While Mahatma Gandhi is hailed across the world as a champion of humanity and nonviolent struggle, the struggles of the woman who accompanied him closely all his life, his wife Kasturba Gandhi, remain untold. This playtext, Jagadamba, rights that wrong with a long monologue in which Kasturba speaks from her heart about the different facets of her life—an often difficult marriage, the great man’s selfless immersion in politics and its consequences for their family, their troubled sons, and, most importantly, her own desires and hopes.

Originally conceived in the Marathi language for actress Rohini Hattangadi, who received an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Kasturba in Richard Attenborough’s classic biopic Gandhi, this play charts the journey of a simple girl who went on to become “Jagadamba,” or the “Universal Mother,” as the wife of the Mahatma.

As Shanta Ghokale writes in her introduction: “Wives of great men have hard lives, often lived in negation of values they hold most dear. Jagadamba is the personal feelings of a devoted wife who had held her own in a life made mentally, physically, and morally turbulent by her husband’s ideas and political work.”

Experimental, strange, and unabashedly feminist, Joanna Russ's groundbreaking science fiction grew out of a belief that the genre was ideal for expressing radical thought. Her essays and criticism, meanwhile, helped shape the field and still exercise a powerful influence in both SF and feminist literary studies.Award-winning author and critic Gwyneth Jones offers a new appraisal of Russ's work and ideas. After years working in male-dominated SF, Russ emerged in the late 1960s with Alyx, the uber-capable can-do heroine at the heart of Picnic on Paradise and other popular stories and books. Soon, Russ's fearless embrace of gender politics and life as an out lesbian made her a target for male outrage while feminist classics like The Female Man and The Two of Them took SF in innovative new directions. Jones also delves into Russ's longtime work as a critic of figures as diverse as Lovecraft and Cather, her foundational place in feminist fandom, important essays like "Amor Vincit Foeminam," and her career in academia.

Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns contains all the elements of a riveting adventure story. Through the eyes of the Mother Abbess, María Rosa, the reader is taken along on this journey through wars, pirates, disease, travel on the high seas, and treacherous mountain passes in the Andes. Five nuns set out in the early 1700s from their cloistered convent in Madrid, Spain, to travel halfway around the world to Lima, Peru. The journey lasted three years—an odyssey not all of them would complete. Yet, this unique historical document is so much more than a typical travel narrative. It illuminates the eighteenth-century way of life of religious women on both sides of the Atlantic basin. María Rosa’s lively prose attests to the literary connection among women religious writers of Spain and Latin America. This annotated edition and first-ever English translation of the manuscript will be of interest to scholars, students and anyone who wants to learn more about women’s history.

This edition, which offers a bilingual selection of poetry and selected prose translated into English by the nun-author Cecilia del Nacimiento (1570–1646), increases contemporary scholars’ access to, and therefore understanding of, the Spanish early modern religious and intellectual milieu. A significant, rarely-studied mystic and poet, and member of the Discalced Carmelite Order in the years after St. Teresa of Avila’s death, Cecilia del Nacimiento exemplifies the range of possibilities used by women writers who worked within the conventions of hegemonic discourses, while creating a unique literary voice.
—Stacey Schlau
Professor, Department of Languages and Culture and the Women’s Studies Program
West Chester University, Pennsylvania

Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, lived a long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices. Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his writing soon devolved into mediocrity.

What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a paycheck, writing everything from potboilers to ad copy. Julian was consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one and a longtime mistress in the other.

The younger Hawthorne's name and work ethic gave him influence in spite of his haphazard writing. Julian helped to found Cosmopolitan and Collier's Weekly. As a Hearst stringer, he covered some of the era's most important events: McKinley's assassination, the Galveston hurricane, and the Spanish-American War, among others.

When Julian died at age 87, he had written millions of words and more than 3,000 pieces, out-publishing his father by a ratio of twenty to one. Gary Scharnhorst, after his own long career including works on Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and other famous writers, became fascinated by the leaps and falls of Julian Hawthorne. This biography shows why.

Sometimes June in Eden occupies a garden in a wild landscape. Other times, we’re given a terrain where the coveted tree is one that hides a cell tower, where lungs are likened to ATMs and prayers are sent via text message. Rosalie Ruth Moffett’s debut collection of poetry, June in Eden, questions the human task of naming in a time where there are “new kinds of war that keep / changing the maps,” where little mistakes—preying or praying, for instance—are easily made. The heart of this book is an obsession with language, its slippages and power, what to do when faced with the loss of it. “Ruth,” says our speaker, is “a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore—the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless.” There is, throughout this collection, a dark humor, but one that belies a tenderness or wonder, our human need to “love the world / we made and all its shadows.”
Rosalie Moffett’s June in Eden gives us a speaker bewildered by and in awe of the world: both the miracles and failures of technology, medicine, and imagination. These darkly humorous poems are works of grief and wonder and give us a landscape that looks, from some angles, like paradise.
 

Winner, 2021 Housatonic Book Award
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

You have a history, and a body. You are a history, and a body. Your body has (is) a history, too. As a girl, Julie Marie Wade was uninterested in makeup, boy-watching, and other trappings of conventional girlhood, much to her mother’s disappointment. Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe—movie stars immortalized as feminine ideals, even as they both died tragically and young—were lodestars that threw Wade’s own definition of beauty into relief as she stumbled into adulthood.

Now, in Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, Wade traces the intimate story of coming of age in one particular body (as a lesbian, an only child, a Protestant attending Catholic school). She uses the language and tenets of music, math, religion, fairy tales, poetry, and art to reckon with the many facets of embodiment, sexuality, and love in our contemporary world. The diet industry, popular culture, and her own family all provide rich material for what is ultimately a lyrical and unflinching investigation into the questions that prickle deep within the human heart.