Women of Harvard Square
Women of Harvard Square

Author: Michael Lieberman

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1937875865

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The women of Harvard Square are smart, sassy, and sexy. There's Agnes, who with her boyfriend Maynard provides the inspiration for her best friend Diana’s new play that turns into a steamy, boundary-bending sendup. As for Agnes and Diana, don't even try to imagine their shenanigans. You'll want to meet Agnes's grandmother Abigail, who at eighty-seven is still feisty and more than a little naughty—and Adriana, her daughter and Agnes’s mother, who receives a shocking gift from her old Radcliffe roommate. That’s Olympia, the award-winning novelist, who gets the scare of her life when she decides to set her new novel in Pittsburgh and visits. Did I mention Beverly, the long, tall Texan who came to Harvard for college and never left—and never left Texas behind? Oh, and Henrietta, whose imagination is so outrageous and dark that she will soon get her own novel. What the women of Harvard Square are saying about Mike Lieberman: Agnes Lubeck: “Mike Lieberman is a master.” Diana Endicott: “I’m on board with what he has done. This guy gets it.” Beverly Ardmore: “He’s nothing but a pimp. It’s all the more outrageous because we're both Texans.” Abigail Lubeck: “I thought I would be only an old person, Agnes’s creaky grandmother. But he gave me a great role to play, and you know what? He threw in a vibrator as well. He knows how to honor older women.” Henrietta Markham: “Mike Lieberman gave me more than I deserve. He gave me motive and opportunity as the crime folks say—and with them sex and, well . . . I’ll let you read The Women of Harvard Square.”

The Equivalents
The Equivalents

Author: Maggie Doherty

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0525434607

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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD In 1960, Harvard’s sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, a “messy experiment” in women’s education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships—poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen—quickly formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves “the Equivalents.” Drawing from notebooks, letters, recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie Doherty weaves a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and activism, love and heartbreak, and shows how the institute spoke to the condition of women on the cusp of liberation. “Rich and powerful. . . . A love story about art and female friendship.” —Harper’s Magazine “Reads like a novel, and an intense one at that. . . . The Equivalents is an observant, thoughtful and energetic account.” —Margaret Atwood, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Silent Sky
Silent Sky

Author: Lauren Gunderson

Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 65

ISBN-13: 0822233800

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THE STORY: When Henrietta Leavitt begins work at the Harvard Observatory in the early 1900s, she isn’t allowed to touch a telescope or express an original idea. Instead, she joins a group of women “computers,” charting the stars for a renowned astronomer who calculates projects in “girl hours” and has no time for the women’s probing theories. As Henrietta, in her free time, attempts to measure the light and distance of stars, she must also take measure of her life on Earth, trying to balance her dedication to science with family obligations and the possibility of love. The true story of 19th-century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt explores a woman’s place in society during a time of immense scientific discoveries, when women’s ideas were dismissed until men claimed credit for them. Social progress, like scientific progress, can be hard to see when one is trapped among earthly complications; Henrietta Leavitt and her female peers believe in both, and their dedication changed the way we understand both the heavens and Earth.

The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway
The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

Author: Merve Emre

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2021-08-31

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1631496778

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Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel, in a lushly illustrated hardcover edition with illuminating commentary from a brilliant young Oxford scholar and critic. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” So begins Virginia Woolf’s much-beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been viewed not only as Woolf’s masterpiece, but as a pivotal work of literary modernism and one of the most significant and influential novels of the twentieth century. In this visually powerful annotated edition, acclaimed Oxford don and literary critic Merve Emre gives us an authoritative version of this landmark novel, supporting it with generous commentary that reveals Woolf’s aesthetic and political ambitions—in Mrs. Dalloway and beyond—as never before. Mrs. Dalloway famously takes place over the course of a single day in late June, its plot centering on the upper-class Londoner Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing to throw a party that evening for the nation’s elite. But the novel is complicated by Woolf’s satire of the English social system, and by her groundbreaking representation of consciousness. The events of the novel flow through the minds and thoughts of Clarissa and her former lover Peter Walsh and others in their circle, but also through shopkeepers and servants, among others. Together Woolf’s characters—each a jumble of memories and perceptions—create a broad portrait of a city and society transformed by the Great War in ways subtle but profound ways. No figure has been more directly shaped by the conflict than the disturbed veteran Septimus Smith, who is plagued by hallucinations of a friend who died in battle, and who becomes the unexpected second hinge of the novel, alongside Clarissa, even though—in one of Woolf’s many radical decisions—the two never meet. Emre’s extensive introduction and annotations follow the evolution of Clarissa Dalloway—based on an apparently conventional but actually quite complex acquaintance of Woolf’s—and Septimus Smith from earlier short stories and drafts of Mrs. Dalloway to their emergence into the distinctive forms devoted readers of the novel know so well. For Clarissa, Septimus, and her other creations, Woolf relied on the skill of “character reading,” her technique for bridging the gap between life and fiction, reality and representation. As Emre writes, Woolf’s “approach to representing character involved burrowing deep into the processes of consciousness, and, so submerged, illuminating the infinite variety of sensation and perception concealed therein. From these depths, she extracted an unlimited capacity for life.” It is in Woolf’s characters, fundamentally unknowable but fundamentally alive, that the enduring achievement of her art is most apparent. For decades, Woolf’s rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists, and scholars alike. The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, featuring 150 illustrations, draws on decades of Woolf scholarship as well as countless primary sources, including Woolf’s private diaries and notes on writing. The result is not only a transporting edition of Mrs. Dalloway, but an essential volume for Woolf devotees and an incomparable gift to all lovers of literature.

Harvard Square: A Novel
Harvard Square: A Novel

Author: André Aciman

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2013-04-08

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0393240312

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"So candid, so penetrating and so beautifully written that it can make you feel cut open, emotionally exposed." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal Harvard Square is the elegant and sexually charged story of a young émigré grad student, a Jew from Egypt, who meets a brash, magnetic Arab taxi driver—and how their friendship tests his loyalties and throws his life in America into doubt. André Aciman's writing has been hailed by Colm Tóibín as "fiction at its most supremely interesting," and here Aciman delivers a powerful tale of identity and the wages of assimilation.

Around Harvard Square
Around Harvard Square

Author: C. J. Farley

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2019-04-01

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1617757268

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Race, class, and hormones combine and combust when a Harvard freshman and his two friends attempt to join the staff of the Harpoon, the school's iconic humor magazine. Around Harvard Square is the winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Youth/Teens)! Around Harvard Square has been named a 2020 Honor Book by the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People "A smart, satirical novel about surviving the racial and cultural tensions ratcheted up in the elite Harvard hothouse. Farley has created a marvelously engaging and diverse set of characters, at the center of which is a nerdy Jamaican American with a philosophical bent and his cohort of oddballs struggling to win a spot on Harvard's brainy humor magazine, which provides a springboard for Farley to dive into the ethics of comedy, among other subjects." --National Book Review, included in Monday's 5 Hot Books "For anyone who likes satire, this quick-witted tale...catches a bundle of truths about a very particular and powerful corner of our world." --New West Indian Guide "Around Harvard Square [is] C.J. Farley's fun novel about an exceptional Jamaican student-athlete facing class and race issues to get a spot on an elite Harvard University humor magazine." --New York Daily News, included in CaribBeat column "C.J. Farley's Around Harvard Square is a witty and artful narrative of a society on the crossroads of change...A must read." --The Gleaner (Jamaica) Included in the American Booksellers Association's ABC Best Books for Young Adult Readers 2019! Included in Publishers Weekly's Spring 2019 Children's Announcements Included in Rich in Color's Six Books to Kickstart April "In his new novel, Around Harvard Square, Farley writes about a scandal strikingly similar to how Singer helped parents and coaches allegedly exploit athletic programs of schools like Yale, Georgetown, and USC." --Fox 5 (New York) "This former Lampoon editor, journalist, and now satirical novelist, has lots of insight into the discrepancies around race and gender that remain present in the comedy industry." --CityLine (WCVB-TV Boston) "Around Harvard Square brings social commentary to college life, approaching the issues in a humorous attitude...Farley makes the injustices more tangible to a younger audience who may be future students at such institutions, and he shows how little progression has been made in the educational system regarding institutional racism." --Prism Review Tosh Livingston, superstar student-athlete from small-town USA, thinks he's made it big as a rising freshman at Harvard University. Not so fast! Once on campus, he's ensnared in a frenzied competition to win a spot on Harvard's legendary humor magazine, the Harpoon. Tosh soon finds that joining the Harpoon is a weird and surprisingly dangerous pursuit. He faces off against a secret society of super-rich kids, gets schooled by a philosophy professor who loves flunking everyone, and teams up with a genius student-cartoonist with an agenda of her own. Along the way, Tosh and his band of misfit freshman friends unearth long-buried mysteries about the Ivy League that will rock the Ivory Tower and change their lives forever...if they can survive the semester. With its whip-smart humor and fast-paced narrative, Around Harvard Square will appeal to readers of all ages interested in exploring the complicated roles that race and class play in higher education.

The Hello Girls
The Hello Girls

Author: Elizabeth Cobbs

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-05-13

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0674237439

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In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France at General Pershing’s explicit request. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. While suffragettes picketed the White House and President Wilson struggled to persuade a segregationist Congress to give women of all races the vote, these courageous young women swore the army oath and settled into their new roles. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges they faced in a war zone where male soldiers wooed, mocked, and ultimately celebrated them. The army discharged the last Hello Girls in 1920, the year Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. When they sailed home, they were unexpectedly dismissed without veterans’ benefits and began a sixty-year battle that a handful of survivors carried to triumph in 1979. “What an eye-opener! Cobbs unearths the original letters and diaries of these forgotten heroines and weaves them into a fascinating narrative with energy and zest.” —Cokie Roberts, author of Capital Dames “This engaging history crackles with admiration for the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the First World War, becoming the country’s first female soldiers.” —New Yorker “Utterly delightful... Cobbs very adroitly weaves the story of the Signal Corps into that larger story of American women fighting for the right to vote, but it’s the warm, fascinating job she does bringing her cast...to life that gives this book its memorable charisma... This terrific book pays them a long-warranted tribute.” —Christian Science Monitor “Cobbs is particularly good at spotlighting how closely the service of military women like the Hello Girls was tied to the success of the suffrage movement.” —NPR

The Girls Next Door
The Girls Next Door

Author: Kara Dixon Vuic

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-02-04

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0674986385

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The story of the intrepid young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas, from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The emotional toll of war can be as debilitating to soldiers as hunger, disease, and injury. Beginning in World War I, in an effort to boost soldiers’ morale and remind them of the stakes of victory, the American military formalized a recreation program that sent respectable young women and famous entertainers overseas. Kara Dixon Vuic builds her narrative around the young women from across the United States, many of whom had never traveled far from home, who volunteered to serve in one of the nation’s most brutal work environments. From the “Lassies” in France and mini-skirted coeds in Vietnam to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, Vuic provides a fascinating glimpse into wartime gender roles and the tensions that continue to complicate American women’s involvement in the military arena. The recreation-program volunteers heightened the passions of troops but also domesticated everyday life on the bases. Their presence mobilized support for the war back home, while exporting American culture abroad. Carefully recruited and selected as symbols of conventional femininity, these adventurous young women saw in the theater of war a bridge between public service and private ambition. This story of the women who talked and listened, danced and sang, adds an intimate chapter to the history of war and its ties to life in peacetime.

Women Are Like Chickens, All Eggs, Breast and Thighs
Women Are Like Chickens, All Eggs, Breast and Thighs

Author: Annette Sandoval

Publisher: Harvard Square Editions

Published: 2019-02

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9781941861653

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This is a story of food. Mexican food. It is also the tale of two sisters, their family restaurant, and their circle of friends. Set against the tapestry of San Francisco's traditionally Latino Mission district, the novel weaves through the lives of a set of unlikely friends. Alex has been running the family restaurant since her father's fatal freak accident while still in her teens. Where Alex thrives in the restaurant's front rooms, her sister, Leah, prefers to work in the kitchen. Far away from the loud and unpredictable public. Tessa can't wait to go to Stanford and disassociate herself from the people of the Mish and their notions, old-fashioned to insane. And then there's Dulce, a precocious boy trapped in a woman's body. She even buys most of her clothes at the boys' department of K-mart. She claims they have the most durable socks. Although subject to cultural expectations and limitations, misogyny, and racism -- not to mention the fashion trends of puffy hair, fuchsia makeup, and parachute pants -- Chickens encompasses all of the comical mishaps and unsettled mayhem of life in the early 80's as each character defines her own unique identity.

A Shoppers’ Paradise
A Shoppers’ Paradise

Author: Emily Remus

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0674987276

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How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown. Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time America’s downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in women’s rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district. After the city’s Great Fire, Chicago’s downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these women’s conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men. A Shoppers’ Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established women’s new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.