skopia
Berlin cleaned houses, worked emergency rooms, raised four sons, and drank. Forty-three stories out of that life, Alaska to Mexico City, written so plainly and fast you miss how much is inside them.
Four women pack boxed lunches on a Tokyo night shift. One strangles her husband, the others take the body apart, and the invisibility that shrank their lives turns out to protect them.
Sara Smolinsky's father studies Torah in a Lower East Side tenement while her mother takes in boarders and he marries her sisters to men they dread. She leaves at seventeen for night school.
Lee refuses the fragile madwoman of legend and gives back a working writer: funny, ambitious, hard on her friends. She holds the breakdowns and the novels together and lets neither explain the other.
Paley wrote as people talk, in the Bronx Yiddish and Greenwich Village argument of women raising children alone, and got more life into three slim collections than most novelists manage in a career.
Carter opened the old fairy tales and took out what was always inside: appetite, blood, and women who want things. Her Bluebeard is a French Marquis, and her Beauty walks toward the tiger.
Widowed after thirty years, a Senegalese teacher writes to her closest friend about the husband who took her daughter's teenage friend as a second wife. It won the first Noma Award.
Kingston's aunt drowned herself in the family well, and no one may say her name. Out of that silence and the legend of a woman warrior, Kingston remade what American memoir could do.
Gornick walks Manhattan with her widowed mother, arguing the argument they have had since the Bronx tenement of her girlhood. Writing programs teach it as how a memoir is built.
Nel stays in her Ohio town and marries. Sula leaves for ten years, returns, and the town settles on her as its evil. Morrison makes their friendship the deepest bond either will know.
Christine de Pizan, the first woman in Europe to live by her pen, answers centuries of learned misogyny by building an allegorical city whose every stone is the life of a woman.
Munro set her stories in Ontario towns where a woman's life can turn on something said at a kitchen table. She fits more into forty pages than most novelists get into a novel.
Give a woman five hundred a year and a room with a lock and she will write, Woolf argues, then invents a gifted sister for Shakespeare and follows her to a terrible end.
One is not born a woman, Beauvoir argues, but becomes one. She works through biology, history, myth, marriage, and old age to prove it, and modern feminism begins in these pages.