Alix Kates Shulman

Sasha Davis recalls the experiences that followed her high school initiation into the rites of middle class society

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

Emma Goldman

The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism

Heather and Mack McKay seem to have it all: wealth, a dream house in the suburbs, and two adorable children along with the nannies to raise them. But their marriage has lost its savor: she is a frustrated writer and he longs for a cultural trophy to hang on his belt. During a chance encounter in LA, Mack invites exiled writer Zoltan Barbu—once lionized as a political hero, now becoming a has-been—to live with him and his wife in their luxurious home. The plan should provide Heather with literary companionship, Mack with cultural cachet, and Zoltan himself with a pastoral environment in which to overcome his writer’s block and produce a masterpiece. Of course, as happens with triangles, complications arise—some hilarious, some sad—as the three players pursue a game that leads to shifting alliances and sexual misadventures. Shulman pokes fun at our modern malaise (why is having it all never enough?), even as she traces the ever-changing dynamics within a marriage. Ménage is a bravura performance from one of America’s most renowned feminist writers.

A Novel

Menage

In Every Woman's Life...

A Novel by Alix Kates Shulman

Memoirs of an Ex-prom Queen

“A respectful and relevant biography of the fiery crusader” from the feminist activist and author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (The New York Times Book Review). Writer, anarchist, revolutionary, feminist—Emma Goldman was all these things and more. She was a fiery advocate, taking bold stands on a wide range of issues including women’s rights, homosexuality, capitalism, and the military draft. Her tumultuous childhood in Tsarist Russia fostered her rebelliousness and emboldened her opposition to violent authority. Upon arriving in New York in 1885, Goldman found a home in the anarchist movement in the United States. She traveled the country to deliver lectures on anarchism, and was jailed for urging unemployed workers to demand the food they needed. Goldman also aggressively supported Margaret Sanger’s effort to educate women about birth control. Goldman was deported to Russia as fears of an anarchist revolution in the US grew. But back in her homeland, she didn’t find the socialist paradise of worker equality and empowerment she had hoped would take root after the Bolshevik Revolution. Disillusioned, she left the Soviet Union and traveled the world to write and agitate on behalf of her causes. Goldman’s radical legacy endures, revived during the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. Her story provides inspiration for any woman who ever wanted to make a difference in the world.

The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman

To the Barricades

A comprehensive collection of writings and lectures by one of twentieth-century America’s most important political activists, with two essays by editor Alix Kates Shulman, a leader of feminism’s second wave Emma Goldman’s fiery speeches and essays made her a household name in the early 1900s. Collected here are the most significant of her writings, supplemented with an essay on Goldman’s feminist politics and a short biography, both by bestselling author Alix Kates Shulman. Including both published and previously unpublished works, Red Emma Speaks is an important historical volume and a fascinating look at the life and times of a major early feminist figure.

An Emma Goldman Reader

Red Emma Speaks

Il senso dell'amore. Storia di un matrimonio

A provocative collection of essays by one of the foremost thinkers of second-wave feminism In a career spanning four decades, Alix Kates Shulman has written on issues ranging from marriage, sex, and divorce to religious identity, age, and family devotion. Throughout her diverse body of work runs a staunch advocacy of equal rights and social justice. Beginning with her provocative essay “A Marriage Agreement,” written in 1969, and continuing through to the heartrending “Caring for an Ill Spouse, and Other Caregivers,” written in 2011, this collection provides a window into the social movements that defined an era. Witty, stirring, and poignant, A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays illustrates how each generation, in Shulman’s words, “can do no more than add its bit to the endless river of consciousness and change.”

Four Decades of Feminist Writing

A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays

A personal story of crisis, commitment, and hope from the best-selling author of Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen One day it happens, the dreaded thing that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you've half expected it, you don't know what form it will take or when it will come, and whether or not you will rise to the challenge. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a coastal Maine island in a remote seaside cabin with no electricity, running water, or road to reach it—where the very isolation that makes it a perfect artist's retreat renders it as risky as life itself. She woke to find that her beloved seventy-five-year-old husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, naked and deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same—but not the same. Each of us has imagined with dread the occurrence of just such an event outside our control that will permanently alter the course of our lives. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties and risks—and surprising rewards—she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a grim life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.

A Marriage Transformed

To Love What Is

A biography of the anarchist who was driven by her hatred of oppression.

An insightful story of three women that wittily portrays the pleasures and pitfalls of marriage, parenthood, and being female in middle-class America After the turmoil of the feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s, three women are drawn together by family and friendship. Rosemary Streeter is a married mother of two who believes in the strength of family—even while having an affair. For Rosemary, “marriage is about family. It’s about raising children. It’s an economic arrangement. Passion has nothing to do with it, except maybe to get it started.” Meanwhile, hard-nosed, glamorous, and successful journalist Nora Kennedy claims to enjoy the freedom of being unmarried and childless, but secretly fantasizes about living with her married boyfriend. Rosemary’s teenage daughter, Daisy, struggles to acquire the wisdom of womanhood in the confusion of 1980s America. Rich with humor and compassion about the complexities of marriage and everyday life, In Every Woman’s Life . . . offers a fresh perspective on the role of women in society and on the American family.

In Every Woman's Life . . .

A provocative coming-of-age chronicle of the Women’s Liberation Movement, as seen through the eyes of a young woman who flees midwestern suburban life to find her true self in 1950s New York City Eighteen-year-old Zane IndiAnna feels trapped by life in her small midwestern town. So she sets out for New York, landing in Greenwich Village during the revolutionary days of Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. Zane’s story of rebellious political awakening plays out over the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, mirroring the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement and bringing the evolution of American feminism to vivid life. Stirring and unforgettable, Burning Questions is a timeless story filled with humor, passion, and revolutionary spirit.

Burning Questions

An honest, unflinching reflection on the meaning of family, from the author of the bestselling novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Alix Kates Shulman wasn’t looking forward to helping her aging parents clean out their house and prepare for the final years of their lives. She had fled suburban Cleveland at age twenty to carve out her own life in New York City. But as she began dismantling their house of forty years, the task evolved into a precious learning experience she would never forget. Shulman discovers the lives of two colorful, vibrant people from whom she remained distant while pursuing a literary career. She finds herself grappling with regret and seeking redemption in the search for what it means to be a good daughter. With warmth and insight, Shulman sheds light on a complex, painful event that many adults eventually face—the final trip home.

A Memoir

A Good Enough Daughter

At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to stay alone in a small cabin on an island off the Maine coast.

Drinking the Rain

A teenage runaway from Maine gets an eye-opening introduction to life on the streets of New York City Robin catches a bus from her home in Maine to New York City to escape her tyrannical father. With no money and little hope of finding a decent job, the sixteen-year-old girl is easy prey for a hard-luck pimp named Prince. He quickly gains Robin’s trust and introduces her to the seedy underbelly of the city, a world of sex, drugs, and lies in which she must fight to survive. A homeless woman named Owl, who was once beautiful and bold, befriends Robin as they both struggle to take control of their lives. On the Stroll is a moving, gritty picture of the people who find themselves on society’s margins and a heartrending look at the ultimate costs of homelessness and prostitution.

On the Stroll

Honor Moore

Two pioneering feminists present a groundbreaking collection recovering a generation's revolutionary insights for today When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women’s consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women’s civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. This was the women’s liberation movement, and writing—powerful, personal, and prophetic—was its beating heart. Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works—many long out-of-print and hard to find—that catalyzed and propelled the women’s liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi’s Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life—changes too often taken for granted today—but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved.

Alix Kates Shulman

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