"The thing about Stein, our dear friend Gertrude, is she made a lot of things possible. Changed what language could be, and what grammar could be. Didn’t give a shit about the rules of language and lived with her boo when people really hated lesbians." - Gabrielle Welsh
"Read together, the reflections of the Nobel women reveal a range of ideas about what literature can do and a sense of a practitioner's responsibility to these ideas. While the lectures vary widely in content-from Lessing's and Gordimer's concrete political lessons to Szymborska's larger abstract musings to fables personal (Müller) and universal (Morrison)-each contains observations that are at once totally complex and recognizably true." - Jessi Haley
"Cita Press’ An Immortal Book: Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far brings together autobiographical essays and short stories from different periods in Eaton’s career, showcasing her range as a storyteller, thinker, and stylist. Revered for her contributions to Asian American and Asian Canadian literature, Sui Sin Far is also a key figure in early women’s journalism, literature, and feminism. A master at developing characters and rendering place, she grappled with themes of identity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and politics in ways that still resonate today."
Download our reading companion, "The Divine Right of Learning," for more background on Sui Sin Far, the history behind the stories, and reflections from writing and scholars working to recover Sui Sin Far's legacy.
"I have tried in this little volume to explain aesthetic preference, particularly as regards visible shapes, by the facts of mental science. But my explanation is addressed to readers in whom I have no right to expect a previous knowledge of psychology, particularly in its more modern developments. I have therefore based my explanation of the problems of aesthetics as much as possible upon mental facts familiar, or at all events easily intelligible, to the lay reader."
Vernon Lee's 1913 text examines the nature of beauty and our response to it--examining taste, emotional responses, and debates around artistic value.
"This is a book of stories. For that reason I have excluded all purely lyrical poems. But the word 'stories' has been stretched to its fullest application. It includes both narrative poems, properly so called; tales divided into scenes; and a few pieces of less obvious story-telling import in which one might say that the dramatis personae are air, clouds, trees, houses, streets, and such like things." -Amy Lowell
“To have [Zitkála-Šá’s] work collected here now speaks to the tenacity of her spirit, her insistence on being heard across generations. Speaking of herself, of her world, she teaches us how to be now.” –Erin Marie Lynch, foreword
Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings by Zitkála-Šá brings together fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by one of the most influential yet underappreciated activist-artists of the twentieth century. Zitkála-Šá (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, 1876-1938) spent her early years on the Yankton Indian Reservation before becoming a pupil, teacher, and reluctant poster child of the Indian boarding school system. Her first national publications marked a definitive break with the oppressive ideas behind her education, and her early fame as a musician and writer evolved into a decades-long political career fighting for Native rights.
The collection focuses on the author’s writing on assimilationist projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and their impact within Native communities and individuals. Zitkála-Šá’s voice is lyrical, bold and fresh–even over 100 years after initial publication. Her writing captures the intense beauty and pain of growing up and explores what it means to forge an identity in the face of cultural erasure. These are essential feminist texts that dig into the cruel tensions of an era through the eyes of an author who spent a lifetime “actively testing the chains which tightly bound [her] individuality like a mummy for burial.”
Designer Kassie John created a special zine for this collection that readers can download, print, and fold into a free mini-book at home (complete with a coloring page illustration of Zitkála-Šá!).
"This story is not about a bygone society’s oppressive strictures, but, rather, about its piecemeal accommodation of subversive actions and vehement passions." - Krithika Varagur
"The Old Maid" is the second novella in Wharton's 1924 quartet Old New York; each story in the collection represents a decade in "Old New York" society from the 1840s to the 1870s. In this novella (originally subtitled "The Fifties"), Delia and Charlotte conspire to raise Charlotte's secret daughter without activating suspicion within their exacting, closed social circle. Wharton expertly digs into her characters and the social contradictions they exploit to protect their family in a story that is as biting as it is tender and, at times, triumphant. Playwright Zoë Akins won a Pulitzer Prize for her adaption of the book in 1935, and a film starring Bette Davis and directed by Edmund Goulding came out in 1939. We are thrilled to bring this book to new audiences with a free, open access edition available online to all readers with an internet connection.
