All that Summer She was Mad


Book Description

Examines Virginia Woolf's life and works in order to dispute claims that she was insane and argues that the prejudices of her physicians were responsible for her misdiagnosis.







One Crazy Summer


Book Description

Eleven-year-old Delphine has it together. Even though her mother, Cecile, abandoned her and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, seven years ago. Even though her father and Big Ma will send them from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to stay with Cecile for the summer. And even though Delphine will have to take care of her sisters, as usual, and learn the truth about the missing pieces of the past. When the girls arrive in Oakland in the summer of 1968, Cecile wants nothing to do with them. She makes them eat Chinese takeout dinners, forbids them to enter her kitchen, and never explains the strange visitors with Afros and black berets who knock on her door. Rather than spend time with them, Cecile sends Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern to a summer camp sponsored by a revolutionary group, the Black Panthers, where the girls get a radical new education. Set during one of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, one crazy summer is the heartbreaking, funny tale of three girls in search of the mother who abandoned them—an unforgettable story told by a distinguished author of books for children and teens, Rita Williams-Garcia.




That Summer He Died


Book Description

On the surface, James Sawday's life couldn't be any better. Writing investigative pieces for a glossy men's magazine, he gets to travel the world. And when he gets home, there's Lucy: smart, funny, seems to love him. She could even be the one. But when James's editor sends him to the seaside town of Grancombe, to cover a murder - the third attack by a serial killer who specialises in chopping off his victims' hands - James finds himself sucked back down into a world he's tried all his adult life to forget. Ten years before, during a hazy, drug-fuelled summer, James was one of a group of teenagers who stumbled on the mutilated corpse of local artist Jack Dawes. And then the second killing happened - the one that still gives James nightmares. Now James has got to dig up everything he's worked so hard to bury. And what he's going to find out could cost him his sanity. And even his life.




Virginia Woolf


Book Description

divdivBy the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as “sledge-hammer blows,” beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother. Yet vulnerable as she was (“skinless” was her word) she began, through these years, to practice her art—and to discover how it could serve her. Ultimately, she came to feel that it was her “shock-receiving capacity” that had made her a writer. Astonishingly gifted from the start, Woolf learned to be attentive to the movements of her own mind. Through self-reflection she found a language for the ebb and flow of thought, fantasy, feeling, and memory, for the shifts of light and dark. And in her writing she preserved, recreated, and altered the dead, altering in the process her internal relationship with their “invisible presences.” “I will go backwards & forwards” she remarked in her diary, a comment on both her imaginative and writerly practice. Following Woolf’s lead, psychologist Katherine Dalsimer moves backward and forward between the work of Woolf’s maturity and her early journals, letters, and unpublished juvenilia to illuminate the process by which Woolf became a writer. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory as well as on Woolf’s life and work, and trusting Woolf’s own self-observations, Dalsimer offers a compelling account of a young artist’s voyage out—a voyage that Virginia Woolf began by looking inward and completed by looking back. /DIV/DIV




Mad Love


Book Description

When you're the daughter of a best-selling romance writer, life should be pretty good. But for 16-year-old Alice Amorous, daughter of the Queen of Romance, life is an agonizing lie. Her mother's been secretly hospitalized for mental illness, and Alice has been putting on a brave front, answering fan letters, forging her mother's signature, telling the publisher that all is well. But the next book is due and the Queen can't write it. Alice needs a story for her mother. And she needs one fast. That's when she meets Errol, a strange boy who's been following her. A boy who tells her that he has a love story. A boy who believes he's Cupid. As Alice begins to hear Errol's voice in her head, and begins to see things she can't explain, she must face the truth - that she's either inherited her mother's madness, or Errol is for real.




Feminine Fictions


Book Description

Addressing the relationship between feminist and postmodernist writing and theory through the insights of psychoanalysis and in the context of the development of modern fiction in Britain and America, Patricia Waugh attempts to uncover the reasons why women writers have been excluded from the considerations of postmodern art. The second part of the book analyses the work of six 'traditional' and six 'experimental' writers, challenging the restrictive definitions of 'realist', 'modernist', 'postmodernist' in the light of the theoretical position developed in part one. Authors covered include: Woolf (viewed as a postmodernist 'precursor' rather than a 'high' modernist), Drabble, Tyler, Plath, Brookner, Paley, Lessing, Weldon, Atwood, Walker, Spark, Russ, and Piercy.




Mrs. Dalloway


Book Description

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.




Last Encounter with the Enemy


Book Description

Greg Johnson's latest collection of stories offers insights both subtle and startling into the workings of the human heart, from a child's-eye view of marital strife and a thoughtless betrayal of first love to the expansive reveries of complicated, conflicted adults looking ahead to new lives or back on past missteps and misfortunes. Johnson also delves into his literary roots with tales of imaginary encounters with Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and Flannery O'Connor--who, in the title story, engages in a fierce battle of wills with a precocious eleven-year-old boy. Through it all, Johnson demonstrates his gift for describing that telling detail--a sentence, a gesture, a memory--that instantly reveals a personality, as if illuminated by lightning. Praise for I Am Dangerous: A bravura literary performance. He rings a hundred changes on the emotional issues with which he deals, keeping them always interesting, always mysterious, changing and evolving before our eyes.--Pinckney Benedict, Chicago Tribune Book World sense of the term: The unique atmosphere and sensibilities of the author's native South color his prose, imbuing it with a special vitality.--Charles Solomon, Los Angeles Times Each of these stories is a prize of insight and storytelling.--Paul Malone, Dallas Morning News Johnson offers keen observations on contemporary life.--Elizabeth Ferber, New York Times Genuine and perceptive, new proof that Greg Johnson is a gifted storyteller and interpreter of the ties that bind--in every sense of the word.--Cathy High, Atlanta Journal-Constitution As always, Johnson's prose is polished, penetrating, understated ... I Am Dangerous once again confirms Johnson as an expert navigator of the human heart in all its vagaries.--Michael Upchurch, San Francisco Chronicle




That Summer


Book Description

For fifteen-year-old Haven this is the summer where everything changes. Dad is remarrying. Her sister Ashley is planning a wedding of her own. They're both moving on, but Haven is lost in memories of a time when life was happy and her family was whole. And then Ashley's ex, the charming and funny Sumner Lee, arrives in town. He reminds Haven of carefree days gone by, and she can't help but wonder - has fate brought this person from her past back to change her future?