Search results for ""VIRAGO""

INTRODUCED BY LISSA EVANS'I envy anyone yet to discover the joy of Monica Dickens. She's beady eyed, big hearted and blissfully funny' NINA STIBBE 'Wherever her eye falls, it finds the exact, significant detail, and her ear for dialogue is unerring' OBSERVER 'Monica's naked curiosity and general bolshiness are easy to identify with' LISSA EVANS Poppy, newly recruited cub reporter at the Downingham Post, is determined to prove to the editor that he's wrong in his belief that 'Women are a nuisance in the office'. He certainly doesn't think she's a nuisance when it's time for the tea round - a job which never fails to fall to the only female reporter.What Poppy lacks in experience, she makes up for in spirit and ambition. She'll make the Downingham Post the best regional newspaper there is - even if she occasionally gets the names wrong in court hearings. Life for a single professional woman in the post-war years certainly has its challenges - from finding a room, when the tyrannical landlady doesn't consider Poppy to be quite respectable to changing her editor's deeply entrenched ways. This semi-autobiographical novel, recounted with Monica Dickens's wit, warmth and wry observation will charm all who read it.If you enjoyed My Turn to Make the Tea, you will love One Pair of Feet, Dickens's novel of being a wartime trainee nurse, also published in Virago Modern Classics.

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40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, WITH A FOREWORD BY STANLEY TUCCI'I have bought more copies of this book to give to people, in a frenzy of enthusiasm, than any other . . . Heartburn is the perfect, bittersweet, sobbingly funny, all-too-true confessional novel' NIGELLA LAWSON'I kept a copy of Nora Ephron's Heartburn next to me as a reminder of how to be funny and truthful, and all I ended up doing was ignoring my writing and rereading Heartburn' AMY POEHLERSeven months into her pregnancy, Rachel discovers that her husband is in love with another woman. The fact that this woman has a 'neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb' is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel is a cookery writer, and between trying to win Mark back and wishing him dead, she offers us some of her favourite recipes. Heartburn is a roller coaster of love, betrayal, loss and most satisfyingly revenge.This is Nora Ephron's (screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle) roman a clef: 'I always thought during the pain of the marriage that one day it would make a funny book,' she once said. And it is!'It is snortingly funny in its depiction of the death throes of a relationship. And it bursts with recipes. What more could you ask for?' ADAM KAYPART OF THE VIRAGO DESIGNER COLLECTION. COVER FEATURES TEXTILE DESIGN BY ELZA SUNDERLAND

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BY ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL INDIAN WRITERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY'The deftness with which Attia Hosain handles the interplay of manners, class, culture and different forms of female power is gorgeously done . . .' KAMILA SHAMSIE'An extraordinary novel, with an extraordinary heroine' MONICA ALI'A masterful examination of class, culture, family and women's lives set against the backdrop of Partition' KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE 'My life changed. It had been restricted by invisible barriers almost as effectively as the physically restricted lives of my aunts in the zenana. A window had opened here, a door there, a curtain had been drawn aside; but outside lay a world narrowed by one's field of vision.'Laila, orphaned daughter of a distinguished Muslim family, is brought up in her grandfather's traditional household by her aunts, who keep purdah. At fifteen she moves to the home of her 'liberal' but autocratic uncle in Lucknow. As the struggle for Independence sharpens, Laila is surrounded by relatives and university friends caught up in politics, but she is unable to commit herself to any cause: her own fight for independence is a struggle against tradition. With its stunning evocation of India, its political insight and unsentimental understanding of the human heart, Sunlight on a Broken Column is a classic of Muslim life.Attia Hosain published only two books, but her writing has influenced generations of writers. Discover Phoenix Fled, Hosain's acclaimed short-story collection, also published in Virago Modern Classics.

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Janet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film "An Angel at My Table". Janet Frame called poetry 'the highest form of literature because you can have no dead wood in a poem'. Its attraction is abundantly evident in her novels where her already 'poetic' prose - intensely lyrical, heavily metaphorical - is at times completely pared down to poetry. She published only one collection in her lifetime, "The Pocket Mirror" in 1967, but she never stopped writing poetry, allowing the manuscripts to accumulate in an old fibreglass bowl she'd originally used as a bath for her geese. Her second, posthumous collection "The Goose Bath" (2006) was compiled from this treasure trove, but not published outside New Zealand."Storms Will Tell" is a comprehensive selection of her beautiful and thought-provoking poems drawn from both those books. Her poems illustrate the shape of Janet Frame's life: her childhood and later years in mental hospitals blighted by mis-diagnosis of schizophrenia; her travels around the world, including her time in England; her life as a writer and return to New Zealand; and, growing older and facing illness and death. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination. Also in 2008: Virago publish "Towards Another Summer", a previously unpublished, short novel by Janet Frame (written in London in 1963), and a new edition of "An Angel at My Table".

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Outlines the key feminist debates on British women's fiction since the 'second wave' and grounds them in examples of women's writingThis book introduces you clearly and succinctly to the ways in which feminist ideas have transformed the form and content of British women's fiction and non-fiction writing. The Introduction sets out the critical background and the main feminist critical approaches to literature. This is followed by 5 chapters which outline feminist engagements with the canon, gender, the body, sexual difference and ethnicity to demonstrate the ways in which feminist ideas have affected the 'content' of women's literature. The next 5 chapters examine types of fiction writing: romance, crime, science fiction, life-writing and historical fiction, to show the effect of feminist ideas on the 'form' of women's literature.The text also provides a wide range of illuminating case studies which include: Virago Modern Classics, The Women Prize for Fiction, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'Herland', Angela Carter's 'The Passion of New Eve', Margaret Attwood's 'The Edible Woman', Lucy Ellmann's 'Sweet Desserts', Barbie dolls, French feminism and sexuality, trans identities, feminist publishing and ethnicity, black and minority ethnic women's writing, Zadie Smith's novels, Toni Morrison's 'Beloved', Eimear McBride's 'A Girl is a Half Formed Thing', Val McDermid and lesbian crime writing, Ruth Rendell and the invention of the 'whydunit', Margaret Atwood's 'Maddaddam' sci fi trilogy, Jeanette Winterson's 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit' and 'The Passion', Pat Barker's 'Regeneration' trilogy and Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up The Bodies'. Each chapter ends with a list of primary texts and recommended further reading.Key FeaturesProvides a clear overview of changing feminist debates and terms in the 20th and 21st centuriesShows the changing form of women's fiction and non-fiction during this periodAssesses the ways in which literary, political and mainstream cultures, as well as the book industry, have impacted on the work and ideas of female writersIncludes a wide range of case studies as well as recommended further reading and a list of primary texts with each chapter

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