'Donna sul filo del tempo' è la storia di Connie Ramos, una donna chicana ingiustamente rinchiusa in un ospedale psichiatrico, e del suo incontro con Luciente, una strana figura androgina apparentemente venuta dall'anno 2137. Attraverso il contatto con Luciente, Connie si ritrova proiettata dalla New York degli anni Settanta - lacerata da violenza, povertà e disuguaglianze - in una comunità che sembra esserne l'antitesi: Mattapoisett, un piccolo villaggio alla foce di un fiume, dove gli abitanti portano curiosi nomi da nativi americani e gestiscono le risorse in un rapporto quasi sacrale con la natura; dove i ruoli di genere sono stati superati e la maternità è un compito condiviso tra donne e uomini; dove il denaro non esiste e la tecnologia è al servizio dei bisogni di tutti. Ma il futuro di Luciente, che tanto contrasta con le privazioni cui è sottoposta Connie nella sua reclusione, non è l'unico possibile, perché altri più minacciosi ne incombono. Un romanzo immaginifico in cui la denuncia sociale si mescola con la favola utopica, e che quasi cinquant'anni fa anticipava temi oggi più urgenti che mai, dai rapporti di potere tra i sessi alla libertà dei corpi, dall'emergenza ambientale alla distribuzione delle ricchezze.

The New York Times bestselling novel of humans in conflict with inhuman events,Gone to Soldiers is “a landmark piece of literary prose…the most thorough and most captivating, most engrossing novel ever written about World War II” (Los Angeles Times).

In this “sweeping epic” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) of World War II, Marge Piercy moves from the United States to Europe, from the North African campaign to New Zealand, from Japan to Palestine, brilliantly recreating the atmosphere of the wartime capitals: the sexual abandon, the luxury and deprivation, the terror and excitement.

Gone to Soldiers interweaves the stories of ten remarkable characters: The New York divorcee and writer of romances-turned-war correspondent... her ex-husband, involved in intelligence for the OSS... Daniel Balaban, whose mission is to crack the Japanese codes... Bernice Coates, who escapes life to fly fighters as a Woman’s Airforce Service Pilot... a painter who parachutes into Nazi-occupied France to fight with the Resistance... Zachary Barrington Taylor, for whom war is the most exciting game... Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who leads Jewish children over the Pyrenees to safety... her sister, Naomi, a troubled adolescent... their cousin, Ruthie Siegal, a touching young woman who tries to keep alive her love for her boyfriend, while working on an assembly line in Detroit... These characters wage memorable and passionate public and private battles, as war casts them into their ultimate dreams and nightmares, daring them to act out their brightest and darkest fantasies.

Written with unmatched authority about the cataclysmic events and passions of war,Gone to Soldiers “is a literary triumph for Marge Piercy and a landmark volume in the literature of war” (USA TODAY).

A treasure trove of new work from one of our most popular poets: poems that range from the Detroit of her childhood to her current life on Cape Cod, from deep appreciations of the natural world to elegies for lost friends and fellow poets.

In her trademark style combining the sublime with gritty reality, Marge Piercy describes the night she was born: 'the sky burned red /over Detroit and sirens sharpened their knives. / The elms made tents of solace over grimy / streets and alley cats purred me to sleep.' She writes in graphic, unflinching language about the poor, banished now by politicians, no longer 'real people like corporations.' There are elegies for her peer group of poets, gone now, whose work she cherishes but from whom she cannot help but want more. There are laments for the suicide of dolphins and for her beloved cats, as she remembers 'exactly how I loved each.' She continues to celebrate Jewish holidays in compellingly original ways, and sings the praises of her marriage and the small pleasures of life. A stunning collection in the best Piercy tradition.

In this collection of short stories, bestselling author Marge Piercy brings us glimpses into the lives of everyday women moving through and making sense of their daily internal and external worlds. Keeping to the engaging, accessible language of Piercy’s novels, the collection spans decades of her writing along with a range of locations, ages, and emotional states of her protagonists. From the first-person account of hoarding and a girl’s narrative of sexual and spiritual discovery to the recounting of a past love affair, each story is a tangible, vivid snapshot in a varied and subtly curated gallery of work. Whether grappling with death, familial relationships, friendship, sex, illness, or religion, Piercy’s writing is as passionate, lucid, insightful, and thoughtfully alive as ever.

Now in paperback: the superb selection from Marge Piercy's nine most recent books, the heart of her mature poems.

This gathering of Piercy's poems is the first selected since Circles on the Water in 1982. These poems chart the milestone events and fierce passions of the poet's middle years: her Judaism, her deep connection with nature, her marriage, her cats, her politics, and in the face of the loss of time and people, her own legacy.

Originally published in 1979, this piece of revolutionary fiction is a bestselling author's classic paean to the 1960s. At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch, who has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the 1960s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement—a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of Life magazine—charismatic, passionate, and totally sure she would prevail. Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. As counterpoint to the underground 1970s, Marge Piercy tells the extraordinary tale of the optimistic era, the thousands of people who were members of Students Against the War, and of the handful who formed a fierce group called the Little Red Wagon. Piercy's characters make vivid and comprehensible the desperation, the courage, and the blind rage of a time when action could appear to some to be a more rational choice than the vote.

Every year, poet and novelist Marge Piercy creates her own Passover seder with a group of family and friends. Babies have been born and grown up, friends have moved or divorced, but the principals continue to gather in her rustic Cape Cod home to participate in a seder that Piercy takes joy in tweaking each spring to make it more meaningful. In this journey through the ritual, Piercy coaxes us toward “a significant contemporary interpretation, rather than an emphasis on what is strictly 'correct' or traditional.” She reminisces about her grandmother, who thought herself unworthy to lead a seder because of her limited Hebrew but presided “morally” at the table; she urges adding an orange to the seder plate; she even describes her heroic efforts to make her own gefilte fish (an experiment not to be repeated).

Piercy offers her distinct slant on each element of the feast and provides dozens of her own wonderful recipes, which she delivers in the same warm, commanding voice as is heard in her poems and prose: “When I told Ira that I was going to explain how to cook matzoh brei, he thought I was crazy. Everybody knows how to make matzoh brei, he said. But I am of the opinion that there is no longer anything that everybody knows how to cook.”

It is in that spirit–no question too simple–that Piercy welcomes readers to her kind of seder: a homemade and personal affair, the kind we all wish we could attend. This charming and instructive book of Passover wisdom, brimming with favorite dishes and Marge Piercy's own moving Passover poems and blessings, invites us to look at an important Jewish ritual in a whole new way.

Post?Civil War New York City is the battleground of the American dream. In this era of free love, emerging rights of women, and brutal sexual repression, Freydeh, a spirited young Jewish immigrant, toils at different jobs to earn passage to America for her family. Learning that her younger sister is adrift somewhere in the city, she begins a determined search that carries her from tenement to brothel to prison—as her story interweaves with those of some of the epoch's most notorious figures: Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony; sexual freedom activist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; and Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose censorship laws are still on the books.

In the tradition of her bestselling World War II epic Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy once again re-creates a turbulent period in American history and explores changing attitudes in a land of sacrifice, suffering, promise, and reward.

Under her mother's constant scrutiny and lost in the shadow of her famous senator father, Melissa is the third child in the politically prominent Dickenson family, where ambition comes first and Melissa often comes last. In college, she meets Blake, a man of mixed race and apparently unknown parentage. His adoptive parents are lawyers whose defense of death-row cases in the past brought them head-to-head with Melissa's father when he was the governor of Pennsylvania.

While Melissa and Blake's attraction is immediate and fiery, a dangerous secret lurks beneath their relationship -- one that could destroy them ... and their families.

Provocative and beautifully written, and dealing with themes of love, honesty, identity, and the consequences of ambition, The Third Child is a remarkable page-turner.

Marge Piercy, a writer who is highly praised as both a poet and a novelist, turns her gaze inward as she shares her thoughts on life and explores her development as a woman and writer. She pays tribute to the one loving constant that has offered her comfort and meaning even as the faces and events in her life have changed -- her beloved cats.

With searing honesty, Piercy tells of her strained childhood growing up in a religiously split, working-class family in Detroit. She examines her myriad friendships and relationships, including two painful early marriages, and reveals their effects on her creativity and career. More than a reminiscence of things past, however, Sleeping With Cats is also a celebration of the present and the future, as Piercy shares her views on aging, creativity, and finding a lasting and improbable love with a man fourteen years younger than herself.

A chronicle of the turbulent and exciting journey of one artist's life, Sleeping With Cats is a deeply intimate, unforgettable story.

Suzanne Blume has known success and disappointment in equal measure. A respected lawyer who survived two marriages and put two children through college, she now faces the disquieting prospect of her wayward older daughter moving back home. But more troubling still is the news that her mother, a woman of legendary independence who has never truly accepted her daughter nor approved of her choices, has been felled by age and illness. And, for the first time in her life, she needs Suzanne's help.

Intertwining the lives of three generations of contemporary women, master storyteller Marge Piercy plunges into the deepest, most elemental basics of life -- love, aging, illness, and death -- and emerges with a brave, compassionate exploration of the volatile ground between mothers and daughters.

Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize

About Marge Piercy's collection of her old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: 'The Art of Blessing the Day is an exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship.

'These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment'  and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments, small things become charged with memories and feelings: paper snowflakes, buttons, one bird, a bottle-cap flower made from a ginger ale top and crystal beads.

'She celebrates the body in rollicking, gusto-filled poems like 'Belly good' and 'The chuppah,' where 'our bodies open their portals wide.' So much that is richly sensuous: 'hands that caressed you,  . . . untied the knot of pleasure and loosened your flesh till it fluttered,' and lush praise for 'life in our spines, our throats,  our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.'

'I love the humor in poems like 'Eat fruit,' the nostalgia and joy in 'The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree,' the fresh, beautiful images of nature--'In winter . . .the sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.'

'I admire Piercy's sense of the past alive in the present, in personal and social history. The poems are memorials, like the yahrtzeit candle in a glass. 'We lose and we go on losing,' but the poems are never far from harsh joy, the joy that is 'the wine of life.'

'Growing up haunted by Holocaust ghosts is an echo throughout the book, and some of the strongest poems are about the Holocaust, poems that become the voices of those who had no voice: 'What you  carry in your blood is us,  the books we did not write, music we could not make, a world  gone from gristle to smoke, only  as real now as words can make it.'

'Marge Piercy's words make such a moving variety of experiences beautifully and forcefully real.'

After his dreams of playing baseball in the Majors fall short and his marriage ends, David Greene returns to his small hometown on Cape Cod. There he meets the eminent professor, Gordon Stone, and his beautiful wife, Judith Silver, with whom he soon falls into a passionate affair. Into this explosive mix, a young woman appears--a single mother at the end of her emotional rope. Crystal desperately needs David. Yet caught between two women, David bears witness to a heartbreaking turn of events that seems as inevitable as the push and pull of ocean waves. . . .

"Marge Piercy is a raw, tough, willfull, magnificent novelist."
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Set against the early days of the modern feminist movement, SMALL CHANGES tells the story of sensual Miriam Berg, who trades her doctorate for marriage and security, but still hungers for a life of her ow,n and shy, frightened Beth who is running from the life Miriam seeks and into a new world of different ideas and a different kind of love.....


From the Paperback edition.

Opening with a powerful cycle of elegies for her long-distant, half-brother, this major new collection by one of our bestselling poets then goes on to include both serious and funny poems about women and poems about the precarious balance of nature, ending with the beautiful, life-affirming "The Art of Blessing the Day." 160 pp.

Growing up in Detroit in the 1950s, and going to college when the first seeds of sexual freedom are being sown, Jill and Donna are coming of age in an exciting, turbulent time. Wry, independent Jill thrives in the new free-spirited world, while her beautiful cousin Donna desperately searches for a man to make her life whole. As each cousin is driven by different demons and desires, they eventually realize that they cannot overcome fundamental differences in each others' lives. Still, as their futures assume contrary paths, Jill and Donna realize that they may be separated, but they'll never be truly divided from one another.
"Rings with passionate awareness...honest and impressive."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD


From the Paperback edition.

In a stunning tour-de-force, Marge Piercy has woven a tapestry of World War II, of six women and four men, who fought and died, worked and worried, and moved through the dizzying days of the war. A compelling chronicle of humans in conflict with inhuman events, GONE TO SOLIDERS is an unforgettable reading experience and a stirring tribute to the remarkable survival of the human spirit.
"Panoramic...This is a sweeping epic in the best sense."
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER