Abraham, Pearl. The Romance Reader
The daughter of a visionary rabbi who dreams of founding his own synagogue and center of learning, Rachel Benjamin lives in an insular environment, seemingly protected from the temptations and freedoms the modern world offers. Rachel is a dreamer like her father; but her dreams are of the strong, confident men and the beautiful damsels in distress she reads about in romance novels she sneaks under her blankets at night. She longs to live not in the dying, desolate community of a bungalow colony in upstate New York, where she can't help but be aware of the presence and allures of the secular world surrounding her, but in Brooklyn - in Williamsburgh or Borough Park - where the Hasidic world is sufficient unto itself and she could more easily be the good Hasidic daughter she is trying to be.

Alvarez, Juila. In the Name of Salome
In her most ambitious work since In the Time of Butterflies, Julia Alvarez tells the story of a woman whose poetry inspired one Caribbean revolution and of her daughter whose dedication to teaching strengthened another.

Attic Press, Dublin. Mad & Bad Fairies
Will Alice, lost in Thunderland, find her way back to Harmony Land? What is Ophelia’s cunning plan of escape? Will the CUPS succeed in their witch-hunt? Find out in this wonderful collection of fairy tales for feminists. Other titles include “Thumbelina the Left Wing Fairy” and “The Frog Prince”.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice.
Elizabeth Bennett is the second of five sisters from a well-off family. Their mother is anxious to marry them off to wealthy young gentlemen, but when they meet Mr. Darcy, an eligible, wealthy young man, his arrogance makes him undesirable, especially to Elizabeth, who is the target of his rudest comments. When her older sister Jane falls in love with Mr. Darcy's best friend Mr. Bingley, Lizzie finds herself having to be in Darcy's presence more than she would like. She befriends Mr. Wickham, who also doesn't view Mr. Darcy in a positive light. However, as the events unfold, Mr. Wickham turns out to be not quite as charming as Lizzie initially believes and Mr. Darcy not quite as odious.
 
Cameron, Anne. Daughters of Copper Woman.
Since its first publication in 1981, "Daughters of Copper Woman" has become an underground classic, selling over 200,000 copies. Now comes a new edition that includes many pieces cut from the original as well as fresh material added by the author. Here finally, after twenty-two years of gathering dust, is the complete version of the groundbreaking bestseller. In this, her best-loved work, Anne Cameron has created a timeless retelling of northwest coast Native myths that together create a sublime image of the social and spiritual power of woman. Cameron weaves together the lives of legendary and imaginary characters, creating a work of fiction with an intensity of style matched by the power of its subject.
 
Campbell, Bebe Moore. Singing in the Comeback Choir
Maxine McCoy has made it. A black woman from working-class Philadelphia, she has risen against the odds to become a television producer in Los Angeles. But when she receives a phone call about her grandmother, a once great singer, she realizes that it's time to return to Philadelphia and her roots.
 
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo.
Through the eyes of young Celaya, or Lala, the Reyes family saga twists and turns over three generations of truths, half-truths, and outright lies. And, like Celaya's grandmother's prized caramelo (striped) rebozo, so is "the universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven.... Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone." The Reyes clan, from Awful Grandmother Soledad and her favorite son Inocencio to Celaya, follow their destinies from Mexico City to the U.S. armed forces, jobs upholstering furniture, and to Chicago and San Antonio. Celaya gathers and retells, in over 80 chapters, the stories that reinforce her family's, and subsequently her own, identity as they travel between the U.S.-Mexican border and within the United States.
 
Cleage, Pearl. What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day – 813.54
After a decade of elegant pleasures and luxe living among the Atlanta brothers and sisters with the best clothes and biggest dreams, Ava Johnson has temporarily returned home to Idlewood - her fabulous career and plans smashed to bits by cold reality. But what she imagines is the end is, instead, the beginning.

Cooke, Grace MacGowan. Power and the Glory.
Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement through a priest and the people he encounters. In the 1930s one Mexican state has outlawed the Church, naming it a source of greed and debauchery. The priests have been rounded up and shot by firing squad--save one, the whisky priest. On the run, and in a blur of alcohol and fear, this outlaw meets a dentist, a banana farmer, and a village woman he knew six years earlier. For a while, he is accompanied by a toothless man--whom he refers to as his Judas and does his best to ditch. Always, an adamant lieutenant is only a few hours behind, determined to liberate his country from the evils of the church.
 
Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.
 
Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine.
The stunning first novel in Louise Erdrich's Native American series, Love Medicine tells the story of two families -- the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. Written in Erdrich's uniquely poetic, powerful style, it is a multigenerational portrait of strong men and women caught in an unforgettable drama of anger, desire, and the healing power that is love medicine.

Esaki-Smith, Anna. Meeting Luciano.
Emily is worried that her mother, Hanako, recently divorced by Emily's father, is becoming more and more eccentric. An avid opera fan and Europhile, the cosmopolitan Hanako has decided to renovate her house because she believes with unwavering certainty that opera star Luciano Pavarotti is coming for a visit. Moreover, Hanako seems to be too trusting of the hearty Greek-American contractor, Alex, who aggressively inflates the home improvements, arousing Emily's suspicions and leaving her baffled at her mother's naive allegiance to this take-charge stranger. Under Alex's gaze and through the regenerative enterprise, Hanako blooms, however, taking stock of her newly reimagined life. Will Pavarotti actually show up? The answer to this question is delightfully unexpected, as the novel gracefully explores Emily's past and present to suggest that it is Emily, not her mother, with the identity crisis.
 
Keller, Nora Okja. Comfort Woman.
Beccah is lost on the path of life, unsure where her future lies, while her mother is lost in the past, her life caught up in the spirits of the dead, who have haunted her since her escape from the camps where she was a sex slave during the Japanese occupation of Korea in World War II. The story is told from these two women's points of view as each grapples with the terrors, real and imaginary, that dominate their lives. Beccah knows little of her mother's past, and when her mother dies, she is forced to confront the truth. Despite the atrocities recounted and the suffering endured, a fierce love binds these two spirits together, even in death.

Knowles, Ardeana Hamlin. Pink Chimneys.
Maude Richmond is a spirited and independent teenager who wishes to become a physician like her father. Since that profession is closed to women, she becomes a midwife, choosing to tend to the childbirths of "fallen women" in defiance of the dictum that the they are evil incarnate. One of her patients, 16-year-old Fanny Abbot, has been seduced and abandoned. Reluctantly, Fanny gives her newborn daughter to her sister to raise and is set up by a Bangor businessman as madam of his posh house of prostitution, Pink Chimneys. The circle of intertwined relationships closes years later when Elizabeth Emerson, Fanny's daughter, is hired to work at Pink Chimneys as a seamstress.

Konecky, Edith. Allegra Maud Goldman
This book tracks the coming to consciousness of a feisty and sharply observant Jewish girl growing up in 1930s Brooklyn. Allegra encounters the usual trials of bourgeois childhood – the confinement of first schooldays, the confusion of fumbled sex education, the humiliations of dress-shopping – and a world that seems determined to stifle her creativity and aspirations. She faces it all with a wisdom and wit that both delight and inspire.

LaDuke, Winona. Last Standing Woman
Based on a tragic history and presenting a hopeful vision for the future, Last Standing Woman is a powerful and poignant first novel tracing the lives of seven generations of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa). Beginning in the 1860s, the story chronicles a Native American Indian reservation and its people’s struggle to restore their culture. Battering alcoholism, sexual abuse, and fighting to regain their land, the characters are living heroes breathing with hope and vision.
 

Letts, Billie. The Honk and Holler Opening Soon.
For 12 years, wheelchair-bound restaurateur and Vietnam vet Caney Paxton hasn't left his Sequoyah, Okla., cafe, known (thanks to a sign-maker's error) as the Honk and Holler Opening Soon. Now it's Christmas time, 1985, and for Caney and four-times married waitress Molly O, who helped raise him, the holiday looks bleak: business is slumping, overdue bills are piling up and the roof is leaking. Worried about her teenage daughter, Brenda, a country musician seeking her fortune in Nashville, Molly O is too preoccupied to recognize the romantic interest of cafe regular Life Halstead; Caney, ashamed of his part in the war, feels trapped by his wound and his painful past. But that changes when luck brings the Honk and Holler two new employees: beautiful young Crow Indian drifter Vena Takes Horse, who signs on as a carhop, and Vietnamese refugee Bui Khanh, a cook and handyman running from a guilty secret of his own.
 
Letts, Billie. Where the Heart is.
Novalee Nation is seventeen, seven months pregnant, and on her way to California with her no-good boyfriend when he abandons her at a shopping mall in Oklahoma. In this contemporary fairy tale with no fairy godmother in sight, Novalee depends on herself to build a new life. Living inside a Wal-Mart at night and on the streets during the day, Novalee patches together a family from the caring people she meets. Capturing each one on Polaroid film, she sees the goodness of each soul and finds a way to help others as they help her.
 
McMillan Terry. Breaking Ice.
Breaking Ice is a collection of short stories from well-known authors. The many, varied female voices - in particular - are eye-opening and engrossing; the subjects are pertinent and realistic. The lives, thoughts, moods, and experiences of people of color are portrayed with finesse and great literary skill.

Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones.
Set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II, "Brown Girl, Brownstones" is the enduring story of a most extraordinary young woman. Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, is caught between the struggles of her hard-working, ambitious mother, who wants to "buy house" and educate her daughters, and her father, who longs to return to the land in Barbados. Selina seeks to define her own identity and values as she struggles to surmount the racism and poverty that surround her.

Morrison, Toni. Sula.
As girls, Nel and Sula are the best of friends, only children who find in each other a kindred spirit to share in each girl's loneliness and imagination. When they meet again as adults, it's clear that Nel has chosen a life of acceptance and accommodation, while Sula must fight to defend her seemingly unconventional choices and beliefs.

Neely, Barbara. Blanche Among the Talented Tenth
When Blanche White—domestic worker extraordinaire turned accidental sleuth—managed to get her kids into a private school, she didn't know they'd be getting as much attitude as education. So she jumps at the chance to spend time with them at Amber Cove, an exclusive, all-black resort in Maine, where she can observe them with their wealthy friends—and keep them from turning into people she doesn't want to know. While some of the guests—including her own daughter—are giving Blanche an insider's view of the color and class divisions within the black community, the godson of a feminist commits suicide, another one of the guests has a fatal encounter with a radio while taking a bath. When Blanche is enlisted to use her considerable wiles to find out if these events are connected, she discovers a web of secrets that someone may be willing to kill for—and a man determined to sweep her off her feet no matter how much she weighs.

Neely, Barbara. Blanche Cleans Up
The funny thing is, Blanche had just been thinking that her life had finally settled down. It's been three years since she had to grab the kids and scurry out of Farleigh, North Carolina. Now they've all settled into life in the Roxbury section of Boston, and Blanche herself is feeling like she may finally be free to enjoy life -- at least a little. But before Blanche can say, "Breakfast is ready," she gets suckered into standing in as cook-housekeeper to one Allister Brindle, a Boston Brahmin politician, and his do-gooder wife. Blanche is quickly enmeshed in a festering canker of scandal that moves from the Brindles' house (a.k.a. Prozac House) to her own black community as she tries to figure out the truth behind the swimming-pool death of a young black man who knew a little too much. With life suddenly getting just a bit too interesting on both the home and work fronts, Blanche finds herself dealing with a love triangle with bent angles, teen pregnancy, phony spirituality, environmental skulduggery, homophobia, a letter she wishes she hadn't read, a friend whose life she might have saved, and at least one person who doesn't mean her any good.

Neely, Barbara. Blanche Passes Go
After three years in Boston Brahmin territory, Blanche White is finally returning home to Farleigh, North Carolina for an entire summer. And, like a sign from above that she's indeed headed in the right direction, she's already lined up a date with the handsome train conductor she met somewhere between Boston and Baltimore. The summer holds lots of promise—including a long-awaited reunion with best friend, Ardell, as she helps out with Ardell's new bustling catering business. Then, like a slap in the face on her first night back, Blanche is reminded of a part of home she'd rather forget: David Palmer, the man who raped her eight years ago and who has tormented her mind and spirit ever since, shows up as a guest at her very first catering event. The time has finally come...she must exact her revenge so that she can finally move on. Then a young woman is murdered and there are signs that David Palmer may be involved. So Blanche sets off on a hunting expedition—for clues she hopes will help convict David Palmer and put an end to his legacy once and for all.
 
Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio: From the Thirties.
Yonnondio follows the heartbreaking path of the Holbrook family in the late 1920s and the Great Depression as they move from the coalmines of Wyoming to a tenant farm in western Nebraska, ending up finally on the kill floors of the slaughterhouses and in the wretched neighborhoods of the poor in Omaha, Nebraska. Mazie, the oldest daughter in the growing family of Jim and Anna Holbrook, tells the story of the family's desire for a better life. Anna's dream that her children be educated and Jim's wish for a life lived out in the open, away from the darkness and danger of the mines. At every turn in their journey, however, their dreams are frustrated, and the family is jeopardized by cruel and indifferent systems.
 
Rivenbark, Celia. We're Just Like You, Only Prettier.
What does a Southern woman consider grounds for divorce? When Daddy takes the kids out in public dressed in pajama tops and Tweety Bird swim socks. Again. What is the Southern woman's opinion of a new "fat virus" theory? Bring it on! We've got a lot of skinny friends we need to sneeze on. Want to become honest-to-Jesus white trash? Spend two weeks' salary on hair extensions and pancake makeup for your three-year-old so she can win a five-dollar trophy in the Wee Tiny Miss pageant and the adoration of, well, nobody much. What does the Southern woman think of Paul McCartney's marriage to a model thirty years younger? We're not surprised. Statistically speaking, it's almost impossible for billionaires to discover that their soul mates are fifty-five and restocking the shampoo end caps at Kmart. In this wickedly funny follow-up to her best-selling Bless Your Heart, Tramp, Celia Rivenbark welcomes you, once again, to the south she loves, the land of "Mama and them's," "precious and dahlin," and mommies who mow. Ya'll come back now, you hear.
 
Shea, Suzanne Strempek. Hoopi Shoopi Donna.
Donna Milewski is a relatively content 14-year-old--until her parents decide to adopt her cousin, six-year-old Elzbieta--the daughter of Donna's father's brother, who can no longer support his family back in Poland. Donna is ambivalent about the newcomer (called Betty in Massachusetts), but when Betty follows Donna on her first date and gets them both hit by an out-of-control truck, her happy existence abruptly ends.
 
Thom, James Alexander. Follow the River.
Mary Ingles was twenty-three, married, and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement, killed the men and women, then took her captive. For months, she lived with them, unbroken, until she escaped, and followed a thousand mile trail to freedom--an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her people.
 

Viramontes, Helenamaria. Under the Feet of Jesus.
The family of 13-year-old Estrella, and the others with whom they travel and work, burn under 109-degree heat until the backs of their necks sting; women nurse their babies in the backs of pickups. Viramontes depicts this world with a sensuous physicality, as when Petra, Estrella's mother, digs a fingernail into the melting tar of a blacktop highway. And the close quarters in which her characters are forced to live promotes a collective intimacy that Viramontes evokes with a sure hand, conveying the solace to be found in solidarity while never losing sight of the fact that these people enjoy absolutely no privacy. Slow and wandering at the outset, the novel picks up after a small plane releases a white shower of deadly pesticide, which washes over the face of Alejo, a teenager who is perched in a peach tree, busy stealing the soft, ripe fruit.
 
Walker, Alice. Living by the Word.
This collection of recent prose reflects Walker's belief in the spiritual connections among all peoples and between them and the earth that sustains them. It further examines how this precept, and themes of race, gender, sexuality, and political freedom, illuminate her life and the lives of friends, family, and ancestors. Entertaining and often stirring, it ranges widely, moving from observations made on trips to China, Bali, and Jamaica to Walker's views on her connection with San Francisco's lesbian and gay communities and her valuable insights into the controversies surrounding the filming of The Color Purple . Included are public addresses, letters, and journal entries published for the first time.
 
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple.
Celie is a young girl, a victim of incest, pregnant with her father's child. Ugly and unloved, separated from her children and her sister, Celie's only option is marriage to an abusive, philandering husband who treats her little better than a slave. Her life changes forever when her husband brings his mistress, a beautiful blues singer named Shug into the house.
 
Walker, Alice. You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down.
These fourteen provocative and often humorous stories show women oppressed but not defeated. These are hopeful stories about love, lust, fame, and cultural thievery, the delight of new lovers, and the rediscovery of old friends, affirmed even across self-imposed color lines.

Waters, Sarah. The Night Watch
Waters (Fingersmith) applies her talent for literary suspense to WWII-era London in her latest historical. She populates the novel with ordinary people overlooked by history books and sets their individual passions against the chaotic background of extraordinary times. There are Kay, a "night watch" ambulance driver; her lover, Helen; two imprisoned conscientious objectors, upper-class Fraser and working-class Duncan; Duncan's sister, Viv; Viv's married soldier-lover, Reggie; and Julia, a building inspector-mystery novelist. The novel works backward in time, beginning in 1947, as London emerges from the rubble of war, then to 1944, a time of nightly air raids, and finally to 1941, when the war's end was not in sight.

Weeks, Yvonne. Deep in the Blueness of Me.
A collection of poetry and prose.

Wells, Rebecca. Little Altars Everywhere.
Little Altars Everywhere, the first novel by Rebecca Wells, is the bittersweet story of the Walker clan of Thornton, Louisiana. Vivi Abbot Walker, the mother, is the eye of the hurricane. Her husband, Shep, is a cotton planter, and the two of them have four children: Siddalee, Little Shep, Baylor, and Lulu, who is named for Tallulah Bankhead, one of her mother's patron saints. Each member of this funny, charming, and wounded family describes the view from his or her perch on the family tree.

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges are not the Only Fruit.
Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette's insistence on listening to the truths of her own heart and mind - and on reporting them with wit and passion - makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood.

Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body.
he unnamed narrator falls for a married woman called Louise. Louise leaves her husband but when she finds she has cancer, she leaves her new lover too. Written on the Body is a journey of self-discovery made through the metaphors of desire and disease.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers.
Sarah, the narrator of Bread Givers, describes with urgency and in detail the lives she, her sisters, and her mother live to support their revered, torah-reading father: their crowded shared rooms so he can study undisturbed; the numerous jobs all but he work to maintain the family and support his books, charities, and manner of dress; his constant and often impossible demands.