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You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Short Stories

Alice Walker · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

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Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado · 248 pages

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying di

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The Complete Stories

Zora Neale Hurston · 320 pages

"This landmark gathering of Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction - most of which appeared only in literary magazines during her lifetime and some of which has never been published - reveals the evolution of the talents of one of the most important African-American writers. Spanning the years from 1921, when Howard University's literary magazine published "John Redding Goes to Sea," to 1955, when Hur

Short StoriesRacismLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Difficult Women

Roxane Gay · 272 pages

"Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege an

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Bailey's Cafe

Gloria Naylor · 229 pages

"Welcome to Bailey's Cafe, the most mythically real eating place you've ever walked into. Presided over by Bailey himself and his helpmate, Nadine, it is a magnet that draws a wide variety of society's detritus, each with her own story to tell." "There is Sadie, whose addiction to alcohol is second only to her mania for cleanliness; and the oddly maternal Eve, whose bordello accepts only fresh flo

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A Pair of Silk Stockings and Other Short Stories

Kate Chopin · 59 pages

Known for her vivid portrayals of Creole life in Louisiana, Kate Chopin (1851–1904) wrote, during her brief literary career, poignant and perceptive stories about the emotional lives of women. Bypassing many of the conventions of 19th-century realism, she won praise for her realistic portraits of the inhabitants of bayou and urban areas. This collection of nine stories contains one of her most fa

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Arranged Marriage: Stories

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni · 320 pages

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Almost Famous Women: Stories

Megan Mayhew Bergman · 281 pages

A collection of stories that explores the lives of talented, gutsy women throughout history. Now Megan Mayhew Bergman resurrects these women, lets them live in the reader's imagination, so we can explore their difficult choices. Nearly every story in this collection is based on a woman who attained some celebrity--she raced speed boats or was a conjoined twin in show business; a reclusive painter

Short StoriesFeminismLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction

Elissa Schappell · 304 pages

"From the acclaimed author of Use Me, eight provocative and darkly funny linked stories that explore the commonly shared, but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers, mapping America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day"--

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Quicksand

Nella Larsen · 157 pages

Brave, bold, and brilliant, Larsen's autobiographical portrait of a biracial woman's quest for self-identity and acceptance offers a cautionary tale of an individual lost between two cultures.

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Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories

Alifa Rifaat, 'lyf@ rf`t · 126 pages

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Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Z.Z. Packer · 238 pages

Drinking coffee elsewhere takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong, from a Girl Scout camp, where a troupe of black girls are confronted with a group of white girls, whose defining feature turns out to be not their race but their disabilities; to the Million Man March on Washington, where a young man must decide where his allegiance to his father lies; an

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Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

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Dancing Girls and Other Stories

Margaret Atwood · 243 pages

A selection of Atwood's short fiction. With flashes of fantasy, humor, and unexpected violence, the stories reveal the complexities of human relationships and bring to life characters who touch us deeply, evoking terror and laughter, compassion and recognition.

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Galatea

Madeline Miller · 75 pages

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Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

Kathleen Collins · 175 pages

A never-before-published collection of stories from Kathleen Collins. These short stories, discovered only recently, highlight Collins's masterfully blend of the personal issues-- race, gender, family, and sexuality-- with the ordinary moments that shape our lives. Also known as an artist and filmmaker, her stories create full-bodied men, women, and children who justify their lives while integrat

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The Quilt & Other Stories

Ismat Chughtai · 225 pages

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A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories

Margaret Drabble · 256 pages

A single-volume compilation of the author's previously uncollected short works offers insight into her use of irony, female friendships, and personal passions and is complemented by an introduction that places her works in a context of her life and novels.

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Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

Flannery O'Connor · 269 pages

The death of Flanner O'Connor at thirty-nine marked the loss of one of America's most gifted contemporary writers at the height of her powers. This volume is the collection on which she was working at the time of her death. Each of the nine stores carries her highly individual stamp, and could have been writte by no one else. Everything That Rises Must Converge is the most worth memorial that Flan

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The Awakening and Selected Stories

Kate Chopin, Alyssa Harad · 296 pages

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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

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They say I'm a monkey

Djenar Maesa Ayu · 125 pages

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I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Maryse Conde · 227 pages

Offered here for the first time in English is I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem, by Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde. This wild and entertaining novel, winner of the 1986 Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme, expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two y

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The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 70 pages

Short StoriesFeminismLiterary FictionFemale Lead

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