The Broken Goddess

After giving a lecture on the contemporary relevance of fairy tales, a skeptical young scholar leaves the hall and steps into a living fairy tale. This is a wondrous story of knowledge versus faith, of the power of imagination and the consequences of cynicism. From the author of The Stone and the Flute.

They pray to her for vengeance, but she longs for peace... Tempest abandoned the land of the gods long ago, unwilling to continue to mediate their problems and tolerate their lies. She may be the judge for the souls of the living, but she can't take on the weight of the responsibility anymore. When Tempest finds an emperor broken and dying, Fate ties them together, and she can't escape. Disguised as a mortal, she must compete to become the next empress while protecting a man she refuses to let into her heart. But to do that means revealing herself to the very gods she's been hiding from, and they will not let her escape again. The goddess of the broken may be broken herself, but what could she be if she wasn't?

The provocative debut by the Women's Fiction Prize 2018-shortlisted author of When I Hit You. When women take to protest, there is no looking back. Sometimes it is over working conditions, other times, perhaps, a strike for higher wages. And so, in a hungry, back-broken community of villages in Tamil Nadu, a group of rural workers begin to defy their landlords. The landlords, in turn, vow to violently crush them. But these punishments only serve to strengthen the villagers' resistance - after all, when starvation is the only option, what else is there to lose...?

The early chroniclers of Britain presented the island as the promised land of the Roman goddess Diana. Later, when the story of Arthur was transformed by Christian mythology, a new literary concept of the island was promoted: the promised land of the Holy Grail. As the feminine enchantment of the Goddess gave way to the masculine crusade of the Grail Quest, the otherworld realms of the fays or fairy women were denigrated in favor of the heavenly afterlife. The dualism of the medieval authors was challenged by modern writers such as Blake and Tolkien, as well as by the scholars of the Eranos conferences. This book explores the conflict between Goddess and Grail—a rift less about paganism versus Christianity than about religious literalism versus spiritual imagination—which is resolved in the figure of Sophia (Divine Wisdom).

“Smart, fast, clever, and funny (As f*ck!)” (Tiffany Haddish), this collection of side-splitting and illuminating essays by the popular stand-up comedian, alum of Chelsea Lately and The Mindy Project, and host of truTV’s Talk Show the Game Show is perfect for fans of the New York Times bestsellers Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby. From a young age, Guy Branum always felt as if he were on the outside looking in. From a stiflingly boring farm town, he couldn’t relate to his neighbors. While other boys played outside, he stayed indoors reading Greek mythology. And being gay and overweight, he got used to diminishing himself. But little by little, he started learning from all the sad, strange, lonely outcasts in history who had come before him, and he started to feel hope. In this “singular, genuinely ballsy, and essential” (Billy Eichner) collection of personal essays, Guy talks about finding a sense of belonging at Berkeley—and stirring up controversy in a newspaper column that led to a run‑in with the Secret Service. He recounts the pitfalls of being typecast as the “Sassy Gay Friend,” and how, after taking a wrong turn in life (i.e. law school), he found stand‑up comedy and artistic freedom. He analyzes society’s calculated deprivation of personhood from fat people, and how, though it’s taken him a while to accept who he is, he has learned that with a little patience and a lot of humor, self-acceptance is possible. “Keenly observant and intelligent, Branum’s book not only offers uproarious insights into walking paths less traveled, but also into what self-acceptance means in a world still woefully intolerant of difference” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). My Life as a Goddess is an unforgettable and deeply moving book by one of today’s most endearing and galvanizing voices in comedy.

Jailbreaking the Goddess is a revolutionary revisioning of the feminine divine. Where the maiden, mother, crone archetypal system is tied to female biology and physical stages of life, the fivefold model liberates the female experience from the shackles of the reproductive model. In a woman's lifetime, she will go through several different cycles of beginnings, potential, creation, mastery, and wisdom. This fivefold model is not an adaption of the threefold. It is a new system that embraces the powerful, fluid nature of the lived experience of women today. Join Lasara Firefox Allen as she explores the nature of the five archetypes; gives examples of what areas of life each might preside over; lists goddesses that fit within each archetype; suggests ways to begin building relationship with the different archetypes; and provides simple rituals for recognition, transition, and invocation. Praise: "Jailbreaking the Goddess is an important contribution to the writings on Goddess tradition and feminist spirituality...I love her political savvy, her sensitivity around issues of diversity and cultural awareness and appropriation, and her unabashed celebration of pleasure, sensuality, and life!"—Starhawk "This fiercely inspired body of work is art, theory, and passion. Genius."—Rosa De Anda, from her foreword "Lasara Firefox Allen delves deep into the ways in which colonialist language has shaped our experience of the divine feminine...This is an innovative work that has the potential to change the face of modern feminist spirituality."—Suzanne Sterling, founder of Voice of Change

Honorable Mention for the 2022 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize awarded by the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (included essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe. Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, this feminist, folkloristic approach deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women’s speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly. However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, break through these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince “hopepunk.” They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today’s world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture’s still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.