If you’re looking to boost your bookshelf, look no further. We’ve got seven women authors that you need to add immediately!
Let’s be honest, sometimes our TBR list becomes just a bit too much to handle. But, when you find something good, you just have to add it. Really, it would be disrespectful to the authors not to, right? So, be sure not to disrespect these wonderfully talented women authors and add them to your shelves today.
Grace Paley
Paley was an antinuclear, antiwar, antiracist feminist activist author. During the last century, Grace Paley was considered one of the great writers of original voice. She’s best known for her three short story collections, “The Little Disturbances of Man,” “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” and “Later the Same Day.”
Violette Leduc
Often referred to as “France’s greatest unknown writer,” Leduc’s novels sparked scandal with the censors in France. She was forced to remove the opening chapters of her novel “Ravages” because of its explicit lesbianism. Violette Leduc didn’t let that stop her though! She went on to publish the censored chapters as a standalone novella, “Thérèse et Isabelle,” that skyrocketed into a lesbian classic.
Pearl Buck
Born, Pearl Sydenstricker, she grew up in Zhenjiang, eastern China with her Presbyterian missionary parents. She earned a Masters in Fine Arts in 1926 from Cornell University. She had been writing articles on Chinese life for American magazines since 1922. Pearl Buck’s first published novel, “East Wind, West Wind” (1930) was penned while on route to America. In 1938, she was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Elsa Morante
Elsa Morante was a Jewish Italian novelist, short-story writer, poet, and children’s book author known for the epic and mythical qualities of her works. During the last years of World War II, she lived as a refugee in the countryside, hiding from the fascist authorities. Because of this, the rural world of the south gained an important role in her fiction, dealing with persecution and injustice. She traveled during the 60s in order to participate in the fight for democratic renewal in Italy.
Carson Mccullers
Carson Mccullers‘ novels and stories demonstrate a Southern gothic embrace of the eccentric and combine examinations of relationships between people, reflections on such subjects inherent incompatibility of the lover and the beloved, and a profound sense of the human longing to connect with others. Her work, “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s book club, shooting the book to number one bestseller that May.
Cherie Dimaline
Cherie Dimaline is a Métis writer and activist from the Georgian Bay Métis Nation in Canada. She has said of her identification, “I would love to be recognized as a writer of Indigenous stories. I’m not a Canadian writer. This is what is now known as Canada; it means something different to and for me.” She has written a variety of award-winning novels and other acclaimed stories and articles. She is most noted for her 2017 Young Adult novel “The Marrow Thieves,” which explores the continued colonial exploitation of Indigenous people, and then its sequel, “Hunting by Stars.”
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo is an Oklahoma native and a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She draws on First Nation storytelling and histories, as well as feminist and social justice poetic traditions, and frequently incorporates indigenous myths, symbols, and values into her writing. Her poetry inhabits landscapes– the Southwest, Southeast, and also Alaska and Hawai’i– and centers around the need for remembrance and transcendence. Her memoir, “Poet Warrior,” draws on her experience as the first Native American to serve as the Poet Laureate of the United States.
Listen to your bookshelf and add these amazing women authors to it now!
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