Braided Lives - Softcover

Marge Piercy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604864427 ISBN 13: 9781604864427

Publisher: PM PRESS, 2013

Synopsis

Marge Piercy carries her portrait of the American experience back into the 1950s - that closed, repressive time in which forces for the upheavals of the 60s ticked away underground. Spanning 20 years, Braided Lives tells the powerful, unsentimental story of two young women coming of age. It features Jill (the fiercely independent poet) and her cousin and closest friend Donna (beautiful and alluring) as they reach the understanding that to control their lives they must fight. Braided Lives is an enduring portrait of the past and its impact on the tenuous present.

About this title

Review:

"This book demonstrates the maturation of Piercy's native talent for story-telling . . . we would have to look to a French writer like Colette or to American writers of another generation, like May Sarton, to find anyone who writes as tenderly as Piercy about life's redeeming pleasures - sex, of course, but also the joys of good food, good conversation, and the reassuring little rituals like feeding the cats, watering the plant, weeding the garden." --Judith Paterson, "Washington Post Book World"

""Braided Lives" is a big, rich book. This writer just gets better and better. She is allowing more flashes of humor and more generosity . . . her sure novelist's hold on making a good story, her poet's eye for careful detail . . . "Braided Lives" is a novel that tries not to simplify but to clarify . . . and by so doing, it adds a great deal to our understanding of how things came to be as they are, and what some of yesterday might have meant." --Marcie Hershman, "Boston Globe"

"Honest and impressive power. No writer I know of has so thoroughly explored the changing, despairing, frightening, and complicated world of a young college girl becoming a woman." --"Washington Post Book World"

"Marge Piercy is the political novelist of our time. More: she is the conscience." --Marilyn French

"A magnificent achievement. With beauty and mastery, [Piercy] palpably creates, recreates a decade. "Braided Lives" is one of those rare, rich, valuable books that reveal how realities, class, sex, one's times--shape generations." --Tillie Olsen

"Absorbing. Marge Piercy recreates the college campus of the fifties with all the desire, confusion, hypocrisy, and pain of young women's emerging sexuality." --Alix Kates

"A delicious binge of a book. I had a wonderful time reading "Braided Lives," crying real tears at the sad parts and feeling real elation at the happy ones." --"San Francisco Chronicle"

About the Author:

Marge Piercy is the author of 17 novels, including "Dance the Eagle to Sleep," "Gone to Soldiers," "Vida," and "Woman on the Edge of Time"; numerous volumes of poetry; and a critically acclaimed memoir, "Sleeping with Cats." She is the recipient of four honorary doctorates and has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time. She lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: PM PRESS
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1604864427
• ISBN 13: 9781604864427
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 456