"If Kafka had been a feminist, his prisoner might have had Nawal el Sa'adawi's feistiness, maybe, like her, he would have hoed a prison garden, led veiled and unveiled cellmates in rebellious calisthenics, strategized with a murderess to foil state illogic. This book gives me hope, even makes me laugh."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After

A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.

Born in 1945 in the Assamese town of Jorhat, Temsula Ao, her father's favourite of his six daughters, remembers her childhood as a time of happiness. The sudden loss of both parents mean that the orphaned children were left to fend for themselves as best they could. Desperately poor, emotionally scarred, lonely and often hungry, the young Temsula made up for her lack of resources with courage and determination. From these unpromising beginnings, Ao went on to become one of Northeast India's best known writers and to build a distinguished teaching career, serving as Director of the Northeast Zone Cultural Centre, and finally, Dean of the School of Humanities and Education, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Temsula Ao describes her memoir as 'an attempt to exorcise my own personal ghosts from a fractured childhood that was ripped apart by a series of tragedies... [it] is about love and what it is like to be deprived of it.' For her readers, Ao’s memoir gives not only an insight into her role as a leading figure in the Northeast, but is also a moving account of a writerly life. Published by Zubaan.

When the author became a nuclear physicist, the number of women in the field could be counted on one hand. In this memoir, she reveals her difficult journey to international recognition in physics. She is frank about the ways being a woman has made a difference in her opportunities and choices as a scientist--and how, by being a woman, she has made a difference in the world of physics.

The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the “middle ranks” whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities—erotic, political, and literary—of real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists’ creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the author’s negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing. Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish. The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its author’s treatment of the thematics of “seeing and being seen” with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists’ responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.

A young Egyptian woman clashes with her traditional family when she chooses a career in medicine. Rather than submit to an arranged marriage and motherhood, she cuts her hair short and works fiercely to realise her dreams. At medical school, she begins to understand the mysteries of the human body. After years of denying her own desires, the doctor begins a series of love affairs that allow her to explore her sexuality – on her own terms.

A 2012 New York Times Book Review Notable Book "Staggering, searing…Ms. Gubar deserves the highest admiration for her bravery and honesty." —New York Times Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen. Her memoir mines the deepest levels of anguish and devotion as she struggles to come to terms with her body’s betrayal and the frightful protocols of contemporary medicine. She finds solace in the abiding love of her husband, children, and friends while she searches for understanding in works of literature, visual art, and the testimonies of others who suffer with various forms of cancer. Ovarian cancer remains an incurable disease for most of those diagnosed, even those lucky enough to find caring and skilled physicians. Memoir of a Debulked Woman is both a polemic against the ineffectual and injurious medical responses to which thousands of women are subjected and a meditation on the gifts of companionship, art, and literature that sustain people in need.