Modern Library Torchbearers – serie

A stunning collection of stories from “one of the foremost chroniclers of the American South” (The Washington Post), including the novella “Light in the Piazza”—featuring an introduction by Afia Atakora, author of Conjure Women   Over the course of a fifty-year career, Elizabeth Spencer wrote masterly, lyrical fiction about southerners. An outstanding storyteller who was unjustly denied a Pulitzer for her anti-racist novel The Voice at the Back Door despite being the unanimous choice of the judges, she is recognized as one of the most accomplished writers of short fiction, infusing her work with elegant precision and empathy. The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer’s short stories, displaying her range of place—the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after World War II, the gray-sky North, and, finally, the contemporary Sun Belt.The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance

The autobiography of a Black woman who defied nineteenth-century conventions to become a preacher, popular speaker, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist. Sojourner Truth was an incredible, remarkable, epoch-defying woman who escaped from slavery and successfully sued for her son’s freedom, in addition to her career as a wildly successful orator and activist—a woman alive to the hypocrisies of her age, and unafraid to talk about them.Her autobiography, which she dictated, is an outstanding historical document. Truth’s tale sheds a light on realities of slavery that are still rarely discussed: that she was a slave in upstate New York, not on a Southern plantation; that Dutch was her first language; that the circumstances of her slavery isolated her from a broader Black community; that her experience of religion was a racially integrated one, and became the means of her independence. Ultimately, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the story of a great American that reveals aspects of slavery and free Black life that are too often overlooked.

A determined young woman challenges her Jewish immigrant family’s rigid norms in this "raw, uncontrollable" (The New York Times) classic American novelMore and more I began to think inside myself, I don’t want to sell herring for the rest of my days. I want to learn something. I want to do something. I want some day to make myself for a person and come among people. But how can I do it if I live in this hell house of Father’s preaching and Mother’s complaining?Sara Smolinsky and her sisters are bread givers: They work to support their mother, who once lived a life of luxury, and their father, who cares more about studying the Torah than feeding his family. As Sara watches her father trade her sisters’ futures for his own financial gain, she sets out to find happiness for herself, even if that happiness goes against the traditions she was raised to follow.Originally published in 1925, Bread Givers draws inspiration from Anzia Yezierska’s own experiences growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family in New York City. This witty, fiercely hopeful novel tells the story of a young woman searching for herself as she navigates Old World expectations and New World dreams, the misery of defeat and the glory of success, and finding what it means “to be a person among people.”

A vivid, enchanting novel, spanning over sixty years, chronicling the lives, loves, and secrets of three generations of women in 20th-century Barcelona—a rediscovered classic by “the shining light of Catalan literature” (Colm Tóibín), with an introduction from Catherine Lacey“That Roig’s work has lost none of its immediacy over the years speaks to the urgency of her prose and the timelessness of her vision.”—Anthony Marra, author of Mercury Pictures PresentsThree women from the same family—grandmother, mother, and daughter, all named Ramona—come to life in the pages of Montserrat Roig’s Goodbye, Ramona. The eldest Ramona lives quietly with her well-meaning husband, but longs for the romance and adventure of her favorite nineteenth-century novels. Years later, her daughter, Ramona Ventura, finds herself constantly enduring her husband’s mood swings and aggressive outbursts. The youngest Ramona falls for a university student whose progressive ideals are undercut by his condescending treatment of her. Each woman, in her own time and in her own way, lives her life in silence: their true feelings about the men in their lives, the violence of Franco’s dictatorship, and their dreams and aspirations, all go unspoken. But the youngest Ramona is lucky enough to be growing up in a Barcelona on the brink of revolution, in the 1960s, when women are finally beginning to claim agency. Will she break free from the fate of the women who came before her and build a life centered on her own happiness? Goodbye, Ramona is an unforgettable social mosaic of Barcelona across the 20th-century, and a universal, powerhouse story of love, power, and the lasting influence that family holds over all of us.