This features several of the female characters from Satrapi's Persepolis, gathered together over tea in a Tehran apartment and taking advantage of their menfolk's afternoon nap to talk freely about their sexuality. It's beautiful and touching and very much in line with other things I have read about Iranian women's culture, and I highly recommend

( The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami )

( Read more... )

32. Geling Yan, The Lost Daughter of Happiness, translated by Cathy Silber ( Read more... )

#25. This Bridge Called My Back, ed. Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa
1981/'83, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press

This is another book that is so full of... ideas and thinking and newness, and that has so many visions and so much emotion in it, and that contains both so much I can identify with and so much that seems deeply foreign -- I don't mean ( Read more... )

29. Shan Sa, Empress. Translated from French by Adriana Hunter ( Read more... )

27. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of FootbindingA non-fiction, academic book, but very readable. Ko states that her intention is to present a study of footbinding that does not approach the subject moralistically; she's very good at that. However, she also writes that she wants to give the female perspective on footbinding ( Read more... )

21. !Ask a Mexican!, Gustavo Arellano
2007, Scribner

I actually finished this book months ago, but I couldn't figure out what to say about it.  I guess I still can't, really.  There are some things I really like about this book, and some things I find very disappointing, so I guess I'll just talk about that.

The book is centrally made up of a ( Read more... )

[Note: Tags I would like to add, when it eventually becomes possible: a: hernandez lea, i: hernandez lea, steampunk.]

#20.  Cathedral Child, Lea Hernandez
Cyberosia Publishing, 2002 (?)

Cathedral Child is a very curious graphic novel of somewhat confusing provenance.  It is also, I think, unfinished.  I gather that it was meant to be the first volume ( Read more... )

26. Faith Adiele, Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist NunFaith is the daughter of a Swedish mother and a Nigerian father; she grew up in a small town in the Midwest. She is smart, motivated, and involved, and her drive to succeed gets her a scholarship to Harvard, where she is involved in social work in addition to her classes ( Read more... )