I grew up in the ‘60s, when women were not in charge of anything much. I’ve always been fascinated by strong women. Amelia Earhart was a particular favorite, as were the suffragettes, Michelle Obama, and others. The strongest thing I’ve done in my life is to seize opportunities when they arise. I forged a second career that way, taking more than one leap of faith to do what I’ve always known I could do, be a writer. During and after my first career as a dental hygienist I took opportunities to be a newspaper wire editor, then a columnist, a magazine writer, an indexer, a nonfiction writer, and a novelist.
This is a small gem of a book that I’ve had for years and have read multiple times.
It’s a retelling of an Athabaskan legend that has been passed from mother to daughter for generations on the upper Yukon River in Alaska. The old women of the title belonged to a large migratory tribe that was slowly starving to death in a bitter Arctic winter. The chief and his male council determined the tribe had a better chance of survival if it left the useless old women behind to die.
What happened next? Read the book. I know you’ll love it as much as I do. It’s a triumphant story of the courage of women set against the inadequate leadership of men.
"No one should miss this beautiful legend." —Tony Hillerman
Velma Wallis’s award-winning, bestselling novel about two elderly Native American women who must fend for themselves during a harsh Alaskan winter
Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine.
Though these women have been known to complain more than contribute, they now must either survive on their own or die trying. In simple but vivid…
From a very early age, I was interested in both magical stories (untrue) and life writing (true). As a writer, I love combining the two. In both fairy tales and memoirs, somebody goes into the woods and comes out wiser. At both Harvard and Oxford, I teach writing courses on Mythic Memoir. I tell my two children as many fairy tales as I know, and then I make up more. In 2022 I published my first collection of personal essays, Awake with Asashoryu, eleven short memoirs from my life, each with a myth or fairy tale at the heart.
A list like this cannot be complete without Kingston, who uses in her book a literary technique called “perhapsing”—defined by Lisa Knopp as “the use of speculation in creative nonfiction”—in which Kingston uses myth and the question “what if” to imagine what might’ve happened in the stories she half-knows about her family.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With this book, the acclaimed author created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.
“A classic, for a reason” – Celeste Ng via Twitter
As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of…
I'm a British writer of children’s books and poetry. The books I've chosen are picture books with vibrant illustrations, instantly pulling the reader into the story. The fascination children have with the sky, the planets, and stars, I discovered with my own children, and now my grandchildren, who gaze, star-struck, at the moon through the windows and doorways. As an ex-teacher I've found that books with a story will appeal to children who are discovering cultures other than their own. There are many picture books with sun and moon stories like the one in Chandra’s Magic Light, and I've chosen those I find particularly appealing, as a mother, grandmother, and teacher.
This is a lovely book about two celestial sisters, one is the sun and the other the moon. As siblings do, they argue about who is more important. They decide to swap roles and the sun begins to shine day and night so nobody can sleep and the earth and growing things suffer. Then the moon takes over and at first everybody is relieved. But gradually the lack of warmth and light makes the world an unhappy place. The sisters realize the importance of harmony in the world and in their relationship. The pictures softly reflect the hues of sun and moon. This would make a lovely bedtime story and the end picture shows the girls' love for each other.
“Redolent of folklore . . . A sweet morality tale of cosmic misadventures and sibling rivalry” by the author of The Cloud Princess (Kirkus Reviews).
The Sun and the Moon are sisters, and they rule and sky together peacefully. One day, however, each begins to wonder: who is more important? This friction leads them to make a powerful decision to switch roles, hoping that it will lead to a greater understanding of their powers. Soon, the Sun begins shining all through the night, and the Moon brings night to the day. In the end, the two sisters will learn an…
In 1662, a man is wrongly executed for signing the death warrant of Charles I. Awaiting execution, he asks to speak with a priest, to whom he declares a curse on the village that betrayed him. The priest responds with a counter-curse, leaving just one option to nullify it.
Over four centuries later, Faith and James move to the country to start a new life and a family. They discover their village lives under the curse uttered by the hanged man. Could their arrival be connected? They fear their choice of new home is no coincidence. Unexplained events hint at threats or warnings to leave. They become convinced the village remains cursed despite their friends’ denials. Who can they trust, and who are potential enemies?
In 1660, a man is wrongly executed for signing the death warrant of Charles I. While awaiting execution, he asks to speak with a priest, to whom he declares a curse on the village that betrayed him. The priest responds with a counter-curse, leaving just one option to nullify it. Over four centuries later, Faith and James move to the country to start a new life and a family. They learn that their village lives under the curse uttered by the hanged man. Could their arrival be connected? Faith and James fear that their choice of a new home is…
This book is a romp! In the upside-down, quirky version of Shanghai that is Hell, a half-vampire half-fox spirit with a saucy disposition is tasked with escorting a human through hell.
The problem is that everything in hell kind of wants to eat him. Not to mention that there’s more going on than meets the eye. This book is fast-paced, irreverent, hilariously funny, and creative as hell.
Pawned by her mother to the King of Hell as a child, Lady Jing is half-vampire, half-hulijing fox-spirit and all sasshole. As the King's ward, she has spent the past ninety years running errands, dodging the taunts of the spiteful hulijing courtiers, and trying to control her explosive temper - with varying levels of success.
So when Jing overhears the courtiers plotting to steal a priceless dragon pearl from the King, she seizes her chance…
Having first discovered the mystery of ancient Egypt as a small child via my father’s war-time souvenirs, this interest grew over the years until it became a serious magical under-taking, culminating in Initiation into the magical order of the Temple of Khem. I became Principal tutor of the Order in 1998 and publishedLiber Ægyptius: The Book of Egyptian Magic in the same year. I continue to teach the Egyptian Mystery Tradition to those willing to submit themselves to the exacting discipline needed to enter the priesthood, and remain a member of the Egypt Exploration Society to keep up-to-date with the current archaeological discoveries in Egypt.
Because of the complexity of the Egyptian pantheon, it is necessary to have a good ‘Who’s Who’ to hand that gives us all the behind-the-scenes scandal and gossip, as well as the genealogy. No one, expert or layman, who reads this book will look at the strange figures of the Egyptian gods in quite the same light again, thanks to The Meekses-Dimitri (Universite de Provence) and Christine (Sorbonne) - who enable us to enter this strange world by observing the daily routines of these divine beings! I have several A-Zs of the Egyptian gods but none can compare with this one…
This is the first English translation of a highly appealing volume originally published in French in 1993. Informed by a sense of wonderment at divine doings, it treats the ancient Egyptian gods as if they were an ethnic group that captured the fancy of ethnologists or sociologists.The book begins with a discussion of the gods' community as a society unto itself. The authors describe the structures of the society of the gods and some of the conflicts that frequently upset it, with individual gods acting to protect their own positions in an established hierarchy and struggling to gain power over…
This is a unique tale of exciting personal encounters with wild tigers as well my hard science that revealed their mysterious world. Readers will experience the conflicts, violence, and corruption, inherent to struggle to recover the charismatic, dangerous predator. Among Tigers is not the usual doomsday prophecy, but a clear roadmap for how we can grow tiger populations to new levels of abundance. While it does not gloss over the very real challenges, overall, it delivers a message of reasonable hope to nature lovers worldwide. I have scientifically researched tigers and, fought passionately to save them, making me uniquely qualified to tell this story like no one else can.
This is a non-fiction classic about ‘tiger culture’ of a remote part of India where tigers do not fear humans as they do elsewhere: in fact, they even hunt down and eat dozens of people every year in this giant Sundarbans swamp where natural prey is scarce. Montgomery is brilliantly evocative while bringing to life both nature and humans of the swamp, making the book a NY Times best-seller. The local culture, where tigers are loathed, feared, and revered as deities—all at the same—is portrayed stunningly. These habitats, tiger behaviors, and local cultures are strikingly different from the ones I describe in my book. Montgomery views the tiger through a filter of human culture, whereas I do so through a filter of hard ecology. Yet, we admire each other’s work because we are both under the spell of the same tiger.
From the author of The Soul of an Octopus and bestselling memoir The Good Good Pig, a book that earned Sy Montgomery her status as one of the most celebrated wildlife writers of our time, Spell of the Tiger brings readers to the Sundarbans, a vast tangle of mangrove swamp and tidal delta that lies between India and Bangladesh. It is the only spot on earth where tigers routinely eat people-swimming silently behind small boats at night to drag away fishermen, snatching honey collectors and woodcutters from the forest. But, unlike in other parts of Asia where tigers are rapidly…
I’ve always been an avid reader, ever since I was old enough to hold a book upright. Today, I’m a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers, with credits spanning novels, short fiction, television, comic books, and video games. I’m especially fond of heroic tales that feature female main characters, both in books and on-screen. Several of my nearly 40 novels have featured heroic female main characters, including my newest book, Star Trek: Picard: Firewall, which is a coming-of-age tale about Seven of Nine’s journey to becoming a Fenris Ranger.
Ever since I was a boy, I’ve loved stories of the Arthurian mythos. Camelot, the Round Table, the Grail Quest, I couldn’t get enough of it. I also love seeing classic stories gender-flipped to reveal new perspectives on the original narrative.
This novel, which reimagines the Grail Quest by making Percival a woman named Peretur, also infuses the classic myths with Welsh and Celtic lore, the effects of Roman colonization, and insightful explorations of queerness and disability in a fantasy setting, all delivered in truly beautiful prose.
This is a book that helped me see some of my favorite tales in a new and more enlightened way.
She left all she knew to find who she could be . . .
She grows up in the wild wood, in a cave with her mother, but visions of a faraway lake drift to her on the spring breeze, scented with promise. And when she hears a traveler speak of Artos, king of Caer Leon, she decides her future lies at his court. So, brimming with magic and eager to test her strength, she breaks her covenant with her mother and sets out on her bony gelding for Caer Leon.
With her stolen hunting spear and mended armour, she…
I was an avid reader of science fiction as a teenager and developed a love of science and how elegantly and yet how alive and ever-changing it is as we learn more. It explains the world. I couldn’t settle on any one field: physics, biology, neuroscience, astronomy, geology? So I began a writing career where I could draw on my faithful reading of Science News and popular science books. Scientific inaccuracies in fiction still irritate me (don’t get me started), and to the best of my ability Ι ground stories in what we know with some confidence, though science will always be a moving target. My recent book, Mixed Harvest, embeds fiction in archaeology and anthropology.
A controversial, scholarly attempt at synthesizing and organizing the foundations of world mythologies may seem a strange selection. It’s certainly an enormous task, and Witzel could be wrong, but this sweeping book tantalizes and enriches any open mind with an interest in mankind’s story on Earth: two great separate migrations out of Africa carried differing concepts of the world’s origins. The first made its way around India to Australia. In this story, the world had no origin, it always existed in Dreamtime. Mankind emerged into time and joined all creatures and their landscapes. The second migration into Europe and Asia brought the foundations of Western traditions. The story is more familiar: an all-powerful deity created the world out of chaos or primordial waters, fashioned and breathed life into human beings, and thrust them into a world of constant struggle and conflict. If for some reason that doesn't sound familiar, reread…
In this comprehensive book Michael Witzel persuasively demonstrates the prehistoric origins of most of the mythologies of Eurasia and the Americas ('Laurasia'). By comparing these myths with others indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa, Melanesia, and Australia ('Gondwana Land') Witzel is able to access some of the earliest myths told by humans. The Laurasian mythologies share a common story line that dates the world's creation to a mythic time and recounts the fortunes of generations of deities across four or five ages and human beings' creation and fall, culminating in the end of the universe and, occasionally, hope for a new world.…
I just looked this up. The word is Hibernophile. I love all things Irish even though I'm American, and distantly, Irish American. My inspiration for the Brigid of Ireland trilogy met at the intersection of genealogy research and discovering druids. The novel Druidsby Morgan Llywelyn whichI read soon after The Mists of Avalon impacted so much of my future writing I love research, too. Finding my family roots—immigrants to the New York marble quarries during the Famine—was the impetus for tying these two things together. This—researching Catholicism in Ireland—led me to Patrick and Brigid. I live, teach, and write in the mountains of Virginia.
This was the first book that made me realize druids had been real, and that entire belief system was nearly—in historical chronology—stamped out by the Roman Empire. The story focuses on a young druid, Ainvar, who befriends Vercingetorix, the Celtic warrior who was brought to Rome in chains by Julius Caesar. While the setting is in Gaul, I began to understand the beliefs of the druid life that was very nearly lost. Where Rome’s war with the druids of Gaul was bloody and decisive, the Irish conversion took a different path. I wanted to find out why the two histories, the change from druid to Christian, was so dramatically different.
The tale of one man who has the vision and genius to save his Celtic people from destruction at the hands of Julius Caesar, this fantasy novel tells the story of the General's invasion of Gaul from the unusual point of view of the invaded.
I have been fascinated by the subject of Bigfoot ever since I was a child when my father drove through West Virginia and told me to search the woods for the elusive creature. From that point forward I wanted to spend as much time in the forest as I could. Over the years I have developed a fondness for the wild, the trees, and nature. For the past ten years, I’ve traveled around the country searching for Bigfoot in Washington, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The searches may have been hit or miss, but more importantly, I was able to experience the wonders and beauty of the wild forest.
John Zada’s writing style is equal to Jon Krakauer and David Grann, in his ability to pull the reader into the narrative of the story with the precision of his words. In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch, Zada does an excellent job of providing historical context related to Bigfoot lore without retelling all of the classic stories. But what captured my heart the most, was the stunning imagery of the British Columbia coast and Great Bear Rainforest that Zada captured with his words.
Set in a wild and immaculate landscape threatened by industry and environmental degradation, a compassionate and gripping exploration of one of the world's most baffling mysteries-the existence of the Sasquatch
On the central and north coast of British Columbia, the Great Bear Rainforest is the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, containing more organic matter than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. The area plays host to a wide range of species, from thousand-year-old western cedars to humpback whales to iconic white Spirit bears.
According to local residents, another giant is said to live in these woods. For…
