Showing 1-8 of 8 items.

"Sweat"

Written by Zora Neale Hurston

Rutgers University Press

Now frequently anthologized, Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Sweat" was first published in Firell, a legendary literary magazine of the Harlem Renaissance, whose sole issue appeared in November 1926. Among contributions by Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, "Sweat" stood out both for its artistic accomplishment and its exploration of rural Southern black life. In "Sweat" Hurston claimed the voice that animates her mature fiction, notably the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; the themes of marital conflict and the development of spiritual consciousness were introduced as well. "Sweat" exemplifies Hurston's lifelong concern with women's relation to language and the literary possibilities of black vernacular.

  • Copyright year: 1997
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"Tell Me a Riddle"

Tillie Olsen

Rutgers University Press

“Tell Me a Riddle” renders an unforgettable portrait of a working class couple when the gender determined differences in their experiences of poverty and familial life give rise to bitter conflict after almost four decades of marriage.  As she dies from cancer, Eva, the protagonist, recollects a revolutionary past that both critiques and offers hope for the present.

  • Copyright year: 1995
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'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'

Joyce Carol Oates

Rutgers University Press

Joyce Carol Oates’s prize-winning story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited options of adolescent women; the tensions between mothers and daughters; the sexual victimization of women; and the American obsession with violence.  Inspired by a magazine story about a serial killer, its remarkable portrait of the dreamy teenager Connie has made it a feminist classic.  Connie’s life anticipates the emergence of American society from the social innocence of the fifties into the harsher contemporary realities of war, random violence, and crime. 

  • Copyright year: 1994
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Everyday Use

Alice Walker

Rutgers University Press

Alice Walker's early story "Everyday Use" has remained a cornerstone of her work. Her use of quilting as a metaphor for the creative legacy that African Americans inherited from their maternal ancestors changed the way we defined art, women's culture, and African American lives. By putting African American women's voices at the center of the narrative for the first time, "Everyday Use" anticipated the focus of an entire generation of black women writers.

  • Copyright year: 1994
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'Seventeen Syllables'

Hisaye Yamamoto

Edited by King-Kok Cheung
Rutgers University Press

Hisaye Yamamoto's often reprinted tale of a naive American daughter and her Japanese mother captures the essence the cultural and generational conflicts so common among immigrants and their American-born children. On the surface, "Seventeen Syllables" is the story of Rosie and her preoccupation with adolescent life. Between the lines, however, lurks the tragedy of her mother, who is trapped in a marriage of desperation. Tome's deep absorption in writing haiku causes a rift with her husband, which escalates to a tragic event that changes Rosie's life forever.

  • Copyright year: 1994
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"Flowering Judas"

Katherine Anne Porter

Rutgers University Press

Katherine Anne Porter often spoke of her story "Flowering Judas" as the tale she liked best of all her stories because it came the nearest to what she meant it to be. It is the story of Laura, an idealistic woman, who travels to Mexico from Arizona at the age of twenty-two to assist the Obregón Revolution.

  • Copyright year: 1993
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'Yellow Woman'

Leslie Marmon Silko

Edited by Melody Graulich
Rutgers University Press

Ambiguous and unsettling, Silko's "Yellow Woman" explores one woman's desires and changes--her need to open herself to a richer sensuality.  Walking away from her everyday identity as daughter, wife and mother, she takes possession of transgressive feelings and desires by recognizing them in the stories she has heard, by blurring the boundaries between herself and the Yellow Woman of myth. 

  • Copyright year: 1993
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"A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Flannery O'Connor

Edited by Frederick Asals
Rutgers University Press

Presents a chronology of the life of author Flannery O'Conner, comments and letters by the author about the story, and a series of ten critical essays by noted authors about her work

  • Copyright year: 1993
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