The Horrors Of The Half Known Life

Now a classic in the field, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life is an important foundational text in the construction of masculinity, female identity, and the history of midwivery.

Fiction. Thanks to advances in biotechnology, the female protagonists of HALF KNOWN LIVES experiment with a fine upstanding citizen of their prairie city. They take Max Hoffman hostage, impregnate him, and keep him prisoner for the duration of the pregnancy. This mordant novel traces the consequences of the experiment to the end of the characters' lives. Joan Givner is a subtle writer whose stories work their way into your psyche so quietly you hardly notice -- until you reach the last few lines and then wish they could somehow continue. You've become completely enmeshed in her characters and their lives -- The Globe and Mail. By the author of THIRTY-FOUR WAYS OF LOOKING AT JANE EYRE, also available from SPD.

The New Thought Movement was an enormously popular late nineteenth-century spiritual movement led largely by and for women. Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science is but one example of the fascinating range of these groups, which advocated a belief in mind over matter and espoused women's spiritual ability to purify the world. This work is the first to uncover the cultural implications of New Thought, embedding it in the intellectual traditions of nineteenth-century America, and illuminating its connections with the self-help and New Age enthusiasms of our own fin-de-siècle. Beryl Satter examines New Thought in all its complexity, presenting along the way a captivating cast of characters. In lively and accessible prose, she introduces the people, the institutions, the texts, and the ideas that comprised the New Thought movement. This fascinating social and intellectual history explores the complex relationships among social reform, alternative religion, medicine, and psychology which persist to this day.

Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution of murderers, through the nineteenth century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the sacred treatment of the crime, to today's true crime literature and tabloid reports.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in fairy tales and sensation novels by authors such as George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens. In the clash between fantasy and reality, these authors create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body, and illuminates the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.

"From pre-classical to present times, this work describes childbirth practices as they have developed through the ages. It critiques the evolution of modern midwifery and obstetrics, focusing especially on how, why and when the process of childbirth became an increasingly sterile, male-dominated, and medically oriented event."-- Provided by publisher.