Sex Wars: A Novel Of Gilded Age New York, Marge Piercy. Piercy's novel explores the formative years of feminism through the intersecting lives of four characters. Three of them -- proto-feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, free love advocate Victoria Woodhull, and moralist Anthony Comstock -- were pi...
Marge Piercy is a phenomenal woman and writer. I can hardly take her novels they are so densely ladden with the minutiae and ordeals of daily living, but she knows what she's doing and does it as only she can, and god I admire her, even though she rarely writes the sort of novel I want to read. I...
It’s interesting how the lens of three decades of life experience can sharpen the focus of certain stories—and even parts of stories. When I first read Woman on the Edge of Time not long after it was published (1976), I was barely into my 20s and already a reliable cog in the corporate machine. A...
I was really disappointed with the way characters were written in this novel - the "three women" are all severely whiny and self-obsessed, especially Beverley and Elena, who act like spoiled and ignorant children. Elena, ironically, constantly criticizes her mother's "bourgeois" and "boring" life...
A rarity, my friends--five stars. I seldom give that but a few books deserve it and this is one.Marge Piercy has taken ten major characters--six women and four men--and written a superb novel of the homefornt during World War II. She gives a very excellent portrayal of the hardships faced at ho...
An honest writer will admit that everything that he or she writes, down to a grocery list, is in some form autobiography, revealing the author's sense of life, core values, interests. The art of literary expression, like any art, is a self-portrait, and the higher the level of quality, the truer ...
This book had the worst font! It's the little things that bug me. The book was about the third child, Girl (of course), who is like lost in her little political family. She has two older sibs who are like her mothers pride and joy and then her and her brother who are kind of left out of everythin...
Five stars for compelling writing and a good story that moves quickly while giving readers plenty to consider about resistance and revolution, love and living. Life changes in an instant for Vida, and although such an abrupt turn was always a possibility she understood and was committed to, its c...
My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its comple...
More than 150 poems from her seven books of poetry written between 1963 and 1982.
Almost ten years ago I discovered the author Marge Piercy when I read her novel He, She, and It. As I do with any author whose book I really, really love, I ran right out and bought every other book of hers I could get my hands on, including Small Changes, which the cover blurb promised showcased...
I wanted to like this book, since it had come highly recommended by another reader who said the author, Marge Piercy, was "amazing." I was able to keep reading the book only because I was trapped on a plane with it and had nothing else to read. Otherwise, I would not have made it past the first f...
In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up. There, she is welc...
They call themselves the Indians. Shawn, a magnetic rock star; Corey, part Indian, whose heritage gave the movement its name; Billy, a brilliant young scientist; and Joanna, a pretty runaway "army brat" who survives on pot and sex. Through the experiences of four young revolutionaries, this macab...
I read ‘The High Cost of Living’ because Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and City of Darkness, City of Light impressed me so much. This novel is neither historic nor utopian, taking place in rather grim 1970s Detroit. ‘The High Cost of Living’ is told from the point of view of Leslie, a postgr...
That is, if a fly’s brain is in its head. Lobsters do not lodge the center of their nervous system there if one is to think of a fly as an inconvenient lobster, arthropods all. I’ve been reading about the ways plants commu- nicate by chemicals, wondering if a tomato plant minds more if a chipmunk...
It is the burrow of a sand worm decorated with pebble and shell the tides bring in. This house is part toy: we move lamps and chairs about exactly as I did in my dollhouse, where I first played at creation and fashioned dramas, gave names to china animals, like Adam; and like a god, invented rule...
Her hair hung in a fat glossy braid and she clasped her hands behind her neck looking wise. “I could have told you six months ago you wanted her …” She did not know what six months could hold. Vera haunted the corner of his eye by flashes: barefoot in pants and loose olive sweater. He felt remove...
Elected on Tuesday, you vote on Thursday—on an issue as routine as a business license or important as a man’s career. I spent the first day just hanging around Town Hall, trying to read more than I could digest in a year and convince the secretaries I wasn’t some clock-watching reformer out to ma...
She thought of girls she had not seen since Miss Porter’s, at least two in the area. She called them both. The first number, she got an answering machine and no one ever called back. The second number, she reached Jessica herself. They arranged to meet Sunday noon at a coffee shop in Georgetown. ...
It’s all statistical,the gross national product or the primelending rate. Yet if our eyes sawin the right spectrum, how it would shine,lurid as magenta neon.If we could smell radiation like seepinggas, if we could sense it as heat, if wecould hear it as a low ominous roarof the earth shifting, th...
I Had a Friend I had a friend, Simon. He was big, almost bearlike, on the clumsy side with dark hair that flopped over his forehead. He was good looking but thought himself ugly. Something had damaged him already in his mid-twenties. We worked together against the Vietnam War, against the draft, ...
Avram said. “We must penetrate them. We must read their plans and find out what they want and how they mean to get it. The Council has given us a mandate to proceed.” Shira was sitting beside Yod on the far lab table. “Will something that sensitive be in their system?” Malkah snorted. “Nobody can...
A man can lie to himself. A man can lie with his tongue and his brain and his gesture; a man can lie with his life. But the body is simple as a turtle and straight as a dog: the body cannot lie. You want to take your good body off like a glove. You want to stretch it and shrink it as you change y...
Pearlo discovered that it had never been printed in the States. He was determined to share it with as many people as possible. “It hit me like a thunderclap,” he said to Victoria. They often read in bed together, discussing ideas and debating. The physical intimacy was quite secondary. Pearlo was...