Paris Press Lobby Display: Book List

Oktenberg shatters the media-induced numbness that surrounded the war in the Balkans, making it impossible to resist or deny this genocide. Echoing the voices of Charlotte Delbo, Tory Dent, and many others, this collection presents the brutalities and experiences of war alongside life in an American landscape marked with the ripening tomatoes of summer and news of devastation in foreign cities with unpronounceable names.

This visceral collection of poems by Jan Freeman takes the reader by the throat, combining a metaphysics of grief with gut-wrenching humor.

Freeman's erotic poems celebrate lesbian lust and sexuality, speaking to and with interspersed charcoal drawings from artist Siena Sanderson.

This autobiographical novel depicts the experiences of three girls coming of age in Nazi concentration camps and the myriad of ways they save each other through their ingenuity, kindness, and acts of courage. With Zdena Berger’s spare prose and first-hand observations, readers experience claustrophobic uncertainty, grief, terror, exhaustion through Tania's eyes, as well as her perceptions and experiences of deep beauty, the friendships that help her to survive.

Simplicity offers critical, playful, and poetic reflections on American life. With a clarity of voice and a wicked sense of humor, Stone draws out the poignance of passing time, love, grief, historical memory and political struggle spoken and reflected through bodies and human lives.

Ordinary Words captures a vision of Americana, marked by Stone's characteristic wit, fearless candor, and lyricism. Her subjects are trailer parks, school crossing guards, bottled water, aging, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonald's as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes: dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters, people leading simple, extraordinary lives.

Muriel Rukeyser's account of Puck Fair — the last existing pagan festival of the goat — captures a state of consciousness, of extended time and sharpened perception that travelers know well. Set in County Kerry, Ireland, The Orgy evokes the poet's journey of sensual and psychological transformation in the midst of a lush account of Irish culture and tradition.

This musical was performed once in 1973 in Lenox, MA, with Christopher Walken as Houdini — one of his earliest roles onstage. Part biography, part fantasy, Houdini unlocks Rukeyser's worlds of illusion and reality as she leads us from Harry Houdini's childhood in Wisconsin through his great feats of escape, his complex relationships with his mother and wife, to his untimely death. With subtexts of desire, race, grief, and love, Houdini presents Rukeyser's gorgeous, reaching language and her brilliant observations of the human psyche.

For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive.

This publication presents Virginia Woolf and her mother Julia Stephen in textual conversation for the first time in literary history. In her essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf observes that though illness is a part of every human being's experience, it is not celebrated as a subject of great literature in the way that love and war are embraced by writers and readers. We must, Woolf says, invent a new language to describe pain as she explores how illness changes our relationship to the world around us. Notes from Sick Rooms addresses illness from the caregiver's perspective. With clarity, humor, and pathos, Julia Stephen offers concrete and useful information to caregivers today.

In this chilling dystopian novel, four men and women attempt an escape to legendary Avalon after the "Movement" threatens the liberty and comforts they have taken for granted. Visa for Avalon takes place in an unnamed country and an unnamed time. In it, Bryher uses her knowledge of history and psychology to examine political crisis in a familiar setting. The style is understated and tense as Bryher suggests that closing our eyes to growing restrictions and loss of liberties does not protect us.

The orphaned James Sands anticipated a magnificent career as apprentice in an Elizabethan theater troupe. But when his master dies unexpectedly, Sands must fight for his art, his home, and ultimately his life as the violent reign of King James I overshadows the glory and creative life of the Elizabethan era.

This collection of stories, memoirs, and poems celebrates the beautifully complex world of sisters. From childhood to old age, rivalry to devotion, hysterical laughter to tears of grief, the bonds between sisters can be at once sweet and loving, fierce and cruel. Contributors include: Lucille Clifton, Lan Samantha Chang, Rita Dove, Joan Baez, Edwidge Danticat, Catherine Chung and more.

Observing that poetry is a natural part of our pastimes and rituals, Muriel Rukeyser explores the centrality of poetry in American life. In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Rukeyser opposes elitist attitudes and addresses Americans' fear of feeling which contribute to a devaluation of poetry and the arts across the country.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton presents a compassionate appeal for solitude, women's equality and dignity, and equal education for all. She believed this to be the most important speech of her lifetime.

In this memoir, Bryher — adventurer, novelist, publisher — speaks on her unconventional childhood, her relationships with mid 20th century artists and longtime partner H.D., her impact on modernism, and her efforts helping 100 people escape from the Nazis before she fled and returned to H.D. in London.