Song Flung Up to Heaven

Biographies & Memoirs

maya-angelou

Community & Culture

VIRAGO (LITT)

<p>The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the nineteenth century toward women's physical and mental health. The story also has been classified as Gothic fiction and horror fiction. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is written in epistolary style, specifically as a collection of first person journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house that he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working, and has to hide her journal entries from him, so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression;a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period. Her husband controls her access to the rest of the house. A key locks the door. The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw ; not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper;the smell! … The only thing I can think of that it is like, is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." In the end, she imagines that there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and comes to believe that she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place where she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."</p>

The Yellow Wallpaper (Virago Modern Classics (Numbered))

Literature & Fiction

Charlotte Gilman

Contemporary

Junko Bayliss is a potter, famous for her exquisite designs. She is also the daughter of Diane and Peter Bayliss, her remote and elegant parents. When Diane and Peter both die, only a few minutes apart, at the age of 75, Junko is left to ponder the question marks that always hovered over her parents' lives, and why there was so little understanding between them and their only daughter. When her aunt hints at a mystery - something that happened to Diane and Peter during the Second World War, maybe in the Philippines, maybe in Japan - Junko decides to return to the place where her parents met, and hunt out their story. It is a journey that will lead her into dark, hidden secrets and an astonishing story of love and betrayal. With her second novel, Linda Lee Welch establishes herself as a writer of immense sensitivity and grace. THE ARTIST OF EIKANDO is a beautiful and redemptive novel.

Artist of Eikando

Linda Lee Welch

Set in 1937, The Friendly Young Ladies is a romantic comedy of off-Bloomsbury bohemia. Sheltered, naïve, and just eighteen, Elsie leaves the stifling environment of her parents’ home in Cornwall to seek out her sister, Leo, who had run away nine years earlier. She finds Leo sharing a houseboat, and a bed, with the beautiful, fair-haired Helen. While Elsie’s arrival seems innocent enough, it is the first of a series of events that will turn Helen and Leo’s contented life inside out. Soon a randy young doctor is chasing after all three women at once, a neighborly friendship begins to show an erotic tinge, and long-quiet ghosts from Leo’s past begin to surface. Before long, no one is sure just who feels what for whom.Mary Renault wrote this delightfully provocative novel in the early 1940s, creating characters that are lighthearted, charming, and free-spirited partly in answer to the despair characteristic of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness or Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. The result is a witty and stylish story that offers exceptional insight into the world of upcoming writers and artists of in 1930s London, chronicling their rejection of society’s established sexual mores and their heroic pursuits of art and life.

Friendly Young Ladies

RENAULT, MARY

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou’s classic memoirs have had an enduring impact on American literature and culture. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.This Modern Library edition contains I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and A Song Flung Up to Heaven. When I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to widespread acclaim in 1969, Maya Angelou garnered the attention of an international audience with the triumphs and tragedies of her childhood in the American South. This soul-baring memoir launched a six-book epic spanning the sweep of the author’s incredible life. Now, for the first time, all six celebrated and bestselling autobiographies are available in this handsome one-volume edition. Dedicated fans and newcomers alike can follow the continually absorbing chronicle of Angelou’s life: her formative childhood in Stamps, Arkansas; the birth of her son, Guy, at the end of World War II; her adventures traveling abroad with the famed cast of Porgy and Bess; her experience living in a black expatriate “colony” in Ghana; her intense involvement with the civil rights movement, including her association with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; and, finally, the beginning of her writing career. The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou traces the best and worst of the American experience in an achingly personal way. Angelou has chronicled her remarkable journey and inspired people of every generation and nationality to embrace life with commitment and passion.

Collected Autobiographies Of Maya Angelou

Angelou, Maya.

Arts & Literature

Keepers of the House

De Teran, Lisa St. Aubin

All Men Are Mortal (Virago Modern Classics)

Simone De Beauvoir

Orlando Trilogy

COLEGATE, Isabel

Hours Before Dawn

FREMLIN, Celia

Seven Moves

Anshaw, Carol

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