A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of...

"Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry. Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they're both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen...

What's the harm in a pseudonym? Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year...

In 2010, Catherine Owen's 29-year-old spouse died of a drug addiction. A year later, she relocated to an apartment by the Fraser River in Vancouver, B.C. As she moved beyond the initial shock, the river became her focus: a natural, damaged space that both intensifies emotion and symbolizes healing. In a sequence of aubades, or dawn poems, Owen records the practice of walking by or watching the river every morning, a routine that helps her engage in...

Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante's fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors--Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few--and critics--James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. But her most resounding success has undoubtedly been with readers, who have...

In Hedda Gabler, a moving exploration of female oppression, a recently married Hedda navigates her new identity as a wife and the intense constraints put on her by society. She prefers pistols to cooking and does not care for raising a family. As Hedda fights against the pressures of her new life and her own neuroses, she comes to terms with an untimely choice. Sirens: Elektra in Bosnia is a gripping story about the horrors of collective and personal...

In this stunning third part to Kate Hennig's powerful Queenmaker series, England's first queen regnant finds herself fighting xenophobia, religious nationalism, and strained familial bonds in the power struggle that dubs her Bloody Mary. Upon the death of King Edward VI, the thirty-eight-year-old princess Mary-daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon-wrests the throne from Edward's deemed heir. But Mary's mother appears from the vaults of memory,...

Set in a West Indian hair salon in Toronto, da Kink in my hair gives voice to a group of women who tell us their unforgettable, moving, and often hilarious stories. Mixing laughter and tears-and told in words, music, and dance-the stories explore the hardship, struggles, and joys of black women's lives.

Annie Mae's Movement explores what it must have, been like to be Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a woman in a man's movement, a Canadian in America, an Aboriginal in a white-dominant culture at a time, when it felt like we could really change the world. Dying under mysterious, circumstances, it is still unclear what really happened to Anna Mae back in the late 70s. Instead of recounting cold facts, this play looks for the truth in examining the life and...

We know the facts of Mary Shelley's life in some detail--the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous...