Girl Paper Stone

Poetry. Women's Studies. "In her luminous book, Laurie Filipelli remakes the constellations of a modern life. Her poems re-draw the lines between the parts of the world, helping us to see there are no divisions between planting a plumbago and watching the passage of hateful legislation, no space between grief for a lost father and the wonder of what he's told the speaker: 'the whale's veins are so wide we could swim / to her heart.' By looking so tenderly and incisively at the actual experience of a life, Filipelli makes us see our own differently."--Sasha West "Flying together, flying apart: in these poems the self is as elastic as a flock of birds cutting across the winter sky. Here, among carousel and cave, where 'the bigger you spin, the lighter you fall,' we are invited into the world of mothers and daughters, fathers and grandfathers, a geography whose inhabitants bear steadily forward while always casting a long look back. As our leader advances, in an outstretched hand she presents to us the artifacts of her explorations--mirrors, keys, paper dragons--reminding us all the while to accept the dangers of discovery as well as its myriad blessings. The wisdom within these pages is hard-won and generously offered, the speaker lifting her face skyward no matter the conditions at her feet. 'The future is a ballad sung in your name,' Filipelli promises, and we want to--we do--believe her."--Laurie Saurborn

This novel following a Korean adoptee, her white mother, and her best friend through two decades is “an intense and compelling read . . . terrific” (Kirkus Reviews). What is considered a family, and who gets to define it? In 1964, as racial tension simmers in America, Catherine and Jonathan adopt a baby girl from Korea. This unconventional choice brings disapproval from Catherine’s family—which creates an even closer bond between her and her daughter. Narrated in alternating chapters by Catherine, her adopted daughter Min, and Min’s best friend Laura, Scissors, Paper, Stone spans twenty years of love, loss, and the complex reality of female relationships. As Min grows up, we watch as she comes out as a lesbian and learns to embrace her heritage, and after she and Laura take a summer road trip together, the shifts in their friendship force all three women to examine the assumptions they’ve been living by and to make choices about the roles they want to play in each other’s lives. “Davis writes with rare insight and compassion about the evolving American family and the struggle to belong . . . a wise and affecting novel.” ―Hilma Wolitzer, author of An Available Man

A frank and beautiful story of damage, survival and restoration from an exhilarating literary voice.

Ten-year-old Cassie lives with her working-class family in 1919 Winnipeg. The Great War and Spanish Influenza have taken their toll, and workers in the city are frustrated with low wages and long hours. When they orchestrate a general strike, Cassie — bright, determined and very bored at school — desperately wants to help. She begins volunteering for the strike committee as a papergirl, distributing the strike bulletin at Portage and Main, and from her corner, she sees the strike take shape. Threatened and taunted by upper-class kids, and getting hungrier by the day, Cassie soon realizes that the strike isn’t just a lark — it’s a risky and brave movement. With her impoverished best friend, Mary, volunteering in the nearby Labour Café, and Cassie’s police officer brother in the strike committee’s inner circle, Cassie becomes increasingly furious about the conditions that led workers to strike. When an enormous but peaceful demonstration turns into a violent assault on Bloody Saturday, Cassie is changed forever. Lively and engaging, this novel is a celebration of solidarity, justice and one brave papergirl.

Winner of the 2010 HKU Poetry Prize "'Then all things began twice.' The poems inPaper Scissors Stoneare moved by the forces of repetition and release, and are haunted by crossings (of borders, of people, of languages and their written characters). With wit and sorrow, precision and tact, the poems study the essential qualities of places, persons, and their arrangements, asking us what it is to begin twice. The book is a formally beautiful and complete meditation on transformation." -Saskia Hamilton "These extraordinary poems, so assured in their directions, so startling in their clarities, have an eerily dreamlike wakefulness. Fan's enigmatic lucidity is born of a confluence of traditions, both real and imagined. This is not simply a remarkable debut, but a brilliantly accomplished book." -Adam Phillips Born and educated in Hong Kong,Kit Fannow lives in the UK. His poems have been widely published in literary magazines. This award-winning first book of poems establishes him as one of the most promising new writers on the Hong Kong literary scene.

She feels like a creature out of a fairy tale; a girl who discovers that her bones are really made out of stone, that her skin is really as thin as glass, that her hair is brittle as straw, that her tears have dried up so that she cries only salt. Maybe that's why it doesn't hurt when she presses hard enough to begin bleeding: it doesn't hurt, because she's not real anymore. Sethie Weiss is hungry, a mean, angry kind of hunger that feels like a piece of glass in her belly. She’s managed to get down to 111 pounds and knows that with a little more hard work—a few more meals skipped, a few more snacks vomited away—she can force the number on the scale even lower. She will work on her body the same way she worked to get her perfect grades, to finish her college applications early, to get her first kiss from Shaw, the boy she loves, the boy who isn’t quite her boyfriend. Sethie will not allow herself one slip, not one bad day, not one break in concentration. Her body is there for her to work on when everything and everyone else—her best friend, her schoolwork, and Shaw—are gone. From critically acclaimed writer Alyssa B. Sheinmel comes an unflinching and unparalleled portrayal of one girl’s withdrawal, until she is sinking like a stone into her own illness, her own loneliness—her own self.

Discover the story of Mary Anning, the world's best-known fossil hunter. As a baby, Mary was struck by lightning, then as a little girl she found a fossilised sea monster, the most important prehistoric discovery of its time. This spectacular tale of a little girl who dared to be different and who followed her dreams will inspire young children. Beautiful illustrations and narrative text help children to learn how Mary discovered new fossils – and how her observations rocked the natural history world. Be inspired by Mary's work as a woman in the field of science – especially as her achievements weren't recognised until after her death. Perfect for kids interested in dinosaurs and rocks, and for parents looking for strong female role models in science. If you liked this, you might like the Anholt's Artists series.

Winner of the 2016 Quill Prose Award, Scissors, Paper, Stone contemplates the meanings of family through twenty years in the lives of a Korean-American lesbian, her adoptive mother, and her boy-crazy best friend.