Named a Favorite Book for Southerners in 2020 by Garden & Gun "Donovan is such a vivid writer-smart, raunchy, vulnerable and funny- that if her vaunted caramel cakes and sugar pies are half as good as her prose, well, I'd be open to even giving that signature buttermilk whipped cream she tops her desserts with a try."-Maureen Corrigan, NPR Noted chef and James Beard Award-winning essayist Lisa Donovan helped establish some of the South's most important kitchens, and her pastry work is at the forefront of a resurgence in traditional desserts. Yet Donovan struggled to make a living in an industry where male chefs built successful careers on the stories, recipes, and culinary heritage passed down from generations of female cooks and cooks of color. At one of her career peaks, she made the perfect dessert at a celebration for food-world goddess Diana Kennedy. When Kennedy asked why she had not heard of her, Donovan said she did not know. "I do," Kennedy said, "Stop letting men tell your story." OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER is Donovan's searing, beautiful, and searching chronicle of reclaiming her own story and the narrative of the women who came before her. Her family's matriarchs found strength and passion through food, and they inspired Donovan's accomplished career. Donovan's love language is hospitality, and she wants to welcome everyone to the table of good food and fairness. Donovan herself had been told at every juncture that she wasn't enough: she came from a struggling southern family that felt ashamed of its own mixed race heritage and whose elders diminished their women. She survived abuse and assault as a young mother. But Donovan's salvations were food, self-reliance, and the network of women in food who stood by her. In the school of the late John Egerton, OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER is an unforgettable Southern journey of class, gender, and race as told at table.

Imagine beginning your life no longer than a table knife in a hospital that lacks even an incubator. Your premature body decides it has had enough, and your heart stops beating. Then a nurse breaths life back into you. Through the birthing process, a brain injury causes cerebral palsy, and normal body movements do not develop. Life is hard, and help is difficult to find. That is how Gail Johnson's life began in 1932. Her life is littered with miracles that came from decisions made by strong, passionate people. Through a combination of those decisions, surgeries, training, and perseverance, Gail has lived a full life. No Time to Quit takes you on a journey through many of the major challenges and events of her life. It shows that there truly is no time to quit.

In Dilemmas of Adulthood, Nancy Rosenberger investigates the nature of long-term resistance in a longitudinal study of more than fifty Japanese women over two decades. Between 25 and 35 years of age when first interviewed in 1993, the women represent a generation straddling the stable roles of post-war modernity and the risky but exciting possibilities of late modernity. By exploring the challenges they pose to cultural codes, Rosenberger builds a conceptual framework of long-term resistance that undergirds the struggles and successes of modern Japanese women. Her findings resonate with broader anthropological questions about how change happens in our global-local era and suggests a useful model with which to analyse ordinary lives in the late modern world. Rosenberger's analysis establishes long-term resistance as a vital type of social change in late modernity where the sway of media, global ideas, and friends vies strongly with the influence of family, school, and work. Women are at the nexus of these contradictions, dissatisfied with post-war normative roles in family, work, and leisure and yet-in Japan as elsewhere-committed to a search for self that shifts uneasily between self-actualization and selfishness. The women's rich narratives and conversations recount their ambivalent defiance of social norms and attempts to live diverse lives as acceptable adults. In an epilogue, their experiences are framed by the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which is already shaping the future of their long-term resistance. Drawing on such theorists as Ortner, Ueno, the Comaroffs, Melucci, and Bourdieu, Rosenberger posits that long-term resistance is a process of tense, irregular, but insistent change that is characteristic of our era, hammered out in the in-between of local and global, past and future, the old virtues of womanhood and the new virtues of self-actualization. Her book is essential for anyone wishing to understand how Japanese women have manoeuvred their lives in the economic decline and pushed for individuation in the 1990s and 2000s.

Italian Women Writers, 1800-2000: Boundaries, Borders, and Transgression investigates narrative, autobiography, and poetry by Italian women writers from the nineteenth century to today, focusing on topics of spatial and cultural boundaries, border identities, and expressions of excluded identities. This book discusses works by known and less-known writers as well as by some new writers: Sibilla Aleramo, La Marchesa Colombi, Giuliana Morandini, Elsa Morante, Neera, Matilde Serao, Ribka Sibhatu, Patrizia Valduga, Annie Vivanti, Laila Waida, among others; writers who in their works have manifested transgression to confinement and entrapment, either social, cultural, or professional; or who have given significance to national and transnational borders, or have employed particular narrative strategies to give voice to what often exceeds expression. Through its contributions, the volume demonstrates how Italian women writers have negotiated material as well as social and cultural boundaries, and how their literary imagination has created dimensions of boundary-crossing.

The journey of Pauline, as she ends a marriage and travels to live in Southern California, her ulti mate dream at the ti me. She goes through personal growth, empowerment, and life changes on her own for the fi rst ti me at the age of thirty-eight. She is enjoying the lifestyle of living in Southern California, starti ng her career over aft er twenty years, dati ng again aft er twelve years, and fi nding answers to her most sought-out questi ons.

When Delores Savage was eight years old, she moved with her family from the hills and the cotton fields of Oak City, North Carolina, to the big city streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In "My Savage Journey," she tells the story of her life in both North Carolina and Philadelphia. She describes going to school and getting her first job at the Robinson Department store. Later, she would spend ten years working at Wanamaker's Department Store, long considered to be the first department store in the United States; now she shares stories of customers-good and bad.

She recalls the story of her mother's unhappy marriage to her father in North Carolina and of her mother's rape at age twelve by their pastor-an event that produced her daughter, Annabelle. Because of the times, though, this fact was not shared with anyone outside their family for fear of reprisal from the pastor. Delores also takes us through her life and the birth of her five children. She has lived a life full of ups and downs, love and challenges, but she takes pride in her accomplishments.

"My Savage Journey" is the biography of a strong, faithful woman who is devoted to her remaining family. It's a life story you won't soon forget.

Growing up in Poland in the 1930s, Rita Braun had many hopes and dreams for the future. When she was nine years old, however, World War II touched her once-idyllic life, transforming paradise on earth into an indescribable hell. In Fragments of my Life, Braun tells her story--from her birth in 1930 to living in Brazil today, where she works to ensure no one forgets the more than six million Jewish people who lost their lives during the Holocaust.

Including many photos, Fragments of my Life provides firsthand insight into the horrors of the war. As a nine-year old on her school vacation, Braun watched as military aircraft streaked across the skies above her parents' farm. She never imagined they would leave behind much more than a trail of smoke. This memoir details what she experienced as a Jewish girl trying to stay alive during World War II. Braun describes watching the selection process and deportation of friends and family, living under both Russian and German rule, using a fake identity, surviving in a gated and guarded ghetto, escaping and hiding for her life, and witnessing the many tragedies of war.

Candid and detailed, Fragments of my Life chronicles one survivor's experiences from a woman of the final generation who can say, "I lived through the Holocaust."

Cette etude s'inscrit dans un courant de pensee tres actuel: la recherche d'un nouvel equilibre entre hommes et femmes provoque toute une efflorescence d'ouvrages et d'articles sur la question feminine, renouvelant en quelque sorte la 'Querelle des femmes'. Les dix-septieme et dix-huitieme siecles ont ete, depuis l'essor de la preciosite jusqu'a la Revolution, un moment d'intense reflexion sur la feminite. Cette enquete permet de mieux saisir les enjeux du debat contemporain: elle ne constitue pas un travail litteraire tourne vers le passe, mais surtout un travail qui est conscience accrue du present. Susceptible d'interesser tous ceux qui travaillent sur l'ecriture feminine, l'ouvrage s'interroge sur le statut de la femme dans la litterature utopique francaise de 1675 a 1795. Car l'existence meme de la femme est problematique en terre utopique: alors qu'on aurait pu penser que l'equilibre du classicisme conjugue a l'elan des Lumieres eut permis a la litterature utopique d'inventer une place progressiste a la femme dans une societe donnee, le feminin demeure le 'sexe second' - mere ou amante - selon l'expression de Retif de La Bretonne, voire disparait en tant que personne, absorbe par le masculin des etres androgynes crees par Foigny ou Casanova. Seules les marges de l'utopie narrative classique avec Sade et sa societe de bohemiens, ou l'utopie 'experimentale' de Du Laurens, Imirce ou la Fille de la nature, parviennent a effacer la part d'ombre qui recouvre la feminite. Un statut plus lumineux lui est alors offert, qui tend a abolir le conflit, constant en utopie, entre liberte individuelle ou recherche personnelle du bonheur, et gestion rationnelle et collective d'une societe. De ce fait, la feminite s'elabore en critique du systeme utopique dont elle indique le degre d'instabilite: l'etude des mythes qui sous-tendent l'imaginaire utopique est particulierement revelatrice de ce processus. L'enquete s'appuie prioritairement sur les utopies narratives de Foigny, Fenelon, Prevost, Rousseau, Casanova et Sade, theatrales de Marivaux, programmatiques de Retif et 'experimentale' de Du Laurens. Mais ce corpus implique des comparaisons avec d'autres utopies, comme celles de Veiras, de Diderot, ce qui fait du present ouvrage la premiere etude d'ensemble sur la femme dans les utopies francaises des dix-septieme et dix-huitieme siecles.

This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through "negotiation"-a concept that accounts for artistic practices outside the duality of resistance/accommodation-and "self-fashioning," Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today. Domestic Negotiations covers a range of archival sources and cultural productions, including the self-fashioning of the "chili queens" of San Antonio, Texas, Jovita Gonzalez's romance novel Caballero , the home economics career and cookbooks of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Sandra Cisneros's "purple house controversy" and her acclaimed text The House on Mango Street , Patssi Valdez's self-fashioning and performance of domestic space in Asco and as a solo artist, Diane Rodriguez's performance of domesticity in Hollywood television and direction of domestic roles in theater, and Alma Lopez's digital prints of domestic labor in Los Angeles. With intimate close readings, McMahon shows how Mexicanas and Chicanas shape domestic space to construct identities outside of gendered, racialized, and xenophobic rhetoric.