Marge Piercy

Middlemarsh, Inc.
Box 1473, Wellfleet, Mass. 02667

BOOKS:

Poetry:
BREAKING CAMP, Wesleyan University Press, 1968.
HARD LOVING, Wesleyan University Press, 1969.
4-TELLING (with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie), The Crossing Press, 1971
TO BE OF USE, (with woodcuts by Lucia Vernarelli), Doubleday, 1973.
LIVING IN THE OPEN, Knopf, 1976.
THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING, Knopf, 1978.
THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE, Knopf, 1980.
CIRCLES ON THE WATER (Selected Poems), Knopf, 1982.
STONE, PAPER, KNIFE, Knopf, 1983.
MY MOTHER'S BODY, Knopf, 1985.
AVAILABLE LIGHT, Knopf, 1988.
MARS AND HER CHILDREN, Knopf, 1992.
WHAT ARE BIG GIRLS MADE OF?, Knopf, 1997.
EARLY GRRRL, Leapfrog Press, 1999.
THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY: Poems with a Jewish Theme, Knopf, 1999.
COLORS PASSING THROUGH US, Knopf, 2003.

Play:
THE LAST WHITE CLASS (With Ira Wood), The Crossing Press, 1979.

Fiction:
GOING DOWN FAST, Trident, 1969; Pocketbooks, 1971.
DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP, Doubleday, 1970; Fawcett 1971.
SMALL CHANGES, Doubleday, 1973; Fawcett 1974.
WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, Knopf, 1976; Fawcett, 1977.
THE HIGH COST OF LIVING, Harper and Row, 1978; Fawcett, 1979.
VIDA, Summit, 1980; Fawcett, 1981.
BRAIDED LIVES, Summit, 1982; Ballantine/Fawcett 1983.
FLY AWAY HOME, Summit, 1984; Ballantine/Fawcett 1985.
GONE TO SOLDIERS, Summit, 1987; Ballantine/Fawcett, 1988.
SUMMER PEOPLE, Summit, 1989; Ballantine/Fawcett, 1990.
HE, SHE AND IT, Knopf, 1991; Ballantine/Fawcett, 1993.
THE LONGINGS OF WOMEN, Fawcett, March 1994; Ballantine/Fawcett, 1995.
CITY OF DARKNESS, CITY OF LIGHT, Fawcett/Ballantine, 1996.
STORM TIDE (with Ira Wood), Fawcett/Ballantine, 1998.
THREE WOMEN, Wm. Morrow/HarperCollins, 2000.
THE THIRD CHILD, Wm. Morrow/HarperCollins, 2003.

Memoir:
SLEEPING WITH CATS, Wm. Morrow/HarperCollins, 2001.

Essays:
PARTI-COLORED BLOCKS FOR A QUILT, The University of Michigan Press, 1982. |

Non-Fiction:
SO YOU WANT TO WRITE: HOW TO MASTER THE CRAFT OF WRITING FICTION AND MEMOIR (with Ira Wood), Leapfrog Press, 2001.

Anthology:
EARLY RIPENING: AMERICAN WOMEN'S POETRY NOW, Pandora, November 1987; Unwin Hyman, July 1988; Harper San Francisco, 1993.

Poetry/Painting Collaboration:
THE EARTH SHINES SECRETLY: A BOOK OF DAYS (with Nell Blaine), Cambridge: Zoland Books, 1990.

Eleven of the novels and four books of poetry have been published in England; translations have been made into Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, French, Hebrew, Danish, Finnish, German, Polish, Arabic and Spanish.

BIO
I was born and grew up in Detroit. Afterward I lived in Chicago, Boston, Paris, San Francisco and New York. Now I live in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. About a third of the time I am on the road. I live by my writing and by giving poetry readings and workshops.

I do only short teaching stints, and then mostly workshops. I prefer giving readings to lecturing, but do some of that too. I have been a political activist for years -- civil rights, anti-war groups, SDS and the women's movement. I am active primarily in the women's movement now, which is my political home, but as the spirit seizes me, I work on other issues also. I left New York City because of respiratory problems, and I can't be around tobacco smoke without getting immediately very sick.

Some of the 300+ periodicals in which poetry has been published:
Sojourner,Painted Bride Quarterly,Calyx, Off Our Backs, Massachusetts Review, Leviathan, Mosaic, Minnesota Review, Epoch, MS., New, Carleton Miscella-ny, Premiere, Berkeley Tribe, The Fifth Estate, Earth's Daughters, Transatlantic Review, Buckle, Moving Out, Aphra, Prairie Schooner, The Rat, Shenandoah, Everywoman, American Dialogue, Anon, Unmuzzled Ox, Aye, The Country Journal, Organic Gardening, Lamp in the Spine, Atlantic Monthly, 13th Moon, Chelsea, Connections, Ploughshares, Jam Today, Out of Sight, Boston Phoenix, Ironwood, Hard Pressed, The New Salt Creek Reader, The Little Magazine, A Room of One's Own, Big Moon, The Feminist Art Journal, The American Poetry Review, Mississippi Mud, Poets On, Speak Out, Sunbury, Lady Unique, Paintbrush, Open Places, Gallimaufry, Pushcart Press, Cedar Rock, Mudfish, San Marcos Review, Manhattan Poetry Review, Croton Review, Minnesota Review, Woman of Power, Shmate, South-ern Humanities Review, Steppingstones, A Delicate Fire, The Harbor Review, kentucky poetry review, IWAA News, Tikkun, The American Voice, Peace Corps Times, Michigan Quarterly Review, MS Magazine.

Some Periodicals in which Fiction has Been Published:
Paris Review, Modern Girl, Off Our Backs, Aphra, The Second Wave, Mother Jones, The Transatlantic Review, Ingenue, Moving Out, Works in Progress, The Boston Phoenix, Aurora, The Bold New Women, Chatelaine, Chrysalis, New England Review, Tin House.

Some Periodicals in Which Essays and Reviews Have Been Published:
American Poetry Review, New York Times, Leviathan, Newsday, The Village Voice, Tri-Quarterly, Partisan Review, Seven Days, Sojourner, New Republic, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, American Book Review, MS, Harper's, Mass. Review.

Work Included in 200+ Anthologies Including the Following:
Best Poems of 1967, Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards, Pacific Books, 1968.
31 New American Poets, Ed. Ron Schreiber, Hill and Wang, 1969.
In a Time of Revolution, Ed. Walter Lowenfels, Random House, 1969.
Love is The Theme, Ed. Douglas and Sylvia Angus, Fawcett, 1970.
The Modern Poets, Ed. John Brinnin and Bill Read, McGraw-Hill, 1970.
Literary Types and Themes, Ed. Maurice McHamee, James Cronin, and Joseph Rogers, Holt, Rinehart, And Winston, 1971.
New American and Canadian Poetry, Ed. John Gill, Beacon Press, 1971.
The Fact of Fiction, Ed. Cyril Gilassa, Canfield Press, 1972.
The Women Poets in English, Ed. Ann Stanford, McGraw-Hill, 1972.
No More Masks, Ed. Florence Howe, Ellen Bass, Anchor Press, 1973; newly expanded, Harper Perennial, 1993.
Rising Tides, Ed. Laura Chester, Sharon Barba, Wash. Square Press, 1973.
The Book of Animal Poems, Ed. William Cole, Viking Press, 1973.
Psyche: Feminine Poetic Consciousness, Ed. Segnitz, Rainey, Dial Press, 1973.
Messages, Ed. X. J. Kennedy, Little Brown, and Co. 1973.
The Language Lens, Ed. R. Brent Bonah, Sheila Shively, Prentice-Hall,1974.
2076: The American Tricentennial, Ed. Bryant, Pyramid Books, 1977.
We Become New, Ed. Lucille Iverson, Kathryn Ruby, Bantam Books, 1975.
The Hopwood Anthology, Harry Thomas, Steven Levine, U. of Mich., 1981.
A Book of Women Poets, Aliki and Willis Barnstone, Shocken Books, 1980.
Work: An Anthology of Readings, C. Haalad, Ginn & Co., Mass., 1982.
Literature and the Urban Experience, Jaye and Watts, Rutgers U.Press, 1981.
Leaving the Bough, Ed. Roger Gaess, Intern Pub., N.Y., 1982.
Writing Poems, Robert Wallace, Little, Brown & Co, Boston, Mass., 1982.
The Norton Intro. to Literature, Carl Blair, Norton & Co., N.Y., 1982.
Structure and Meaning: An Introduction to Literature, Second Edition, Dube, Franson, Murphy, Parins, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1983.
Whales: A Celebration, edited by Greg Gatenby, Little, Brown & Co., 1983.
Keeping the Peace, Lynne Jones, The Women's Press Ltd, London, England, 1983.
Feminist Poetics, Ed. Fraser, Frankel, San Francisco State University, 1984.
The Generation of 2000, Ontario Review Press, Princeton, NJ, 1984.
Contemporary American Literature, 4th Edition, A. Poulin, Jr., Houghton Mif-flin, 1985; 5th ed, 1991; .
Introducing Literature, Macmillan, New York, 1985.
Reading and Writing Poetry: Successful Approaches for the Student and Teacher, Oryx Press, Phoenix, 1983.
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds.,Norton, 1985.
The New Jewish Wedding, by Anita Diamant, Summit Books, New York, 1985.
The Norton Introduction to Literature, 4th Edition, Eds. Bain, Beaty and Hunter, Norton, 1986; the shorter 4th edition, 1987.
The Norton Introduction to Poetry, 3rd Edition, J. Paul Hunter, Ed., NY: Norton,1986.
Images of Women in Literature, 4th Edition, Ferguson, Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
The Norton Book of Light Verse, Russell Baker, ed. Norton, 1986.
An Invitation to Poetry, Ed. Jay Parini, Prentice Hall, 1987.
Point Counterpoint: Eight Cases for Composition, ed. Anderson and Forrester, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Utne Reader, #29, Minneapolis, MN, Sept./Oct. 1988.
The Dolphin's Arc: Poems on Endangered Creatures of the Sea, Elisavietta Ritchie, ed., College Park, Maryland: SCOP Publications, Inc., 1989.
Wedding Readings, edited by Eleanor Munro, New York: Viking, 1989.
Vital Signs: Contemporary American Poetry from the University Presses, Edited by Ronald Wallace, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology, Eds. Medhurst, Ivie, Wander and Scott, Greenwood Press, 1990.
The Big Book of New American Humor: The Best of the Past 25 Years, ed. Novak &Waldoks, Harper Perennial, 1990.
Yellow Silk: Erotic Arts and Letters, eds. Pond and Russo, Harmony, 1990.
Contemporary American Poetry, 5th edition, Ed. A. Poulin, Jr., Houghton Mif-flin, 1991.
Writers and Their Craft: Short Stories & Essays on the Narrative, eds. Delbanco and Goldstein, Wayne State, 1991.
The Female Body: Figures, Styles, Speculations, ed. Goldstein, The University of Michigan Press, 1991.
A New Geography of Poets, ed. Field, Locklin and Stetler, The U. of Arkansas Press, 1992.
Touching Fire: Erotic Writings by Women, eds. Thornton, Sturtevant, Sumrall, Carroll & Graf, 1989.
Hadesh Yameinu: A Siddur for Shabbat and Festivals, Rabbi Ron Aigen, Congregation Dorshei Emet, 1993.
Mondo Barbie: An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry, eds. Ebersole & Peabody, St. Martins Press, 1993.
A Place Apart: A Cape Cod Reader, edited by Robert Finch, Norton, 1993.
Bad Sex: A Book of Stories, Serpent's Tail, 1993.
The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry, University Press of New England, 1993.
Dear Mother: An Anthology of Women Writing to or About Their Mothers, The Women's Press, 1994.
Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story, Ballantine, 1994.
Unsettling America: Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, Penguin 1994.
Women: Images and Realities, A Multicultural Anthology, Mayfield Press, 1995.

CRITICAL COMMENTS ON POETRY:
"These poems are clear by subtle, full of gusto and wisdom, guts and delicacy."
Christina Robb, BOSTON GLOBE

"Angry, alive, loving, real poetry; not feminine, but powerfully female."
Kirkus Service

"They are rough, direct, hairy, political, tremendously energetic, visionary, vulnerable and real."
Margaret Atwood

"I think Marge Piercy is one of the most important writers of our time who has redefined the meaning of the female consciousness in literature and in so doing has begun to redefine the meaning of literature. Certain phrases in this book are so memorable that they are bound to become catchphrases....Poem after poem has that kind of authority, power, and verbal brilliance."
Erica Jong

"It is the unique blending of politics with metaphor that makes these poems successful. And Marge Piercy discovers the most evocative metaphor almost every time."
Gerald Costanzo, Pittsburgh PRESS

"Your mouth is watering. You need these poems to feed a part of you that has been hungry for a very long time."
Almitra David, COUNTRY JOURNAL

"The Cycle of poems based on the Celtic Lunar Calendar, which gives her book its title...happens to be marvelous...All these poems are interesting, some are masterpieces..."
Anne Stevenson, LONDON TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

"The spirit most felt in this book is generous love, but love combined with scrutiny and even humor...its concerns are the difficult balances that result when love, self-regard and moral concerns clash and reveal themselves...The book spills over with a love of place, a restoration sense of home (perhaps its rarest quality), a need for growth and preservation."
Charles Molesworth, Sunday NEW YORK TIMES

"Piercy can be wry or tender, aggressive or compassionate by turns...They are vibrant, out-of-doors, today poems that place their writer squarely on the page. Bite these poems and they will bite back. They are that alive."
Victor Howes, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

"Her surreal imagination...carries far beyond truth into a marvelous, flashing world of words."
American Library Association Booklist

"Marge Piercy is my idea of the very model of a modern major feminist. There is a deal of sheer, toe-curling pleasure to be gained from reading this ro-bust, protean and hilarious woman's selected poems...her earthiness, her wonderful physicalness...In addition to being as fine on the subject of friendship as any T'ang Dynasty Chinese poet, Piercy, who so richly bodies forth the five senses, is wonderful about sex...This is a woman who can write breathtaking poetry about making love to a man, and then move into a brilliant diatribe about their inequality."
Carolyn Kizer, WASHINGTON POST

"There is no poet writing today who can give us the sensuous world as Marge Piercy does in these marvelous poems. At last I have found someone worthy of Colette, she who also kept life alive in troubled times by describing a cat or a flower."
May Sarton

"These are wise poems, ripe with the sweetness of apples, pithy with tartness of truth. Each is a veritable parable of right living minus any hint of sour righteousness. Absolute awe is the core. This is Marge Piercy at her best."
Joy Harjo

"Vital, bold and visionary. In her magnificent sixteenth collection, this major American writer is as subversive in her wit as she is cosmic in her perceptions and political in her convictions."
Booklist

CRITICAL COMMENTS ON FICTION:
GOING DOWN FAST:
"Her first novel...seizes you by the lapels (or dashiki) and flings you into a bomb site...I believe her, and her savage novel."
John Leonard, New York TIMES

DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP:
"Ms. Piercy has a beautifully savage way with words...An important book, an alarming vision of what could well happen here."
John Blades, Chicago TRIBUNE

DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP is a vision, not an argument...She writes it down on bandages, and suddenly we are aware of our wounds. What a frightening, marvelous book."
John Leonard, New York TIMES

"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

SMALL CHANGES:
"She sustains her hard driving prose throughout this long, completely absorb-ing 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."
John Alfred Avant, LIBRARY JOURNAL

"A powerful and wonderful combination of poetry, passion and politics...This is the first novel to depict heroines as well as casualties of the sex war...sharply witty, deadly serious, visionary."
Phyllis Chesler

"I have never seen so lucidly represented the differences between what women and men want out of sex, conversation, relationships of all kinds. More than anything this is a novel in which the women characters, instead of being depicted as numbed or living under a `bell jar', retain the vitality and intelligence of their feelings and insist on them even when they lead to risk and defiance."
Adrienne Rich

"This groundbreaking novel teams with women in transition and their mothers, fathers, lovers, husbands, children, employers...SMALL CHANGES speaks to the totality of a woman's experience and as such is unquestionably unique...one must feel gratitude for the amity and emotional intensity of the intimate human concerns in this passionately life-oriented novel."
Myrna Lamb, Washington POST

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME:
"Infused with splendid portraits of human dignity..rich and wholesome, at once inspired by and celebrating the ordinary, accessible magic of human life and possibility."
Karen Lindsey, Boston HERALD AMERICAN

"a fiercely brilliant writer..a novel which on several levels is as chilling, provocative and at least as controversial as...SMALL CHANGES."
Jane Howard, MADEMOISELLE

"It is the most serious and fully imagined Utopia since Ursula K. LeGuin's THE DISPOSSESSED, and even the cynical reader will leave it refreshed and rallied...."
Kirkus Service

"Ms. Piercy is a good storyteller whose sense of psychological detail is rich and accurate. Connie's growing awareness that she has the strength to say no comes across with simple, majestic force."
Philadelphia INQUIRER

THE HIGH COST OF LIVING:
"...one of the more unusual love triangles that has appeared in recent fic-tion...It is not just that these three are believable and oddly appealing -- it is also that one willingly identifies with, even admires, Leslie, however alien she may be to the reader's own sense of identity...Piercy has written a novel as ambiguous and fascinating as life itself."
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York TIMES

"...as important to understanding what is of portent in our times as Hardy's JUDE THE OBSCURE and Dreiser's AMERICAN TRAGEDY were to theirs."
Tillie Olsen

"...realism lightened and much speeded up...a human, complex and truthful work...it has formidable virtues: an intense sense of character, a direct dignity, and genuine weight. It neither snoozles up to you nor gushes nor complains, and that's rare. By all means, buy it..It's an impressive achieve-ment." Joanna Russ, FRONTIERS

VIDA: "Real people inhabit its pages and real suspense carries the story along...VIDA of course means life and she personifies it...I found the book fascinating."
Thomas Williams, Chicago TRIBUNE

"Marge Piercy's strong, complex yet lucid political novel is a flame opus....a fire show: sometimes the explosion of a grenade, sometimes the glow of an oil lamp in a New England farm house, sometimes sparks from the friction of IRT subway wheels or the friction of passion between men and women or women and women, sometimes a veritable son et lumiere of the 60's and 70's..."
Cynthia Macdonald, Washington POST

"A fully controlled, tightly structured dramatic narrative of such artful intensity that it leads the reader on at almost every page...It is an inter-esting and challenging book."
Elinor Langer, New York TIMES

"This epic story fueled with intense commitment and sensuousness...Piercy shows characters surviving...with integrity and tenderness...in a political milieu. VIDA may be to women in the 80's what THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK was to women in the 60's."
Valerie Miner, LA TIMES

BRAIDED LIVES:
"...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.. BRAIDED LIVES is a novel that tries not to simplify but to clarify...and by so doing, it adds a great deal to our under-standing of how things came to be as they are, and what some of yesterday might have meant."
Marcie Hershman, The Boston GLOBE

"It is a novel that bursts with felt life--immediate and universal--and pulsates with a rare generosity of spirit towards its characters, men as well as women."
Helen Yglesias

"This book demonstrates the maturation of Piercy's native talent for story-telling...we would have to look to a French writer like Colette or to American writers of another generation, like May Sarton, to find anyone who writes as tenderly as Piercy about life's redeeming pleasures - sex, of course, but also the joys of good food, good conversation, and the reassuring little rituals like feeding the cats, watering the plant, weeding the garden."
Judith Paterson, Washington POST BOOK WORLD

FLY AWAY HOME:
"...full of commonplace delights and loving detail about furniture, animals, gardens, sex and, most delightfully, food. Daria Walker is someone who really understands and respects simple pleasure, an attractive quality surprisingly rare among fictional heroines and reminiscent of Colette. FLY AWAY HOME is an exciting novel that takes on many big subjects with ease."
Alane Rollings, Chicago TRIBUNE

"FLY AWAY HOME is a taut, rich, vibrant story...a novel of ideas about inno-cence and responsibility, about an individual's place in society and in the changing shape of family...Piercy's most accessible novel and, therefore, her most politically powerful one."
Valerie Miner, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

GONE TO SOLDIERS:
"This book deserves to have an entire book written about it...a landmark piece of literary prose...in Piercy's hands, that war is new again, in its awfulness, its quirkiness, the idiosyncratic peculiarities...this could be the most thorough and most captivating, most engrossing novel ever written about World War II."
Carolyn See, LA TIMES

"Piercy's war takes on universality of a sort that Hemingway's war, or Mailer's war, could never have achieved...she has mastered a huge subject, dismantled a centuries-old sex barrier and widened our perceptions of both war and literature. All this in a good beach book makes GONE TO SOLDIERS a victory by any standards."
NEWSWEEK

"...what Marge Piercy has achieved with her stunning 703-page opus, GONE TO SOLDIERS, is unquestionably literature -- a novel that moves as easily from battlefield to home front as it does from female to male perspective...Piercy is as much a poet as a novelist, with a poet's gift for language and capturing the moment in essential details...Piercy has brought that poetry into GONE TO SOLDIERS, the sweep of change, loss, and growth, the feel of life going on -- the lives that will eventually become our own."
Dorothy Allison, VILLAGE VOICE

"For many readers of this urgent and powerful recapturing of World War II the whole immense tapestry will seem to be a tale told long ago suddenly come alive and made as vivid as Star Wars. For readers like me who were alive at the time, it will come as a bringing together of the whole human tragedy, the clarification of a human past we cannot forget and often failed to encompass when it was happening. I found it deeply moving and redemptive and am grate-ful for the imaginative genius who has `brought them back alive' forever."
May Sarton

"Despite the tragedy that is the central drama, the book is rich and vivid with the texture of experience. Page after page of exquisitely described moments accumulate...One is stunned and shaken by the terrain of this book and, as if by the same hand that dealt us this blow, given a precious insight into what it is to be committed to the living."
Susan Griffin, San Francisco EXAMINER

"A sense of urgency blows through GONE TO SOLDIERS, strong enough to carry even showers of details behind it...GONE TO SOLDIERS is a literary triumph for Marge Piercy and a landmark volume in the literature of war. As few novels have done, it takes into account the way that war affects old people, women, children, even animals and plant life, as well as the 'official' participants in battle, the soldiers."
USA TODAY

SUMMER PEOPLE:
"... the author display's an old-fashioned narrative drive and a set of well realized characters permitted to lead their own believably odd lives... she can serve a meal, arrange a funeral, or make a Christmas in convincing detail."
Thomas Mallon, NEWSDAY

"This reviewer knows no other writer with Piercy's gifts for tracing the emotional route that two people take to a double bed, and the mental games and gambits each transacts there." Ron Grossman, Chicago TRIBUNE

"...the relationship between the three individuals affords a perfect means of studying the tenuousness of any bonds of love. Piercy constructs artful novels that skillfully couch her intelligent observations of human behavior."
Brad Hooper, BOOKLIST

HE, SHE AND IT:
"Piercy's vision, in addition to being broad and serious, is playful. This novel reaches its apex as a dangerous vision when it retells the story of manhood. Piercy depicts a more than human man-made man who is programmed by women. HE, SHE AND IT, which describes Yod the perfect lover/father and house-work-free domiciles, is a woman-centered fantasy. HE, SHE AND IT, a ground-breaking example of Jewish feminist fabulation, is a triumph."
Marleen Barr, AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW

"Marge Piercy has written a marvelous story of love and robots.... Piercy adds family and religious values to the cyberpunk core of multinational corpora-tions and information pirates. The result is one of the best novels of the year."
Fred Cleaver, Denver POST

"Also in evidence is Piercy's customary skill in focusing on the minutiae of human thought and interaction, and it is this attention to inner psychological conflict (even in the case of our two golems) that pulls the book out of its sci-fi trap and makes its world of tomorrow ominously real."
Alison Bass, The Boston GLOBE

Yod is.. "the most articulately introspective "monster" in fiction since Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. It is these Golem sequences that Piercy's sophis-tication is most manifest. They reflect Malkah's concerns as much as they do Yod's. They prefigure, becoming meta-fictional commentary on the novel in progress, and ultimately they give HE, SHE AND IT a mythic depth rare in science fiction. It is a powerful and memorable mixture, worth the attention of science fiction devotees and people who have never read a science fiction novel.."
Darrell Schweitzer, The Boston PHOENIX

"Piercy's vision of a post-greenhouse-effect, nuclear-blasted world interlaced with the Prague ghetto of 1600, and the efforts of certain people to stay human in both, is threaded with the questions: What is it to be human? ... What does `life' mean?... What are the limits of creativity? As always, Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion and innate feminism."
Adrienne Rich

THE LONGINGS OF WOMEN:
"Marge Piercy can seat 15 strangers around a Thanksgiving table, and by the time dessert is served you'll know all of them. Her paragraph on Leila's interview techniques for talking with battered women is a miniature master class. These characters are so authentic, you'll want to shake them: 'Leave that creep!' 'Get a shrink!' "Work at Legal Seafood!' "
Patricia Volk, New York Times Book Review

"It would be a public service to distribute THE LONGINGS OF WOMEN to anyone facing the flu or a long train journey. Marge Piercy's 11th novel id addictive, engrossing and remarkably successful in replacing the reader's reality with its own. And yet this examination of modern American life is not an escape into fantasy but a window on the world of hard facts."
Anna Mundow, New York Daily News

"What Piercy has that Danielle Steel, for example, does not is an ability to capture life's complex texture, to chart shifting relationships and evolving consciousness within the context of political and economic realitites she delineates with mordant matter-of-factness. Working within the venerable tradition of socially conscious fiction, she brings to it a feminist understanding of the impact such things as class and money have on personal interactions without ever losing sight of the crucial role played by individual's responses to those things."
Wendy Smith, Sun-Times, Chicago

"Like a painter with favorite colors, Piercy has themes and elements she returns to in every book. In THE LONGINGS OF WOMEN, she combines them in three entwined stories that are the most interesting and consistently balanced she has ever written."
Susan Hall-Balduf, Detroit Free Press

Mary, Leila's homeless cleaning lady, is a character to haunt your dreams. Mary's plight generates the novel's anguished suspense.
Kennebunk, ME Coast Star

CITY OF DARKNESS, CITY OF LIGHT
…each individual comes alive in that storm-torn world, for an unusual and moving novel.
The Anniston Star

Marge Piercy's awesome new novel about the French Revolution powerfully reflects the dichotomy in characters and events whose ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity were mangled by power struggles and massacres.
Philadelphia Inquirer

…thoroughly astonishing new novel…A story of epic sweep and resounding authenticity. Piercy's prose, snapping with Gallic directness, alloys the earthy and the erudite in this stirring novel that serves up haute cuisine for the intellect. Its most memorable elements - the befuddled, terrified Louis; the surging power of the riots; the vicious squabbling between political factions; a Paris under siege from within; the courage and sacrifice of the freedom crusaders - are all viscerally felt.
Orlando Sentinel

Piercy has written a notably broad, evenhanded, comprehensive book.
Los Angeles Times

Piercy skillfully juxtaposes the political debates, painfully slow reforms and bloody confrontations against the ironies and absurdities of everyday life…a novel that adds fresh, powerfully grounding perspective to accepted historical fact.
Publisher's Weekly

Five hundred pages of gripping, page turning, blood-curdling, awe-inspiring prose. This may well be Marge Piercy's best book. Each character in this book is exquisitely multidimentional, so no one comes off as either wholly good or bad - not even Robespierre. Many scenes, like the storming of the Bastille and of the Palace at Versailles, are downright thrilling. And when I closed the book on this cast of heroes and scoundrels, I felt a real sense of loss at leaving them.
The Guardian

A near-epic retelling of events of the French Revolution through the points of view of three women and three men deeply involved in the revolution's glory years. …Her female characterizations and her depiction of the activity of women revolutionaries are a major accomplishment and immediately convincing. Marge Piercy is one of the few contemporary American writers with a true greatness about her.
Morning Star Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas

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