“Anyone who reads her will never forget her voice.” - Biographile Mary MacLane (1881-1929) was the first of the modern media personalities: a pioneer in self-revelation, in defiance of established rules, in living on her own terms - and writing it in brilliant style. At age 19 she burst upon the world out of Butte, Montana with a journal of private thoughts and longings that incited national then international attention. In the books and newspaper articles that followed she evolved a completely new, individual voice decades ahead of its time. She influenced Gertrude Stein, inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald, and was hotly discussed by everyday people - and America’s biggest writers. Yet despite sparking film, stage, and music projects today - and being endlessly quoted on the Internet - the writer behind the writing has remained unknown until now. HUMAN DAYS: A MARY MACLANE READER features the complete texts of all her books (with expurgated passages restored), her colorful newspaper articles (much never before reprinted), an intriguing 1902 interview, the first viewing ever of her striking personal letters, illuminating introductions to each era in her life, and comprehensive notes that open the door to her influences and the age she came from and impacted so profoundly. A foreword from actress Bojana Novakovic provides a contemporary artist’s creative appreciation of the author’s still-powerful effect upon readers. “Mary MacLane comes off the page quivering with life. Moving.” - London Times “She reminds us of the power of personal narrative, honestly told.” - The Atlantic “In a pre-soundbite age she already knew how to draw blood in one direct sentence.” - The Awl “She had a short but fiery life of writing and misadventure, and her writing was a template for the confessional memoirs that have become ubiquitous.” - The New Yorker “One of the most fascinatingly self-involved personalities of the 20th century.” - The Age “A girl wonder.” - Harper’s “Confessional journalists have people like Mary MacLane to thank.” - Flavorwire “Her diaries ignited a national uproar, ushering in a new era for women’s voices. Her elegant, ambitious embrace of full-disclosure opened a door to what was possible for women.” - The Atlantic “Fiery frankness made her a pioneer.” - Time Out Chicago “Her poetry is one of extremes: lust for happiness, despair for life.” - Hairy Dog Review “Riveting.” - N.H. Public Radio “I Await The Devil’s Coming is a small masterpiece, full of camp and swagger.” - Parul Sehgal, NPR “Pioneering newswoman, later silent-screen star, considered the veritable spirit of the iconoclastic Twenties.” - Boston Globe “A pioneering feminist - a sensation.” - Feminist Bookstore News “First of the self-expressionists, and the first of the Flappers.” - Chicagoan Check www.marymaclane.com for exclusive content, news, and previews.

Reproduction of the original: The Story of Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane

I, Mary MacLane : A Diary of Human Days IT is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana. The sky is overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy. And at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me. Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with great intentness. I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus: I am rare—I am in some ways exquisite. I am pagan within and without. I am vain and shallow and false. I am a specialized being, deeply myself. I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other pointes. I am dynamic but devasted, laid waste in spirit. I’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse and I’m like an outlaw. I have a potent weird sense of humor—a saving and a demoralizing grace. I have brain, cerebration—not powerful but fine and of a remarkable quality. I am scornful-tempered and I am brave. I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet. I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond. I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my truth. I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it. I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous. I am young, but not very young. I am wistful—I am infamous. In brief, I am a human being. I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling genius. And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER “A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire . . . [and] what makes all this so much fun is Danforth’s deliciously ghoulish voice . . . exquisite." —Ron Charles, THE WASHINGTON POST "A multi-faceted novel, equal parts gothic, sharply funny, sapphic romance, historical, and, of course, spooky.” —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Named a Most Anticipated Book by Entertainment Weekly • Washington Post • USA Today • Time • O, The Oprah Magazine • Buzzfeed • Harper's Bazaar • Vulture • Parade • HuffPost • Refinery29 • Popsugar • E! News • Bustle • The Millions • GoodReads • Autostraddle • Lambda Literary • Literary Hub • and more! The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls—a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary’s book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, the Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever—but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way. Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the “haunted and cursed” Gilded Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled—or perhaps just grimly exploited—and soon it’s impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins. A story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period-inspired illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read. “Full of Victorian sapphic romance, metafictional horror, biting misandrist humor, Hollywood intrigue, and multiple timeliness—all replete with evocative illustrations that are icing on a deviously delicious cake.” –O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan's advice to eat the forbidden fruit and thus responsible for all of humanity's subsequent miseries. The notion of woman as the Devil's accomplice is prominent throughout Christian history and has been used to legitimize the subordination of wives and daughters. In the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Lucifer was reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a tyrannical patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests. Per Faxneld shows how this Satanic feminism was expressed in a wide variety of nineteenth-century literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures, and even artifacts of consumer culture like jewelry. He details how colorful figures like the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, gender-bending Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky, author Aino Kallas, actress Sarah Bernhardt, anti-clerical witch enthusiast Matilda Joslyn Gage, decadent marchioness Luisa Casati, and the Luciferian lesbian poetess Renée Vivien embraced these reimaginings. By exploring the connections between esotericism, literature, art and the political realm, Satanic Feminism sheds new light on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism, and revisionary mythmaking.

This book will help those wishing to teach a course in technical writing, or who wish to write themselves.