Synopses & Reviews
Provocative and compulsively readable, lively, engaging, and brilliantly representative,
The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States presents short stories, poems, essays, plays, speeches, performance pieces, erotica, diaries, correspondence, and even a few recipes from nearly one hundred of our best women writers.
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 chosen selections spanning four centuries and reflecting the rich variety of American women's lives. The collection embraces the perspectives of age and youth, the traditional and the revolutionary, the public and the private. Here is Judith Sargent Murray's 1790 essay "On the Equality of the Sexes," journalist Martha Gellhorn's "Last Words on Vietnam, 1987," and Mary Gordon's homage to the ghosts of Ellis Island, "More Than Just a Shrine"; powerful short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, Cynthia Ozick, and Toni Morrison; letters from Abigail Adams, Sarah Moore Grimke[accent], Emma Goldman, and Georgia O'Keeffe; Alice B. Toklas's recipe "Bass for Picasso," and erotic offerings from Anais Nin and Rita Mae Brown. The moving autobiography of Zitkala- Sa[accent], whose mother was a Sioux, tells us more about "otherness" than any sociological treatise, while Janice Mirikitani's and Nellie Wong's poems about being young Asian-American women, like Alice Walker's meditation on the beauty of growing old, speak to all readers.
A thought-provoking introduction and descriptive headnotes explore the history of women's writing in ways that help the reader to understand the American women who have used language to change their worlds and to remember the past, and as a means of etching their deepest, fondest dreams. A joy to read, The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States is filled with eye-opening and unexpected selections. It is the perfect book for anyone fascinated by women's writing and women's lives.
Review
"A generous survey of American women's voices that is as remarkable for its quality as it is for its breadth....As textbook, reference work, or cover-to-cover recreational reading, this collection is an outstanding editorial achievement."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Editors Wagner-Martin and Davidson pay tribute to the vibrant variety of American women's lives and writing in this meandering and happily idiosyncratic anthology....a wonderful spectrum."--Booklist
About the Author
About the Editors:Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson are the Editors in Chief of The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Wagner-Martin is Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; her recent books include Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography and a forthcoming biography of Gertrude Stein. Davidson is Professor of English at Duke University; her many books include The Book of Love: Writers and their Love Letters and Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan.