Monday, December 9, 2013

Women Write, Women Read

Here are some great deals on hardcover fiction written by women across different culture backgrounds, ethnicities, and genres. These titles are all new books unless otherwise specified. Multiples copies of some titles are available for book clubs or as a gift to share and read along with someone else.

Save on postage with the purchase of multiple items. Links with individual books will take you to the book purchase page for that item. Please contact The Book Savoury if you have any questions about these or other items. Thanks for supporting small businesses!
Saving Fish from Drowning, by Amy Tan Random House (2005), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 474 pages New. $4.99
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The title of this book comes from the Myanmar saying that fishermen scoop up fish to save them from drowning. On an ill-fated art expedition, twelve American tourists find themselves deep in the Burmese jungle, where they encounter a tribe awaiting a leader and the mystical book of wisdom that will protect them from the Myanmar military regime.
Atlas of Unknowns, by Tania James Alfred A. Knopf (2009), Hardcover, 336 pages New. $6.99
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A story about sisterhood, the tantalizing dream of America, and the secret histories and hilarious eccentricities of families everywhere. When Anju, the daughter of a dyspesic father living in Kerala, India, wins a scholarship to a prestigious school in America, she seizes the opportunity, even though it means betraying her sister. But when Anju goes missing, her sister Linno procures a visa so that she too can travel to America to search for her vanished sister.
Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain, by Kirsten Menger-Anderson. Algonquin Books (2008), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 290 pages New. $7.99
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From the publisher: In 1664 Dr. Olaf van Schuler flees the Old World and arrives in New Amsterdam with his lunatic mother, two bags of medical implements, and a carefully guarded book of his own medicines. He is the first in what will become a long line of peculiar physicians. Plagued by madness and guided by an intense desire to cure human affliction, each generation of this unusual family is driven by the science of its day: spontaneous combustion, phrenology, animal magnetism, electrical shock treatment, psychosurgery, genetic research. As they make their way in the world, New York City, too, evolves--from the dark and rough days of the seventeenth century to the towering, frenetic metropolis of today. Like Patrick Suskind's classic novel "Perfume," Kirsten Menger-Anderson's debut is a literary cabinet of curiosities--fascinating and unsettling, rich and utterly singular.
~Titles by Laura Esquivel~
Esquivel is a noted Mexican author whose Like Water For Chocolate. was made into a movie by the same name. Esquivel often employs magic realism to combine the ordinary and the supernatural. All of these titles are new books.
Click here to select one or more Laura Esquivel titles to purchase.
Swift As Desire $6.99 Swift as Desire is Laura Esquivel's loving tribute to her father, who worked his own lifelong magic as a telegraph operator. In this enchanting, bittersweet story, touched with graphic earthiness and wit, she shows us how keeping secrets will always lead to unhappiness, and how communication is the key to love.
The Law of Love $8.99 (Esquivel's 2nd novel, set in Mexico City.)
Malinche: A Novel $8.99 (via wiki: The life of a near mythic figure in Mexican history-the woman who served as Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez's interpreter and mistress" as he fought to overthrow the Aztecs. Reportedly, although "since the 15th century, Mexican history and folklore have interpreted her actions as traitorous to her people. Esquivel characterized La Malinche as a strong woman - an ambassador and a genius. The novel includes an Aztec codex (by Jordi Castells) which acts as Malinche's own diary.)
Between Two Fires: Intimate Writings on Life, Love, Food, and Flavor $8.99 (essays)
The Wind Done Gone: A Novel, by Alice Randall Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2001), Hardcover, 224 pages Slightly used, out-of-print in hardcover $12.99
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In a brilliant rejoinder and an inspired act of literary invention, Alice Randall explodes the world created in Margaret Mitchell's famous 1936 novel, the work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum South. Imagine simply that the black characters peopling that world were completely different, not egregious, one-dimensional stereotypes but fully alive, complex human beings. And then imagine, quite plausibly, that at the center of this world moves an illegitimate mulatto woman, and that this woman, Cynara, Cinnamon, or Cindy, beautiful and brown, gets to tell her story.
Make Believe, by Joanna Scott Little Brown & Co (2000), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 246 pages New. $12.99
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Joanna Scott is the author of nine books, including The Manikin, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Various Antidotes and Arrogance, which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and the critically acclaimed Make Believe, Tourmaline, and Liberation. This tale is a story of race, class and the playing out of these social states in the lives of family members who fight for custody of a mixed-race child.
Touba and the Meaning of Night (Women Writing the Middle East), by Shahrnush Parsipur The Feminist Press at CUNY (2006), Hardcover, 320 pages New. $15.00
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In the character of Touba, an intellectually intrepid and spiritually gifted woman, Shahrnush Parsipur distills eight decades of Iranian history, including the eras of British and Russian colonialism, the reigns of two shahs, the brief period of democracy in the 1950s, which a U.S.-backed coup ended, and the advent of the Islamic Revolution." "From a distinctly Iranian perspective, Touba and the Meaning of Night reveals ongoing tension between rationalism and mysticism, tradition and modernity, male and female, East and West. Speaking in an idiom unique to its author and indicative of a new tradition in Persian women's writing, the epic also defies Western stereotypes of Iranian women and Western expectations of Iranian literary form.
When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsuka Alfred A. Knopf (2002), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 143 pages New. $15.99
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Julie Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination, both physical and emotional, of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view, the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family's return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity, she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion. Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.
Snow Man, by Carolyn Chute Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (1999), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 256 pages New. $6.99
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After assassinating a senator in Boston, a wounded militiaman is nursed by the wife and daughter of his next intended victim, another senator. Between bouts of sex with both women, he lectures them on injustices perpetrated on the poor by the rich. By the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine.
Mistress of the Revolution, by Catherine Delors Dutton Adult (2008), Hardcover, 464 pages New. $12.99
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An impoverished noblewoman, Gabrielle de Montserrat is only fifteen when she meets her first love, a commoner named Pierre-AndrĂ© Coffinhal. But her brother forbids their union, forcing her instead to marry an aging, wealthy cousin. Widowed and a mother before the age of twenty, Gabrielle arrives at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in time to be swept up in the emerging turbulence—and to encounter the man she never expected to see again. Determined and independent, she strives to find her own freedom— as the Revolution takes an ever more violent turn.
Sisterfire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, edited by Charlotte Watson Sherman HarperPerennial (1994), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 378 pages Slightly used, out-of-print in this edition. $19.99
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Includes Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Gloria Naylor, ntozake shange, and J. California Cooper, who join fifty-four other women from the African-American literary scene to lend their voices to the concerns, frustrations, joys, and experiences of Black women today. (Published in 1994.)
Shaking the Tree: A Collection of Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah Slightly used, out-of-print in this edition. $12.99
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Showcasing the newest generation of black women writers, including ZZ Packer, Edwidge Danticat, and Shay Youngblood, Shaking the Tree gathers twenty-three voices that came of age in the wake of the civil rights, black arts, gay rights, and feminist movements. Their literature embodies the tragedies and triumphs of contemporary black women in their struggle to negotiate a sense of individual identity beyond the limited scope of gender and race.
For Janet Evanovich mystery fans (and those who love them). New hardcovers. Save postage on multiple titles with an order.
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Plum Lucky $6.99 Plum Spooky $5.99 ------- Twelve Sharp $8.99 Fearless Fourteen $9.99 Sizzling Sixteen $9.99