In three separate tales, Stein invests the lives of three working class women with extraordinary insights into race, sex, gender, and other feminist issues.

Shadows on the Rock Willa Cather - Set in 17th century Canada. A year in the life of a widow and his young daughter and the trappers, missionaries, craftsmen, friends and others who come to their house and shop, it highlights the men and women who struggled to adapt to the "new world" and make a new life for themselves even as they clung to the one they had left behind

This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson--who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist--Lucy is soon at war with the...

"The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded...

This book tells of the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness of the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian façade. It is the atittude of Dowell, his puzzlement and uncertaintiy, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration that make the book powerful and mysterious. It also has many comic moments, despite its catalogue...

Presents the first book of Proust's monumental work "Remembrance of Things Past", introducing such themes as the destructive force of obsessive love, the allure and the consequences of transgressive sex, and the selective eye that shapes memories.

"No Exit is an unforgettable portrayal of hell. The Flies is a modern reworking of the Electra-Orestes story. Dirty Hands is about a young intellectual torn between theory and praxis. The Respectful Prostitute is a scathing attack on American racism."

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligence greater than man's; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied. Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. Then, late one night, in the middle...