"This is the fascinating story of Connie Ramos, a Chicana woman in her mid-thirties, living in New York and labeled insane, committed to a mental institution. But the truth is that Connie is overwhelmingly sane, heroically sane, and tuned into the future. Connie is able to communicate with the year 2137. Two totally different ways of life are competing. One is beautiful--communal, nonsexist, environmentally pure, open to ritual and magic. The other...

Suzanne Blume has known success and disappointment in equal measure. A respected lawyer who survived two marriages and put two children through college, she now faces the disquieting prospect of her wayward older daughter moving back home. But more troubling still is the news that her mother, a woman of legendary independence who has never truly accepted her daughter nor approved of her choices, has been felled by age and illness. And, for the first...

Under her mother's constant scrutiny and lost in the shadow of her famous senator father, Melissa is the third child in the politically prominent Dickenson family, where ambition comes first and Melissa often comes last. In college, she meets Blake, a man of mixed race and apparently unknown parentage. His adoptive parents are lawyers whose defense of death-row cases in the past brought them head-to-head with Melissa's father when he was the governor...

A washed-up minor league pitcher gets more than he bargained for when his affair with an older woman draws him into a tangled web of deceit and scandal   When Cape Cod high school star pitcher David Greene left home, everyone in his small beach town rallied behind his dream of making it in the pros. No one expected the local legend to return broke a few years later, with an undistinguished minor league record and a painful divorce behind him. As...

Originally published in 1979, Vida is Marge Piercy's classic bookend to the 60s. 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,...

Marge Piercy carries her portrait of the American experience back into the Fifties-that closed, repressive time in which forces for the upheavals of the Sixties ticked away underground. Spanning twenty years, and teeming with vivid characters, Braided Lives tells the powerful, unsentimental story of two young women coming of age. Jill, fiercely independent, dark, Jewish, an intellectual with Detroit street smarts, is a poet, curious, avid of life-a...

Marge Piercy's debut collection of short stories 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 and a girl's narrative of sexual and spiritual...