All Animals are Equal…or are They?

George Orwell’s 50th anniversary illustrated edition of a farm that is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. Orwell’s famous satire of the Soviet Union, in which “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Call Number: 829.143078 A598 1995

No “Goblin Market” but Still Some Wholesome Fun!

Drawing from letters, contracts, and other archival material, Linda Peterson details the careers of various women authors from the Victorian period. Some adopted the practices of their male counterparts and wrote for periodicals before producing a best-seller; others began in literary partnerships with their husbands and pursued independent careers later in life; and yet others wrote from obscure parsonages or isolated villages, hoping an acclaimed novel might spark a meteoric rise to fame. Peterson considers these women authors’ successes and failures–the critical esteem that led to financial rewards and lasting reputations, as well as the initial successes undermined by publishing trends and pressures.

“For the case studies, I have chosen six women of letters whose careers reveal new possibilities for the professional woman author and whose commentaries on their literary lives reveal the obstacles they faced and the strategies by which they succeeded (partially, if not wholly). All professionally innovative, these women took different approaches to authorship — approaches determined in part by their historical moment, in part thrust upon them by the demands of the marketplace, in part adopted as expressions of highly personal values and contingencies. The case studies do not, as one of my readers noted, ’round up the usual suspects’ (though canonical figures appear frequently in this book); rather, I have focused on women whose literary innovations and public self-constructions are pivotal in the history of authorship. I alternate women whose lives were marked by professional success and literary esteem with lesser-known writers, famous in their day, uncanonical now, but nonetheless representative of important models of nineteenth-century authorship” (Peterson, 6).

Call Number: 820.9 P485B

A Lebanese Canadian Poet

Why The Nectar of Pain?

They asked me,

How is your soul able to

give so much love to

this world?

I said,

There is a sweetness in

the nectar that

bees seek

for honey.

There is a

sweetness in

you that

every sting and

every pain

seek

to make love.

Do not allow your

pain to make you

bitter.

Turn it into

the sweet nectar

that your soul

contains and gives

as a sign of

strength and resilience

after

it is shattered.

(Zebian, 2)

Call Number: 892.408 Z41N

First Native American U.S. Poet Laureate

The United States first Native American Poet Laureate (named in the Summer of 2019), Joy Harjo. She began writing as a college student, and now at 68, has written eight books of poetry, a memoir, and two books for young audiences. An important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. Her works include themes such as defining self, the arts, and social justice.

From “A Postcolonial Tale”

“Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from

dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of

dreaming stuff.

This is the first world, and the last.

Once we abandoned ourselves for television, the box that separates

the dreamer from the dreaming. It was as if we were stolen, put into

a bag carried on the back of a whiteman who pretends to own the

earth and the sky. In the sack were all the people of the world. We

fought until there was a hole in the bag.”

(The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, page 18).

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Call Number 816.21 H282C

The Woman Who Fell From the Sky: Call Number 816.21 H282W

An American Sunrise: Call Number 816.21 H282A