Through home sewing, Sarah A. Gordon examines domestic labor, marketing practices, changing standards of femininity, and understandings of class, gender, and race from 1890 to 1930. As ready-made garments became increasingly available due to industrialization, many women, out of necessity or choice, continued to make their own clothing. In doing so, women used a customary female skill both as a means of supporting traditional ideas and as a tool of personal agency. The shifting meanings of sewing formed a contested space in which businesses promoted sewing machines as tools for maintaining domestic harmony, women interpreted patterns to suit-or flout-definitions of appropriate appearances, and girls were taught to sew in ways that reflected beliefs about class, race, and region. Unlike studies of clothing that focus on changes in fashion, "Make it Yourself" looks at the social and cultural processes surrounding home production. Gordon examines sewing clothing as work, whether resented or enjoyed, and the function of that work for families and individuals from a range of backgrounds. Another unique element is Gordon's use of an unusually wide variety of source materials, from diaries, photographs, and government pamphlets to tissue paper patterns, dresses, sewing workbooks, and paper dolls. This "hands on" approach, combined with an accessible writing style, connects the reader to the women and girls who are at the heart of her study. Altogether, "Make it Yourself" provides a new perspective on a widespread yet often neglected form of women's work.

"The Kingdom of Mathalot has been cursed The royal child is missing. Learn more about the villagers while searching for the missing heir." It is often difficult for a very creative child to learn mathematical concepts. The author struggled with this herself in the first and second grade. Memorizing the concrete concepts did not work for her. To help her learn addition, subtraction, and multiplication, she made up stories and personalities in her creative little head for the numbers. This is the basis for this book.

Let's say you're a people person. You like helping people, taking them soup when they're sick, inviting their college children for dinner, solving their computer problems, supporting them in their business efforts. Then one day you realize you're always on the answering end of the phone, and you have no life of your own. So you say to yourself, "I need to get away, and tell nobody where I am." This is what happened to A1QTEE, owner/operator of the social networking site, Blaq-kawfee.com except she left a message, "Tell them I died." Tell Them I Died is a romantic adventure that centers on the loves and lives of Angela and "Bodine" Beaudoin and their friends on the social networking site, Blaq-Kawfee.com. Angela and Bodine are retired and live in Raleigh, North Carolina. Every day they interact with friends all over the world on Blaq-Kawfee.com until Angela receives a phone call from Carlton telling her that his mother, A1QTEE, the owner/operator of Blaq-Kawfee died a month ago. Instantly, Angela smells foul play and finds herself working overtime, much to the chagrin of Bodine, to figure out what happened to her dear friend.

Imagine you gave a baby up for adoption forty years ago, and after years of trying to find her, she finds you. Now come the hard questions. She's healthy, beautiful, and successful, but she wants to know why you gave her away and why you didn't marry her father. And there is also the unspoken question of "What kind of black woman gives her baby away?" How do you explain to her that giving her away was the best gift you could offer? This is Sarah Weathersby's first published work, a coming-of-age-in-the-sixties-single-black-pregnant and on the way to Germany, memoir.

Family stories are easily lost, especially in these times when children leave home and move far and wide from the place where it all began. Family reunions are times when the old stories may be repeated, but the young ones often don't listen. Some stories are never retold because of embarrassment or feelings of shame, and the failure to recognize that regardless of how dour our circumstances may have been, that was where we came from. Even our mixed heritage should be a source of our strength. My siblings and I often heard the stories of our grandmother, Mattie. My sister LaVerne, as the oldest had the foresight to write down the story as told by our Mother before she died in 1958.

Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature focuses on the intersection of food and humor across several medieval narrative genres. This book is a part of the Purdue Studies in Romance Literature Series.

The Lost Thing is a collection of poems exploring absence and loss and the potential of language to witness that loss. These poems capture the certain fading away--of family, individuals, places, and emotions. The inevitable erasures of time are countered by poetry that is often startling and compelling, asserting the necessity for a clear-eyed sensibility that is both honest and humane. The poet steadfastly refuses to settle for a facile cheerfulness or inspiration. Her territory is wide-ranging, sometimes wry, and relentlessly probing, with an eye always to the ironic, the strange, and the downright curious. In images that are precise and memorable, Gordon's poetry is hard-hitting and provocative, covering diverse subjects from the worlds of art, poetry, history, as well as the quotidian, topics often turned inside out to ensure the reader's focus and renewed attention.

Disturbing, ironic, haunting, brutal. What inner struggles led Flannery O'Connor to create fiction that elicits such labels? Much of the tension that drives O'Connor's writing, says Sarah Gordon, stems from the natural resistance of her imagination to the obedience expected by her male-centered church, society, and literary background.

Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination shows us a writer whose world was steeped in male presumption regarding women and creativity. The book is filled with fresh perspectives on O'Connor's Catholicism; her upbringing as a dutiful, upper-class southern daughter; her readings of Thurber, Poe, Eliot, and other arguably misogynistic authors; and her schooling in the New Criticism.

As Gordon leads us through a world premised on expectations at odds with O'Connor's strong and original imagination, she ranges across all of O'Connor's fiction and many of her letters and essays. While acknowledging O'Connor's singular situation, Gordon also gleans insights from the lives and works of other southern writers, Eudora Welty, Caroline Gordon, and Margaret Mitchell among them.

Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination draws on Sarah Gordon's thirty years of reading, teaching, and discussing one of our most complex and influential authors. It takes us closer than we have ever been to the creative struggles behind such literary masterpieces as Wise Blood and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."