Sandra M. Gilbert

Discusses the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

Award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan's first work of nonfiction explores the author's lifelong love for the living world and all its inhabitants. As an Indian woman, grandmother, and environmentalist, Hogan questions "our responsibilities to the caretaking of the future and to the other species who share our journey." In stories about bats, bees, porcupines, wolves, and caves, Hogan honors the spirit of all living things. Dwellings is about the idea and meaning of home. The earth is our universal home, this book tells us. Dwellings teaches us about cultures whose understanding of the world are often at odds with one another and with other species; about Native peoples' sacrifices and gifts, and the Indian tradition as a means of finding balance, of restoring our relationship to the earth. In offering praise to sky, earth, water, animals, we witness how each living thing is alive in a conscious world with its own integrity, grace, and dignity. Spoken with tenderness, beauty, and care, Dwellings takes us on a spiritual quest born out of the deep past. These illuminating writings offer a more hopeful future as they seek visions and light ancient fires.

From the recipe novel to the celebrity chef, renowned scholar Sandra M. Gilbert traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania.

"Belongings and longings of all kinds - as possessions, as the history and furnishings of a life, and as the places in which life itself happens - preoccupy the prize-winning poet Sandra Gilbert throughout this collection. Ranging from journeys into the past to literal and figurative travels in the present, Belongings explores the question: "Where, how, and to what do you belong?""--Jacket.

In 2003, Rachel Cusk published A Life's Work, a provocative and often startlingly funny memoir about the cataclysm of motherhood. Widely acclaimed, the book started hundreds of arguments that continue to this day. Now, in her most personal and relevant book to date, Cusk explores divorce's tremendous impact on the lives of women. An unflinching chronicle of Cusk's own recent separation and the upheaval that followed―"a jigsaw dismantled"―it is also a vivid study of divorce's complex place in our society. "Aftermath" originally signified a second harvest, and in this book, unlike any other written on the subject, Cusk discovers opportunity as well as pain. With candor as fearless as it is affecting, Rachel Cusk maps a transformative chapter of her life with an acuity and wit that will help us understand our own.

On February 10, 1991, Elliot Gilbert, a sixty-year-old professor of English, checked into a major medical center for routine prostate surgery. Twenty-four hours later, he was pronounced dead in the recovery room. To this day, no one from the hospital has told his family how or why he died. In Wrongful Death his widow has produced a searingly frank account of one family's experience with a kind of medical disaster that occurs surprisingly often but is all-too-rarely discussed in a political arena dominated by concerns about the escalating costs of malpractice insurance. As her story unfolds, Sandra Gilbert describes the numbing shock into which she and her children were plunged by her husband's inexplicable death as well as the stages of grief they endured as they struggled to come to terms with their loss. But her major focus is on the process of discovery through which, with the help of friends and lawyers, they began to learn something about what had happened to Elliot. What are the implications of such a medical tragedy for the deceased and for his survivors? How does it feel to confront the possibility that a loved one has suffered what the law calls a "wrongful death"? As she examines the bewildering complexity of the legal, social, and medical questions surrounding "adverse events" like the one that killed her husband, Gilbert shows how vulnerable we all are to the power of the health-care establishment.

Contains selections written by over 150 women authors from English-speaking countries. Ranges from the fourteenth century to the present.

"Death has always served as one of the most powerful catalysts for poetry. Whether with Dylan Thomas, counseling readers to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," or with Walt Whitman, taking comfort in the serene arrival "sooner or later" of "delicate death," poets throughout history have faced the mortal losses that all of us inevitably encounter. Inventions of Farewell collects English-language poems of mourning from the late Middle Ages to the present. Aesthetic assumptions and poetic styles have altered over the centuries, yet the great and often terrifying themes of time, change,age, and death are timeless. The poems here - by writers from Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, and W. S. Merwin - trace the trajectory of grief, but they also illustrate how the deepest sorrow has produced countless poignant and resonant works of art - words that can aid us as we struggle with our own farewells."--BOOK JACKET.