蕾丝书信

After they met in 1922, Vita Sackville-West, a British novelist married to foreign diplomat Harold Nicolson, and Virginia Woolf began a passionate relationship that lasted until Woolf’s death in 1941. Their revealing correspondence leaves no aspect of their lives untouched: daily dramas, bits of gossip, the strains and pleasures of writing, and always the same joy in each other’s company. This volume, which features over 500 letters spanning 19 years, includes the writings of both of these literary icons. DeSalvo and Leaska established the chronological order of the letters and placed them in sequence, and they have also included relevant diary entries and letters Vita and Virginia wrote to other friends where they add context and illumination to the narrative. Annotations throughout the text identify peripheral characters, clarify allusions, and provide background. As the New York Times noted, "the result is a volume that reads like a book, not just a gathering of marvelous scraps." In his introduction Mitchell A. Leaska observes, "Rarely can a collection of correspondence have cast into more dramatic relief two personalities more individual or more complex; and rarely can an enterprise of the heart have been carried out so near the verge of archetypal feeling."

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. African & African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. 2019 Over the Rainbow Booklist Selection for Nonfiction. Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes. SISTER LOVE: THE LETTERS OF AUDRE LORDE AND PAT PARKER 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. SISTER LOVE is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

The engrossing drama begun in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916-1954 culminates in this gathering of 200 quintessential letters, culled from thousands. Copiously annotated, they propel the reader with passionate immediacy through the rich years of this beloved author's maturity and world-wide fame, to her death. Sarton is one of the great letter writers of our time, Library Journal affirmed of the first volume. And here once again we see her in every aspect: the hard-pressed writer, the tormented lover, at her fiercest and most fond; the friend, confidante and passionate traveler, intensely engaged by public issues, ceaselessly searching for the elusive muse which made poetry and the creative transformation of life possible. In addition to longtime friends and intimates familiar from Volume One--Louise Bogan, Eva Le Gallienne, Bill Brown, Muriel Rukeyser and the Huxleys--the more than 150 recipients in this volume include Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bowen, Carolyn Heilbrun and Doris Grumbach, Madeleine L'Engle, Pat Carroll, and Marianne Moore. No topic escapes her, Susan Kenney wrote of the first volume, and in the breadth and amplitude of these vibrant missives to friends and strangers, poets and scientists, actors and scholars, teachers and editors from every corner of the States and throughout Europe, the reader will partake of her joys, and learn well her griefs; it is no coincidence she always capitalized Hell. Particularly rich are her letters to members of the religious community who were drawn to the spiritual center in her work; her magnificent letters of condolence; her fiery replies to critics; her trenchant, generous responses to the many young writers who touched her; and her life-enhancing responses to hordes of admirers. Here, too, we are privy to several intense love relationships, and live beside her through the landmark publications of Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing and her revolutionary Journal of a Solitude. We accompany her as she writes the celebrated lyric poems which, with missionary fervor, she brought alive in dynamic readings to standing-room-only audiences across America, as long as she could do so. And finally we are witness to the gradual diminishments of age as, with characteristic courage, she charges into her ninth decade, ardent and alone. Selected Letters 1955-1995 offers new insights and throws fascinating sidelights on Sarton's multi-faceted character, presenting an awesome self-portrait--more revealing than anything yet published--of this truly singular woman who, faithful to her vision of life--and like the legendary phoenix which marks her grave --never ceased to be reborn over and over again. As critic William Drake put it, May Sarton always seems to be speaking to each one of us personally, as if we were a friend. In this richly moving and nourishing collection--the capstone of her literary legacy--this unforgettable woman speaks to each of us, as to each correspondent, once again in her timeless voice. Readers will find this volume a valuable companion to Sarton's other work; reading it put me back in touch with her keen intelligence, her restless but rich spirit, and I enjoyed it tremendously. --Eleanor Dwight, author of Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life In a century of cruel inhumanity, 'life-enhancing' poet, novelist and journal-keeper May Sarton showed us, most of all, how to be human. . . . That is why we find in her a friend, and will keep rereading these thoughtful letters and her books for clues about the journey ahead. --Father John Dear, author of Living Peace Those who know her journals will find here a Sarton willing to examine the underside of creativity, a Sarton who refuses to stay stuck in life or work. This book passes on that courage to readers. --Alexandra Johnson, author of Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal A searingly honest self-portrait of a complex and many-sided woman. . . . What a feast! --Dr. Claire Douglas, author of Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung's Circle

For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence to her neighbor and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson's poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet's life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. "With spare commentary, Smith ... and Hart ... let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters' genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page." Renee Tursi, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Rachel Mennies embraces the public/private duality of writing letters in her latest collection of poems. Told through a time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters chronicles the relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she loves. Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath, their love story unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends to Naomi--and occasionally Naomi's responses, as filtered through the speaker's retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first from the use of found texts, next from the speaker's personal observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness, and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences. As the speaker discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and its stakes--a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short, but precarious distance.