From My Bookshelf: Guineas, Chronicles, Words

My decision to go to a bookstore after work today was an excellent one (not surprising) – here is what I picked up (or, titles that have been ‘From My Bookshelf‘ for just a few hours).

Three Guineas
Virginia Woolf

• A Harvest Book (Harcourt, Inc.), 2006
  • Annotated and with an Introduction by Jane Marcus
  • Cover painting: “Nose-Diving on the City” by Tullio Crali, 1939

Another Virginia Woolf title to add to my collection…

From the back cover: Three Guineas is written as a series of letters in which Virginia Woolf ponders the efficacy of donating to various causes to prevent war. In reflecting on her situation as the “daughter of an educated man” in 1930s England. Woolf challenges liberal orthodoxies and marshals vast research to make discomforting and still-challenging arguments about the relationship between gender and violence, and about the pieties of those who fail to see their complicity in war-making. This pacifist-feminist essay is a classic whose message resonates loudly in our contemporary world. 

Death of a Schoolgirl (The Jane Eyre Chronicles)
Joanna Campbell Slan

• Berkley Prime Crime (The Berkley Publishing Group), 2012
  • Cover Art by Alan Ayers

What can I say, I can’t resist anything Jane Eyre related. Plus, the summary makes the book sound similar to Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons, which I love.

From the jacket flaps: Jane can’t help but fret when a letter arrives from Adèle Varens—Rochester’s ward, currently at boarding school—warning that the girl’s life is in jeopardy. Although it means leaving her young son and invalid husband, and despite never having been to a city of any size, Jane feels strongly compelled to go to London to ensure Adèle’s safety. 

But almost from the beginning, Jane’s travels don’t go as planned—she is knocked about and robbed, and no one believes that the plain, unassuming Jane could indeed be the wife of a gentleman; even the school superintendent takes her for an errant new teacher. But most shocking to Jane is the discovery that Adèle’s schoolmate has recently passed away under very suspicious circumstances, yet no one appears overly concerned. Taking advantage of the situation, Jane decides to pose as the missing instructor—and soon uncovers several unsavory secrets, which may very well make her the killer’s next target…

Living Nations, Living Words
Collected and With an Introduction by Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate

• W.W. Norton, 2021
  • Library of Congress First Edition
  • Foreword by Carla D. Hayden, Librarian of Congress
  • Cover photograph by Shawn Miller

I am a used/backlist book buyer through and through, but with the women and poets behind this collection, I couldn’t leave this book behind.

From the back cover: Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. 

This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgement. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering. 

Are you familiar with any of these books or authors? Let’s chat in the comments.