Recommendations based on "A Spy in the House of Love"

On Women brings together Susan Sontag's most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves. For the most part written in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's essays are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the 'biological division of labour', the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women's powerlessness and women's power. As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, 'They offer us the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.' 'One of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer 'Susan Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times 'At the time she died, she was America's best-known public intellectual. To my mind, she was also the most exemplary' John Gray, New Statesman WITH A PREFACE BY MERVE EMRE

Paperback. Pub Date :2011-11-10 Pages: 300 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK A ruthless and unflinching examination of American life in the late 1960s. from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking.Somewhere out beyond Hollywood. hollowed- out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving.Anaesthetized to pain and pleasure. she is seemingly unaffected by her fraught personal history.In her early thirties. divorced from her husband. dislocated from friends. and somehow detached from her past and future. Wyeth epitomises a generation made ill by too much freedom.Set beyond good and evil - literally in Los Angeles and the barren wastescapes of the Mojave desert. and figuratively in the landscapes of a broken spirit - Play It As It Lays is an immaculately wrought vision of Californian culture on the cusp of the 1970s.Three d...

The Feminine Mystique

Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macabéa's fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector's audacious last novel is a haunting portrayal of innocence in a bad world.

Ellen is a single artist living alone on New York's Upper West Side in the 1970s. She is beset by old boyfriends, paint pigment choices, and, occasionally, by 'radiances' - episodes of joyous, reckless unreality. Under the influence of 'radiances' she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street becomes the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a liberating experience for Ellen, who, despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda, and by the freedom that it gives her. The Princess of 72nd Street is Elaine Kraf's witty, dizzyingly inventive take on female liberation and mental health, a work of immense literary power and unbridled energy. Provocative at the time of its publication in 1979 and thoroughly iconoclastic, it is a remarkable portrait of an unforgettable woman.

The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time. 'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.' A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. 'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian

Text: English, French (translation)

A novel of loss and love. The author has also written Sexing the Cherry and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit which won the 1985 Whitbread Prize and was later adapted as an award-winning BBC dramatization. Her book The Passion won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

Evocative and superbly erotic, Little Birds is a powerful journey into the mysterious world of sex and sensuality. From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.

An Observer Best Debut of the Year A Granta Best Young British Novelist 'I loved this book' JULIA ARMFIELD 'Exhilarating' MONICA HEISEY 'Astonishing' ANDREA LAWLOR 'Should be on everyone's summer reading list' iNEWS 'Scorching ... One of our favourite reads' TIME OUT A Guardian Essential Summer Read A sensual debut novel of the forbidden love between a young woman and a headmaster's wife, unfolding across a single heatwave summer. In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of 'matron'. There she meets Mrs S, the headmaster's wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into the older woman's world with their unspoken desire blooming into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer begins to fade, both know that a choice must finally be made. 'Desire crackles through these pages like fire' TELEGRAPH 'Wildly sexy ... I kept forgetting to exhale' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON 'There's nothing else like it out there' THE TIMES 'Compulsively readable ... beautiful, brilliant' OBSERVER 'Moody, generous and brilliant' JESSIE BURTON 'Rare and thrilling' SARAH WINMAN