The only full-length biography of Grace Paley, that joyful, funny, smart, and intensely interested woman, is now out in a new edition – with a new design, new cover, new preface, and many text edits. Working on Grace Paley’s Life Stories, Judith Arcana had unprecedented access to Grace, her family, and close friends; the result is a thorough exploration of the roots of her political consciousness, tracing her activism as it grew into her writing.  A committed activist and globally celebrated author, Grace Paley sat down in front of rolling tanks and rearing horses, got arrested on the White House lawn, and traveled across the world to negotiate prisoner exchanges during the U.S. war in Vietnam.  She was one of the great masters of the short story form, a model for everyone writing stories in any language, in any country.  Though Grace died in 2007, her work as an activist and writer is alive in this book, teaching us what resistance means: Calling for liberation, peace, and justice; crying out to save the burning earth; demanding healthcare for all, and the right of women to determine the course of our lives.

If you want to know how Grace Paley came to be a tireless political activist and renowned writer, read Grace Paley’s Life Stories. This book tells the story of the life from which Grace Paley made her extraordinary stories.

We must keep Grace Paley’s Life Stories always available. Grace is still an exemplar to writers who would tell good stories, and to citizens who would save the world.

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Jane Lazarre is a widely published novelist and essayist who has spent more than fifty years as a white woman living in an African American family. Married over all these years, she raised two grown sons and is now a grandmother.

A powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, this is the story of the education of an American woman. Praised by writers from Tillie Olsen to Grace Paley to Alice Walker, this memoir has been taught and read by numerous students and teachers interested in stories of motherhood, African American autobiography, whiteness and American literature. In this widely read and praised memoir, Lazarre recounts the stories of her own life and its transformations through a deeper understanding of the world. From a crucial moment as a mother in which her consciousness is transformed, to comprehending the complexities and history of whiteness, she describes each step of her intellectual and personal journey toward understanding what she calls “the whiteness of whiteness.”

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Inheritance is a novel of American race history: of relationships between people of different and mixed race heritages, of love, friendship and profound loyalty, and of deep ignorance, violence and hatred. The story moves from from the present time, back to the early 20th century in a Connecticut city, once a stop on the Underground Railroad, then back to the period of Slavery shortly before the Civil War in Maryland, on the western coast of the Chesapeake Bay. The white characters are all connected through a Black family, whose four generations move through the novel. This is a story of our shared inheritance, of what it means, in this nation’s history and present, to be so called “mixed” racially, and what it means within the lives of the people who carry these meanings and questions within themselves.

The voice of the narrator, Samantha Reed, a young woman of mixed American heritages, remembering a dramatic transformation in her identity when she was 16, is reading, writing, learning this history as it has played out in her heritage. A young naive white woman, daughter of a slave holder, becomes a fervent abolitionist. An immigrant Jewish woman falls in love with a black oyster-man while being deeply attracted, in a way she does not understand, to his wife. An Italian American writer considers her devotion to the form of fiction and to the idea of “color blindness” as she encounters the demands of her racially mixed granddaughter for “the truth,” and, later, by a black woman writer of memoir. Inheritance is an American story of how history is not only in our world, but deeply within ourselves.

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In Worlds Beyond My Control, Lazarre revisits the landscape of her pioneering first book, The Mother Knot, exploring with searing honesty the complexities of motherhood. In this later work, she tackles the emotionally demanding time when separation from children begins. Moving from a traditional narrative style, through the immediacy of a journal, and finally to a direct autobiographical voice, the novel interrogates genre itself while following one woman’s odyssey through a conflicted and confusing world. A white mother of black sons, Julia suddenly finds herself at a loss. One son is leaving home, a beloved child is struck with a serious illness, and throughout the city the dangers of racism’s physical, verbal and emotional violence toward black boys and young men increases daily as her beloved sons make their way through their growing lives. Fearful of crime in a crime-ridden city, learning to be fearful as well of police, Julia feels she is both “stark white and visible,” to her family and “trying to bridge their differences with her voice.”  A writer in danger of losing her words, a mother who fears the loss of control, this is the story of a mother and a writer who learns to accept the limits of her power – the endurance to face a new relationship to husband and sons – to reclaim the power she has always felt in what she names “sex and words.”

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Seeker: A Sea Odyssey is a delightful mix of adventure, exploration, introspection and reflection, an engaging account of how the author and her partner fulfilled their dream to see the world, discovering, as they adapted en route to different cultures, unanticipated personal strengths and weaknesses. This beautifully crafted account reveals the author’s evolving relationships with her partner, family, the strangers they met along the way, and life.

Rita Pomade…has written a crackling sea story, an adventure yarn to stand with any of them – except that this sailor is not a swashbuckling, peg-legged pirate with an eye patch but a soft-spoken, introspective woman with a keen eye and (although she never mentions it) bottomless courage. She navigates her way through raging monsoons and real-life pirates from Taipei to the Suez to Mallorca with a sure hand, steady nerves and the intelligence to delve deeply into an experience most of us can only read about.

A fascinating tale that takes the reader into the mind and heart of a true explorer. A glimpse into what so many of us would like to do, it is also masterfully written.

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