'What if she isn't happy - does she think men are happy in this world? Doesn't she know how lucky she is to be a woman?' The pioneering Betty Friedan here identifies the strange problem plaguing American housewives, and examines the malignant role advertising plays in perpetuating the myth of the 'happy housewife heroine'. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The Path Has No Name is the fascinating description of the search for an authentic spiritual life. The longing to be able to live a spiritual life while being in the world--having a career and raising two children--was fulfilled for Annette Kaiser after her encounter with Sufi teacher Irina Tweedie. Annette Kaiser demonstrates that the Sufi path as a path of love does not demand avoidance of the world but rather an active presence in the middle of it; that this path is not about philosophy or religion but rather a way of life that can lead us to our essential nature.

Mary Field Belenky, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock, hoping to carry Belenky's theoretical work in the bestselling Women's Ways of Knowing into the realm of everyday life, created the Listening Partners project, designed to help young women isolated in rural poverty give voice to their personal and communal needs and come together to create social change. A Tradition That Has No Name explores this project and the work of other women who have created organizations to give voice to and strengthen traditions of community organizing and leadership, particularly as they have developed in communities of women marginalized by race and class. Ranging across cultures and classes—from struggling inner-city neighborhoods to affluent middle-class suburbs, from African American communities in the South to poor rural communities in Vermont—the book teaches us how to appreciate the ways women create networks of listening and community-building, and how to bring these little-recognized traditions of women's activism to the forefront of public life. It is these “public homeplaces” women create together, the authors argue, that hold the key for empowering communities and creating social change.

What really happened on the first Thanksgiving? How did a British drinking song become the US national anthem? And what makes Superman so darned American? Every tradition, even the noblest and most cherished, has a history, none more so than in the United States—a nation born with relative indifference, if not hostility, to the past. Most Americans would be surprised to learn just how recent (and controversial) the origins of their traditions are, as well as how those origins are often related to such divisive forces as the trauma of the Civil War or fears for American identity stemming from immigration and socialism. In pithy, entertaining chapters, Inventing American Tradition explores a set of beloved traditions spanning political symbols, holidays, lifestyles, and fictional characters—everything from the anthem to the American flag, blue jeans, and Mickey Mouse. Shedding light on the individuals who created these traditions and their motivations for promoting them, Jack David Eller reveals the murky, conflicted, confused, and contradictory history of emblems and institutions we very often take to be the bedrock of America. What emerges from this sideways take on our most celebrated Americanisms is the realization that all traditions are invented by particular people at particular times for particular reasons, and that the process of “traditioning” is forever ongoing—especially in the land of the free.

The primary aim of this book is to explore the contradiction between widely shared beliefs in the USA about racial inclusiveness and equal opportunity for all and the fact that most churches are racially homogeneous and do not include people with disabilities. To address the problem Mary McClintock Fulkerson explores the practices of an interracial church (United Methodist) that includes people with disabilities. The analysis focuses on those activities which create opportunities for people to experience those who are `different' as equal in ways that diminish both obliviousness to the other and fear of the other. In contrast with theology's typical focus on the beliefs of Christians, this project offers a theory of practices and place that foregrounds the instinctual reactions and communications that shape all groups. The effect is to broaden the academic field of theology through the benefits of ethnographic research and postmodern place theory.

High on a remote butte, a young Sioux waits. Though daring in battle, skillful, and strong, he cannot be a man until his spiritual vision comes. When it appears, he must interpret it correctly to know who he is, and he must deserve it, or continue to be called No Name. No Name has his vision, a glowing white mare who walks among the stars. She tells No Name his destiny and how to achieve it. He must pass through hostile camps, storm, and fire, risk his life many times to become Conquering Horse, chief of the Sioux. Conquering Horse is the first of Frederick Manfred's five volume series, the Buckskin Man Tales.

From one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century—an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies that powerfully speaks to contemporary conversations around racism. “It contains truth that cannot be denied.” —The Atlantic Monthly In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.