Fresh Voices



The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
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Hardcover, 321 pages
Published by Random House
ISBN: 0679457313
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"Born of two eggs in the one womb of their beloved mother Ammu, Rahel and Esthappen have little to cling to but each other, and the occasional joy that passes through their young lives like a cool breeze on a sweltering Indian day. When Ammu, divorced and disappointed, returns with the twins of her family home in southern India, into the arms of Ammu's eccentric relatives, a tragedy begins to unfold that will propel them toward a fate that has perhaps stalked them from their inception."-- synopsis from Amazon.com




Not Her Real Name : And Other Stories
by Emily Perkins
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Paperback, 256 pages
Published by Anchor
ISBN: 0385486642
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"A fresh and wise collection of stories that marks the debut of an extraordinary talent, Not Her Real Name presents an essential guide to postmodern romance, to the vagaries of city life, and to a chronically self-absorbed generation whose love affairs are never as good as the last movies they've seen. "It makes for shivery reading."--Susan Fromberg Schaeffer."-- synopsis from Amazon.com

 
Fiction: Literary & Contemporary Classics


The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
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Paperback, 182 pages
Published by Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1573920983
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"An American classic of sexual expression that paved the way for the modern novel, The Awakening is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a startling reminder of how far women in this century have come. The story of a married woman who pursues love outside a stuffy, middle-class marriage, the novel portrays the mind of a woman seeking fulfillment of her essential nature."-- synopsis from Amazon.com



To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
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Paperback
Published by Harcourt Brace
ISBN: 0156907399
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"A landmark of modern fiction, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse explores the subjective reality of everyday life in the Hebrides for the Ramsay family."-- synopsis from Amazon.com



Beloved
by Toni Morrison
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Paperback
Published by New American Library
ISBN: 0452264464
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"This fifth novel by Toni Morrison, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1988, is, among many other things, a ghost story. But it is not some frivolous spine-tingler; it deals with the grim psychological legacies of slavery. The central character is Sethe, a former slave in her mid-30s, living in Ohio after the Civil War. The supernatural element is treated as a natural and practical outcome of traumatic events: Sethe is haunted not only by violent and sickening memories of rape and murder, but also literally by her dead child Beloved, killed in gruesome circumstances. The story of how Beloved died , and the terrible history that led to it, emerges slowly and grippingly, conveyed in rich, powerful language."-- synopsis from Amazon.com



The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
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Paperback
Published by Bantam Books
ISBN: 0553278355
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"A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath's own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness."-- synopsis from Amazon.com



The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
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Published by Fawcett Books
ISBN: 0449212602
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"Near the end of the 20th century, birth control and the effects of nuclear fallout have caused fewer births, so the Biblical story of Rachel is invoked to handle the declining birth rate."-- synopsis from Amazon.com



The Complete Poems
by Anne Sexton
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Paperback, 622 pages
Published by Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0395329353
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"She drew her poems from a great depth in herself, and they continue to stir us...Her voice remains a distinctive one in American poetry of the past half century. -- J.D. McClatchy

The stuff of Anne's life, mercilessly dissected, is here in the poems. Of all the confessional poets, none has had quite Sexton's 'courage to make a clean breast of it'...Anne Sexton has earned her place in the canon. -- Maxine Kumin"-- synopsis from Amazon.com



Foxfire : Confessions of a Girl Gang
by Joyce Carol Oates
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Paperback
Published by Plume
ISBN: 0452272319
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"Foxfire chronicles the life of five unforgettably real teenage girls in upstate New York in the 1950s. This controversial, topical tale captures the exhilaration of conspiracy, the blaze of youth, and the inevitable end of violence."-- synopsis from Amazon.com



The Passion
by Jeanette Winterson
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Paperback, 176 pages
Published by Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802135226
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"Literary Fiction and Classics Editor's Recommended Book, 07/01/97: In 1985 Jeanette Winterson won the Whitbread Award for best first fiction for the semi-autobiographical Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an often wry exploration of lesbian possibility bumping up against evangelical fanaticism. She was 25. Two years later, The Passion, her third novel, appeared, the fantastical tale of Henri--Napoleon's cook--and Villanelle, a Venetian gondolier's daughter who has webbed feet (previously an all-male attribute), works as a croupier, picks pockets, cross-dresses, and literally loses her heart to a beautiful woman. Written in a lyrical and jolting combination of fairy tale diction and rhythm and the staccato, the book would be a risky proposition in lesser hands. Winterson has said that she wanted to look at people's need to worship and examine what happens to young men in militaristic societies. The question was, how to do so without being polemical and didactic? Only she could have come up with such an exquisite answer. In the end, Henri, incarcerated on an island of madmen, becomes aware that his passion, "even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else."-- synopsis from Amazon.com



The Essential Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson, Joyce Carol Oates (Compiler)
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Hardcover, 94 pages
Published by Fromm Intl
ISBN: 0880014946
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"In this distinguished new volume in The Essential Poets series, Joyce Carol Oates presents a "personal--yet not private" collection of Dickinson favorites, selecting from the poet's much-loved anthologized poems as well as her more obscure works to illuminate her depth, complexity, and unorthodox genius. The Essential Dickinson is an extraordinary tribute to one remarkable writer and woman from another."-- synopsis from Amazon.com





Emma
by Jane Austen
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Paperback
Published by Bantam Classics
ISBN: 0553212737
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"Emma is bright, pretty, rich, supremely self-assured, and determined to impose her romantic ideals on all those around her. Her well-ordered life is about to change, though, as she embarks on a journey of growth and discovery described with the wit, grace, and style and humor that is Jane Austen's unforgettable signature."-- synopsis from Amazon.com





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