Celebrate Women's History Month with Penguin Classics
From collections of essays and poems, to outstanding fiction and nonfiction, here's a selection of Penguin Classics books written by women to add to your personal libraries.
The Best of Everything
Rona Jaffe, Rachel Syme
Rona Jaffe's beloved novel about 1950s NYC women in the workplace that paved the way for the #MeToo movement and iconic cultural touchstones like Sex and the City and Mad Men, now for the first time in Penguin Classics, in a 65th anniversary edition with an introduction by New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme
When Rona Jaffe’s superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company.
Bread Givers
Anzia Yezierska, Deborah Feldman
A timeless American novel about an immigrant girl growing up on the Lower East Side who dares to challenge her Orthodox Jewish family’s narrow conceptions of a woman’s place in the world.
The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves, under their rabbi father’s iron fist, to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are “bread givers,” working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah―according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is “less than nothing.” But Sara hungers for more. In defiance of her father, she breaks free, escaping home to see what the American dream holds for her in this poignant coming-of-age tale and striking portrait of feminist rebellion.
The Mirror of My Heart
A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women
An anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before, from acclaimed scholar and translator Dick Davis.
The Mirror of My Heart is a unique and captivating collection of eighty-three Persian women poets, many of whom wrote anonymously or were punished for their outspokenness. One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe'eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present.
The Portable Anna Julia Cooper
Shirley Moody-Turner
A collection of essential writings from the iconic foremother of Black women's intellectual history, feminism, and activism, who helped pave the way for modern social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name
The Portable Anna Julia Cooper brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual, and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African American social and political activism.
A Nation of Women
Luisa Capetillo
The groundbreaking feminist and socialist writings of Puerto Rican author and activist Luisa Capetillo
In 1915, Puerto Rican activist Luisa Capetillo was arrested and acquitted for being the first woman to wear men's trousers publicly. While this act of gender-nonconforming rebellion elevated her to feminist icon status in modern pop culture, it also overshadowed the significant contributions she made to the women's movement and anarchist labor movements of the early twentieth century--both in her native Puerto Rico and in the migrant labor belt in the eastern United States. With the volume A Nation of Women, Capetillo's socialist and feminist activism is given the spotlight it deserves with its inclusion of the first English translation of Capetillo's landmark Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer.
The Cancer Journals
Audre Lorde, Tracy K. Smith
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.
First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.
The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu, Royall Tyler, Royall Tyler, Royall Tyler
An abridged edition of the world’s first novel, in a translation that is “likely to be the definitive edition . . . for many years to come” (The Wall Street Journal)
Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel—and is certainly one of its finest. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic.
Royall Tyler’s superior translation is detailed, poetic, and superbly true to the Japanese original while allowing the modern reader to appreciate it as a contemporary treasure. In this deftly abridged edition, Tyler focuses on the early chapters, which vividly evoke Genji as a young man and leave him at his first moment of triumph. This edition also includes detailed notes, glossaries, character lists, and chronologies.
Between Past and Future
“A book to think with through the political impasses and cultural confusions of our day.”
—Harper’s Magazine
Eichmann in Jerusalem
As shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling issues of the twentieth century.
On Revolution
A unique and fascinating look at violent political change by one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Julia Alvarez, Elizabeth Acevedo
A collectible hardcover thirtieth-anniversary edition of Julia Alvarez's modern Latinx classic that gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures, featuring a new foreword by New York Times bestselling, National Book Award–winning novelist Elizabeth Acevedo
The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after the discovery of their father's role in an attempt to overthrow the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean.
More from the Penguin Vitae Series
The Custom of the Country
In the Time of the Butterflies
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Sister Outsider
Little Women
Orlando
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