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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS
HIROSHIMA IN THE MORNING
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
eISBN: 9781558616684 | ISBN: 9781558616677
2010 FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD. In June 2001, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto went to Hiroshima in search of a deeper understanding of her war-torn heritage. She planned to spend six months there, interviewing the few remaining survivors of the atomic bomb. A mother of two young boys, she was encouraged to go by her husband, who quickly became disenchanted by her absence.
It is her first solo life adventure, immediately exhilarating for her, but her research starts off badly. Interviews with the hibakusha feel rehearsed, and the survivors reveal little beyond published accounts. Then the attacks on September 11 change everything. The survivors’ carefully constructed memories are shattered, causing them to relive their agonizing experiences and to open up to Rizzuto in astonishing ways.
Separated from family and country while the world seems to fall apart, Rizzuto’s marriage begins to crumble as she wrestles with her ambivalence about being a wife and mother. Woven into the story of her own awakening are the stories of Hiroshima in the survivors’ own words. The parallel narratives explore the role of memory in our lives, and show how memory is not history but a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are.
“A brave compassionate, and heart-wrenching memoir, of one woman’s quest to redeem the past while learning to live fully in the present.”
—Kate Moses, author of Cakewalk, A Memoir and Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
“This searing and redemptive memoir is an explosive account of motherhood reconstructed.”
—Ayelet Waldman, author of Red Hook Road
“This book is an important contribution to the growing understanding that we are all part of history, and we all make history. A moving account of a contemporary voyage, which is also a voyage back in time, reckoning with and bearing witness to one of the great tragedies of the last century.”
—Susan Griffin, author of A Chorus of Stones
RAHNA REIKO RIZZUTO is the author of many books, including the highly acclaimed Why She Left Us. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College.
GOYA’S GLASS
Monika Zgustova
eISBN: 9781558617988 | ISBN: 9781558617971
The Duchess of Alba, known as Goya’s muse, recalls the passions of youth on her deathbed in the royal court of eighteenth-century Madrid. A young woman defies the protocols of her arranged marriage and pursues love—and the life of a published writer—until her readers condemn her as a danger to society in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nina Berberova escapes persecution during the Russian Revolution and flees to Paris, where the intelligentsia naively covet the promise of a Soviet Union. These three women attempt to find passion and intimacy in worlds that rarely accommodate female desire. Goya’s Glass is an unforgettable novel of guilty pleasures coursing through history.
“Monika Zgustova’s concerns are close to my own: the fate of the individual in the hands of totalitarianism. She is an outstanding writer, whose fiction invokes the politics and culture of people throughout history.”
—Vaclav Havel
“Three centuries, three solitudes, three unbridled passions, three indomitable women—Monika Zgustova is a born storyteller. Goya’s Glass is a magnificent achievement.”
—Josef Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls
“The portraits of three women of different nationalities and centuries in Goya’s Glass reveal a unique voice that owes as much to Kundera as to Flaubert, to Hasek as to Tolstoy. Monika Zgustova is a perfect example of a writer without borders, whose literary creations include the cultures and languages that she has accumulated throughout her lifetime.”
—Juan Goytisolo, Exiled from Almost Everywhere
MONIKA ZGUSTOVA has published seven books, including novels, short stories, a play and a biography, and translated more than fifty books of Russian and Czech fiction and poetry into both Spanish and Catalan.
THE SILENT WOMAN
Monika Zgustova
eISBN: 9781558618411 | ISBN: 9781558618428
A rapturous novel of love, longing, and exile, The Silent Woman depicts a twentieth century woman’s life against a backdrop of war and political turmoil.
Syliva, half-Czech and half-German, is born into an aristocratic family and lives in a castle outside Prague. She marries a man she doesn’t love, and is seduced by the joyful madness of Paris in the 1920s as an ambassador’s wife. When the Nazis force her to state her loyalty, she capitulates, not realizing how this decision will inform and haunt the rest of her life. Sylva’s story is interwoven with a contemporary sex chronicle of her son Jan, a world-renowned mathematician and émigré living in the United States, who exudes the restlessness of a man without a country.
MONIKA ZGUSTOVA has published seven books, including novels, short stories, a play and a biography, and translated more than fifty books of Russian and Czech fiction and poetry into both Spanish and Catalan.
DEPARTING AT DAWN: A NOVEL OF ARGENTINA’S DIRTY WAR
Gloria Lisé
eISBN: 9781558616479 | ISBN: 9781558616035
March 23, 1976. Berta watches as her lover, Atilio, a union organizer, is thrown from a window to his death on the sidewalk below. The next day, Colonel Jorge Rafael Videla stages a coup d’état and a military dictatorship takes control of Argentina. Though never a part of Atilio’s union efforts, Berta is on a list to be “disappeared” and flees to relatives in the countryside. There she becomes part of the family she knows only from old photographs: Aunt Avelina, who blasts records from an old player; Uncle Nepomuceno, who watches slugs slither in the garden every afternoon; and Uncle Javier, who sits in his tiny grocery store day and night. When Berta learns that government officials are still looking for her, she realizes she must run even further to save her life.
Gloria Lisé describes a terrifying period in her nation’s history with a touch that is light yet penetrating. A powerful portrait of Argentinians caught up in traumas that have haunted the country ever since.
“It never ceases to astound me how many people around the world choose to deny a dark period in the history of their respective nations. Anyone anywhere today in need of the reminder that political change begins with speaking out should read this testimony.”
—Ana Castillo, poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist
“I just loved it because of its immense human depth and high quality of writing.”
—David William Foster, author of Violence in Argentine Literature: Cultural Responses to Tyranny
“From the heart of Argentina comes a novel of the heart, where the outbreak of our worst military dictatorship is told with utmost reserve. Departing at Dawn is a beautifully simple, poetic story of solidarity and love, with memorable characters painted in the tender strokes of a watercolor.”
—Luisa Valenzuela, author of Black Novel with Argentines and Symmetries
GLORIA LISÉ is a lawyer and professor at the National University of Salta in Argentina.
THE SILENT DUCHESS
Dacia Maraini
Afterword by Anna Camaiti-Hostert
eISBN: 9781558617834 | ISBN: 9781558612228
FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE. Set in Sicily in the early eighteenth-century, the novel tells the story of Marianna, the daughter of an aristocratic family and the victim of a mysterious childhood trauma that has left her deaf and mute, trapped in a world of silence. In luminous language that conveys both the keen visual sight and the deep human insight possessed by her remarkable main character, Dacia Maraini captures the splendor and the corruption of Marianna’s world and the strength of her unbreakable spirit.
“Maraini brilliantly conveys the mixture of luxury and squalor
in which the Sicilian aristocracy lived. . . . The Silent Duchess manages totally to overpower the reader with its narrative urgency. . . . Since she won the Prix Formentor in 1963, Dacia Maraini has produced nothing finer than this.”
—Evening Standard, London
“One of those rare, rich, deep, strange novels that create a world so fantastic and so real you want to start reading it again as soon as you come to the last page.”
—Katha Politt
“The Silent Duchess has a subtlety of perception, a delicacy in probing emotions and above all, an elusive feel for history itself. . . . The narrative has the richness of a saga. . . . This history of a woman’s quest for dignity is an astonishing achievement.”
—The Independent, London
DACIA MARAINI is the author of more than fifty books, including novels, plays, collections of poetry, and critical essays.
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