Alice Walker | ENTERTAINMENT REALM

Women’s History Month: choice quotes by women writers

Posted by Amy Steele in Books, Women/ feminism on March 22, 2014

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter,
one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
–Virginia Woolf

Art is so much more real than life. Some art is much more real than some life, I mean.
–Rebecca West

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple.
–Iris Murdoch

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That’s’ why we have art.
–Joyce Carol Oates

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
–Susan Sontag

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.
–Alice Walker

I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure.
–Amy Tan

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
–May Sarton

Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Iris Murdoch, Joyce Carol Oates, May Sarton, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf

BOOKS: 25 Suggestions for #ReadWomen2014

Posted by Amy Steele in Books on February 6, 2014

As an English major at a women’s college (Simmons College in Boston), I didn’t read as many women authors as you’d think. I remember a Victorian Experience class with George Eliot as one of the authors along with Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, naturally. I took a wonderful summer course at Emerson College that included Edith Wharton on the syllabus and I immediately fell for her. Upon graduating I’ve made up for not reading that many female authors and likely read more female than male authors. As with any business, I know that the literary world’s filled with many more big-name male authors and lesser-known female authors. More literary prizes go to men than to women. Female authors usually get pushed into the “women’s fiction” a.k.a. “chick lit” genre whereas men nearly always write literary fiction, mystery/thriller and nonfiction. There’s little parity. So I’m all for this #ReadWomen2014 movement.

Here are 25 of my favorite books by women, a mix of classic and modern, if you need some reading suggestions: