award-winning playwright, poet, activist, and screenwriter whose many works for the stage include The Depot, Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, Lemonade, Ladies, and, most recently, Necessary Targets, which was performed on Broadway to benefit Bos-nian women refugees. She has presented her off-Broadway hit The Vagina Monologues (winner of the 1997 Obie Award) at theaters and universities around the United States, as well as in Jerusalem, London, and Zagreb. She is currently writing a screenplay on women in prison for Glenn Close at Miramax and a new play for the Music Theater Group. An in-structor in the graduate Dramatic Writing Pro-gram at New York University, she lives in New York City with her partner, Ariel Orr Jordan.