"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public Radio When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.
"These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games. "Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader," said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books.
The stories in Getting’ High take place mainly in New York City and Puerto Rico, though three are set in rural Michigan where the author grew up. They take place, by and large, during the turbulent decade of the 1960’s. As the title suggests, many characters smoke marijuana and experience its eerie, pleasurable effects. That is one current running through several stories, though not a major theme. Rather, the thematic anchor is the search for love and meaning in a changing, transient world. The characters are generally involved with music, as performers or students, and what it means to become a professional musician. Music as a means to communicate truly with another person is also an important facet of the plot lines in the stories, whether this is on a river tour or on a formal concert stage, and the characters strive to find the essence of their art in various ways. Of course, music goes beyond words, and this musical quest is what propels many of the characters’ lives and loves. Also, the real-life business of music is another salient aspect for character development. Three of the stories are set in the rural landscape of the author’s youth. Here the theme of the demise of the family farm is set forth against the backdrop of the long transition from an agrarian to an urban life style which has taken place throughout the 20th century. All of the stories in Getting’ High were written many years ago while the author himself was working as a professional musician in the Puerto Rico Symphony. As such, they may seem somewhat dated, since this was a time before iphones, the internet, Tik Tok and social media. People needed to communicate more directly with one another, in a more personal manner. And this is reflected in the plots and dialogue of the stories. The roles of men and women were also, for better or worse, more clearly defined, and this perspective undoubtedly finds its way into the portrayal of the characters as they seek to explore new boundaries and experiences—from the farm to the concert stage, to smoking weed—a long trajectory set against the backdrop of the Vietnam war. Though these stories were mostly written over 50 years ago, the author believes that they are still relevant in today’s modern world. The subject of abortion figures in “A Love Story” as well as interracial love. And the racism still lingering in the South of the early 60’s and which America is still struggling to truly confront, plays a role in “Milly-A Fantasy.” Undoubtedly, the transformative potential of music has not diminished over the years—whether it be jazz, folk music, Hip-Hop, Rap or the classical music of the formal, concert stage. Humanity still thrives on music’s inherent message of hope and its curative power. Finally, it is the author’s hope that, at the very least, readers will find something of themselves in the characters of these tales as they seek out life’s ephemeral joys, happiness and fulfillment in today’s challenging world.
Though this is a book of stories by Southerners, the settings range widely, from Italy to Ireland, from Montreal to Barbados. Included are works from such diverse Southern writers as Andre Dubus, William Goyen, Mary Hood, Tom T. Hall, Lewis Nordan and Jayne Anne Phillips.
This book is about a girl that grew up on a plantation in Mississippi during the 50s and the 60s. Her folks were framers, and the main source of livelihood was working the land for someone else. Her father had the responsibility of being a father and mother to his children as she was only eighteen months old when her parents separated. Edna grew up fast, not having much time for childhood, and along the way, what she encountered and had to endure will amaze you that she overcame it all. At one point in her life, an unimaginable trauma happened to her so bad that she blocked it out of her memories for years. After getting over the pain of what happened to her, she was spurred to write about her life, all the good and the bad, leading up to that awful day in an eight-year-old girls life; until this day, no one knows.
In 1968, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz helped found the Women’s Liberation Movement, part of what has been called the second wave of feminism in the United States. Along with a small group of dedicated women in Boston, she produced the first women’s liberation journal, No More Fun and Games. Dunbar-Ortiz was also an antiwar and anti-racist activist and organizer throughout the 1960s and early 1970s and a fiery, tireless public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade and formed associations with other revolutionaries across the spectrum of radical politics, including the Civil Rights Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Revolutionary Union, the African National Congress, and the American Indian Movement. Unlike most of those involved in the New Left, Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part–Native American in rural Oklahoma, and she often found herself at odds not only with the ruling class but also with the Left and with the women’s movement. Dunbar-Ortiz’s odyssey from Oklahoma poverty to the urban New Left gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a movement that forever changed American society. In a new afterword, the author reflects on her fast-paced life fifty years ago, in particular as a movement activist and in relationships with men.
