Fiction
Marge Piercy’s debut collection of short stories, THE COST OF LUNCH, ETC., brings us glimpses into the lives of everyday women moving through and making sense of their daily internal and external worlds. Keeping to the engaging, accessible language of Piercy’s novels, the collection spans decades of her writing along with a range of locations, ages, and emotional states of her protagonists. From the first-person account of hoarding (“Saving Mother from Herself“) to a girl’s narrative of sexual and spiritual discovery (“Going over Jordan“) to a recount of a past love affair (“The Easy Arrangement“) each story is a tangible, vivid snapshot in a varied and subtly curated gallery of work. Whether grappling with death, familial relationships, friendship, sex, illness, or religion, Piercy’s writing is as passionate, lucid, insightful, and thoughtfully alive as ever.
VIDA is the most important novel yet written about the political ’60s and ’70s; it is at the same time a sensual and moving love story. Vida is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters and victories of an extraordinary band of people. At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the ’60s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement — a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of Life magazine — charismatic, passionate and totally sure she would prevail. Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. She comes briefly to rest in a safe house on Cape Cod. To her surprise and annoyance, she finds another person in the house, a fugitive, Joel, ten years younger than she, a kid who dropped into the underground out of the army. As they spend the next days together, Vida finds herself warming toward a man for the first time in years, knowing all too well the dangers.
CITY OF DARKNESS, CITY OF LIGHT is my take on the French revolution. Why be interested? First of all, modern politics began there, even the notions of “left” and “right.” Second, modern feminism began right there, and many of the demands those women fought for are not yet achieved – although some have been. Third, late 18th century France was a society that had some of the same characteristics as ours – the top was becoming ever richer, the poor were getting poorer, and the middle class were being squeezed with taxes the rich did not have to pay.
Fourth, the people who made the revolution and those who fought against it were lively, colorful, intelligent, willful and sometime sexy individuals. It was an extremely dramatic time and you might enjoy visiting it.
A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period
In the tradition of her bestselling World War II epic GONE TO SOLDIERS, Marge Piercy once again re-creates a turbulent period in American history and explores changing attitudes in a land of sacrifice, suffering, promise, and reward.
“This is a big American story…harsh and enthralling. Marge Piercy is not just an author, she’s a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence… ”Sex Wars,” a resonant tale of public and private lives during a time of staggering societal shifts.”
—The Boston Globe
The Third Child
Piercy’s “Sixteenth riveting novel…A remarkable and provocative page-turner”
-Booklist
“A biting, contemporary take on Romeo and Juliet and an acidic commentary on Washington political culture.”
-Publishers Weekly
In the prominent political family of the Dickinsons, ambition comes first, and Melissa, the third child, has always felt she came last. Going away to college at Wesleyan offers a chance at love and a life free from her brilliant mother’s constant scrutiny.
Blake, a child of mixed race and apparently unknown parentage, has been reared by lawyers whose defense of death row cases has brought them toe-to-toe with Melissa’s father, the former governor of Pennsylvania, who is now a U.S. senator.
When Melissa meets Blake at college, their passion is immediate. Yet Blake is keeping a dangerous secret from Melissa, one that could destroy them–and their families. Dealing with themes of love, honesty, identity, and the consequences of ambition, this thoughtful, beautifully written story is a remarkable and provocative page-turner.
In her sensual new novel, SUMMER PEOPLE, Piercy exchanges her panoramic canvas for a strikingly intimate one, focusing on the lives of three dedicated artists in a small Cape Cod community.
The “scandal” of the relationship between Dinah, Susan, and Willie has long since faded among the locals. Like all the year-rounders in the town where they have lived for ten years, the three tolerate a seasonal migration of summer people – like a cloud of outrageously plumed tropical birds come to chatter, to feed, to mate. For Dinah, an avant-garde composer, the invasion of these part-time visitors means that her peace will be shattered and her beloved woodlands despoiled. But Willie, a sculptor whose art is unfashionably political, makes his living renovating their cottages. And Susan, Willie’s wife, a fabric designer and passionate seeker of high style, eagerly awaits the arrival of summer people – especially Tyrone Burdock, the charming, manipulative financier across the pond-who offer her a warmly inviting world of elegant meals and sensitive conversation. Piercy explores that margin where artists mingle with their patrons, where class and status bleach to invisibility in the blaze of sun on white sand, where behind the dark glasses, it is hard to tell who is conning and who is conned.
Known by millions of readers for vivid research and characters that live long after the last page is turned, Marge Piercy has breathed life into history and rendered societies past, present and future as real as the ink on the page. In her newest novel, Piercy’s focus is absolutely contemporary and frighteningly real. Told from the viewpoint of three unforgettable women — Beverly, the union organizer; her daughter, Suzanne, the litigator who can negotiate everyone’s problems but her own and Suzanne’s daughter Elena, burdened with a violent past before she ever grew out of childhood, Piercy weaves a generational saga about a tragedy that every one of us, man and woman, will face.
Storm Tide is a novel of lost dreams, fiery politics, and consuming passion.
At a very young age, David Greene, the guy with the incredible pitching arm, saw his dreams of playing in the majors almost fulfilled. But he never made it out of the minor leagues. Now, divorced, with a son he’s not allowed to see, David returns to the shores of his hometown, the small Cape Cod hamlet of Saltash, once a local hero, now a failure. There he meets Judith Silver, a beautiful, brilliant lawyer, and her husband, the eminent professor Gordon Stone – an imposing presence much older than Judith, a living legend now dying of cancer. These two prominent members of the community befriend, nurture, and eventually push David to run for political office. As David considers the proposition, he and Judith fall into a passionate affair. It is a liaison that does not go unnoticed by Gordon, who, curiously, tacitly allows it to unfold. Gordon is more concerned with the election at hand – which pits his candidate, David, against the powerful man who virtually runs the town. Into this explosive mix, a young woman appears – a single mother at the end of her emotional rope.
Marge Piercy, whose earlier novels have chronicled the female experience in the turbulent ’60s and 70s, now turns her considerable skill and passion to the 1950s in this portrait of women in transition from repression to freedom.
Through the intense friendship between Jill and her cousin, Donna, we see and feel what it was like to grow up in Detroit in the ’50s and go to college when the first seeds of freedom were sown. Through Jill’s childhood friend Howie, and her relationships with Mike and Peter, we come to understand the danger that sex posed when abortions were illegal, making the outcome of a chance encounter of a night of love a matter of life and death. And, through Marge Piercy’s brilliant, thought-provoking novel, our lives are illuminated.
“A delicious binge of a book…it’s impossible to ignore the generous spirit of this feast.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“BRAIDED LIVES is a big, rich book. This writer just gets better and better. She is allowing more flashes of humor and more generosity…her sure novelist’s hold on making a good story, her poet’s eye for careful detail..
Small Changes
SMALL CHANGES is the explosive novel of women struggling to make their place in a man’s world.
Intelligent, sensual Miriam Berg wanted to love and be loved. She traded a doctorate for marriage and security, only to find herself hungry for a life of her own-but terrified of losing her husband.
Shy, frightened Beth ran away from her parents, her husband, her way of life. She ran to a new world, different ideas and a different kind of love. . . the love of another woman.
“Beautiful, inspiring, realistic, essential.” -Boston Phoenix
“She sustains her hard driving prose throughout this long, completely absorbing novel…It’s a big rich novel that one hoped would emerge from the new women’s consciousness…When you read it you are caught up in the excitement of watching Marge Piercy’s talent explode all over the page, and she never loses control of the explosion.”
Marge Piercy gives us her most involving, heartbreaking, and ultimately life-affirming novel yet. Through her three unforgettable female characters – women whom we recognize in ourselves, our friends, and our chance acquaintances – Piercy reveals a deep, often secret, part of a woman’s life: the need for a place in the world that cannot be lost to the vagaries of relationships, work, or the economy.
Leila Landsman has long known that her theater-director husband has affairs with young actresses he casts. But it takes the death of her best and oldest friend for Leila to confront how little is left of her marriage. Adrift with this new knowledge, she decides to investigate a subject that, as an academic expert on abused women, she might consider too sensational: the notorious case of Becky Burgess and her teenage lover, who are accused of murdering her husband.
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom
The time is the middle of the twenty-first century. The place is what used to be North America, now Norika: a vast toxic wasteland dotted with huge environmental domes, enclaves of the monolithic corporations-the “multis”-that have replaced governments and whose employees have become an indentured citizenry; the far fewer “free towns,” independent settlements where the remarkable technology of the age has not yet been turned against the individual; and the “Glop,” the overwhelmed stretches of megalopolis where nine-tenths of the Norikans live – violent, festering warrens unprotected from the poisonous atmosphere and ruled by feuding gangs and warlords.
“SOMETIMES I THINK WE’D ALL BE BETTER OFF WITH MORE JOGGING AND LESS SEX.”
For Leslie, the heroine of this searching novel, the cost of living – and loving – is getting higher and higher. First of all, she is miserable for having lost her lover, Valerie, to another woman. And she has begun to doubt just about everything about her life.
Now, she is involved in a strange erotic triangle with Honor, an adolescent virgin who has romantic ideals and Bernie, a homosexual street hustler trying to settle down. Leslie and Bernie both want Honor. They a1so want each other. But all Honor wants is a little spice in her life.
Here is a powerful, searing novel of three young dreamers caught up in a lifestyle they can neither accept nor change.
Fly Away Home
Successful Boston cookbook author Daria Walker, whose greatest pleasures are her home and family — and who loves her husband deeply — is devastated to learn he wants a divorce. Now she must put her life back together. But as she strives to understand the life she is losing, Daria must face the shocking truth behind the smooth facade of her prominent attorney-husband, Ross — and recreate her own values, her own sense of family, and herself.
With this magnificent epic of World War II, Marge Piercy moves into territory that has long been the exclusive province of such writers as Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Herman Wouk. Never before has a leading woman writer written with such authority about the cataclysmic events and passions of war. Sweeping across the globe from the United States to Europe, from the North African campaign to New Zealand, from Japan to Palestine, GONE TO SOLDIERS brilliantly re-creates the atmosphere of the war-time capitals: the sexual abandon, the luxury and deprivation, the terror and excitement.
GONE TO SOLDIERS interweaves the stories of ten remarkable characters…
With a power and truth that rock us — and through the medium of a woman who becomes vitally alive, important, and dear to us — Marge Piercy moves between a revelation of our present society and a startling twin projection of the possible future.
The woman “on the edge of time” is Consuelo (Connie) Ramos. A Chicana in New York City, she is in her mid-thirties, once beautiful, now worn and disheveled, once a college girl, now a pickpocket, both loving mother and “child abuser” (her child taken from her), a mourning widow (unmarried), a heroically sane woman labeled insane.
With her we experience the New York where Latinos live today without money or hope of it; where food, cleanliness, order, and peacefulness are Sunday luxuries; where life-force translates as violence. And with her we experience the mental hospital where, held against her will, she is faceless, invisible to the attendants, social workers, doctors. . . where whatever she says and does is received and recorded as “aggression,” as “bad patient behavior,” until suddenly she is valued at last as a potential subject for a frightening neuro-electric experiment on which hundreds of monkeys have already been “used up.”
Going Down Fast
As a blighted neighborhood is invaded by a university — an institution that promises to bring new life — the people who live there are forced to go along with too many changes, too fast. There is Anna, a woman living through a succession of losses — marriage, job, home, and lover. And Rowley, a blue-eyed soul singer whose greatest limitation is his belief that he is powerless. Together with Leon, an underground filmmaker, and Caroline, a beautiful woman with a dark and desperate secret, they watch the progress of the wrecking ball, hoping, as always, for something better . . . maybe even love.
Dance The Eagle To Sleep
Originally published in 1970, Marge Piercy’s second novel follows the lives of four teenagers in a near-future society as they rebel against a military draft and “the system.” The occupation of Franklin High School begins, and with it, the open rebellion of America’s youth against their channeled, unrewarding lives and the self-serving, plastic society that directs them. From the disillusionment and alienation of the young at the center of the revolt to their attempts to build a visionary new society, the nationwide following they gain, and the brutally complete repression that inevitably follows, this is a future fiction without a drop of fantasy. As driving, violent, and nuanced today as it was 40 years ago, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction by the author reflecting unapologetically on the novel and the times from which it emerged.
“Here is somebody with the guts to go into the deepest core of herself, her time, her history, and risk more than anybody else has so far, just out of a love for the truth and a need to tell it. It’s about time.”
– Thomas Pynchon