'Alice Walker in this, the most beautiful, the most compassionate, the most sensuous of novels, has created a masterpiece. It is one of the most life-enhancing novels you could hope to read. Flawless' Mary Louden, THE TIMES
'All your life you have the necessary illusion that you know all there is to know about heartbreak. I hate to the one to tell you about the heartbreak you will experience after you die . . .'
A family goes to the remote sierras of Mexico - the writer-to--be Susannah; her sister Magdalena; their father and mother. There, amid indigenous people called the Mundo, they begin an encounter that will change them more than they ever could have dreamed. This is a deeply sensual novel that explores the richness of female sexuality as a celebration of life, affirming the belief "that it is the triumphant heart, not the conquered heart, that forgives. And that love is both timeless and beyond." (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize * Winner of the National Book Award
Published to unprecedented acclaim, The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. This is the story of two sisters--one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South--who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic novel of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
Comprising two volumes, The Complete Stories is a rich smorgasbord of tales that showcases three decades of the author's work. They show the immense range of Alice Walker's talent, from humour to stories of love, race and politics, reaffirming her position as one of the most important writers of the past 50 years. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
This gorgeous collection gathers Alice Walker's wide-ranging meditations--many of them previously unpublished--on our intertwined personal, spiritual, and political destinies. For the millions of her devoted fans, and for readers of Walker's bestselling 2006 book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, here is a brand new "gift of words" that invites readers on a journey of political awakening and spiritual insight. The Cushion in the Road finds the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and activist at the height of her literary powers, sharing fresh vantages and a deepening engagement with our world. Walker writes that "we are beyond a rigid category of color, sex, or spirituality if we are truly alive," and the pieces in The Cushion in the Road illustrate this idea beautifully. Visiting themes she has addressed throughout her career--including racism, Africa, Palestinian solidarity, and Cuba--as well as addressing emergent issues, such as the presidency of Barack Obama on health care, Walker explores her conflicting impulses to retreat into inner contemplation and to remain deeply engaged with the world. Rich with humor and wisdom, and informed by Walker's unique eye for the details of human and natural experience, The Cushion in the Road will please longtime Walker fans as well as those who are new to her work.
Alice Walker's early story, "Everyday Use," has remained a cornerstone of her work. Her use of quilting as a metaphor for the creative legacy that African Americans inherited from their maternal ancestors changed the way we define art, women's culture, and African American lives. By putting African American women's voices at the center of the narrative for the first time, "Everyday Use" anticipated the focus of an entire generation of black women writers.
This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Walker's life, an authoritative text of "Everyday Use" and of "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," an interview with Walker, six critical essays, and a bibliography. The contributors are Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Thadious M. Davis, Margot Anne Kelley, John O'Brien, Elaine Showalter, and Mary Helen Washington. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
Johnny lives in a town where everyone owns a shiny green stone. He has one, too, until his mean-spirited behavior makes him lose it. His family and the whole town help him search, but to find it, he alone must discover the “bright green sun in his heart.” A symbolic and sensitive tale about a young boy who discovers that happiness and fulfillment can come from within. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
The status of black American women is explored in this collection of nonfiction writings. Writing these, Walker says, "led me eventually into a larger understanding of the psyche, and of the world." What finally marks this volume is the strong sense of change and, ultimately, of forgiveness as a part of growth. In her powerful third collection, Alice Walker writes vivid, beautiful poems of breakdown and spiritual disarray.
"Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one." So writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality, the power we each share to express our truest, deepest selves. Beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others, she demonstrates that we are stronger than our circumstances. As she confronts personal and collective challenges, her works dance, sing, and heal.
In her preface to this collection Alice Walker expresses surprise that she has been writing poetry for more than a quarter of a century--since the summer of 1965 when she traveled to East Africa and began writing the poems that would form her first volume. Here, in an inspiring compilation of her earlier poetry, Walker offers a historical perspective on the political and spiritual issues spanning three decades of injustice, perseverance, and hope. Revelatory introductions to each group of poems become essential threads in the tapestry that is Alice Walker, tightly weaving a special insight into the evolving consciousness of one of the most remarkable and provocative literary voices of our time. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
This new collection of poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet Alice Walker is characterized by a variety of themes spoken in humor, anger, and love. In spare, eloquent language Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind. She writes of the small joys of life, the blight of racism, injustice and hunger, the need to save the earth from self-destruction, and about poetry itself. "These Days" catalogs the uniqueness of the poet's friends; "Poem at Thirty-Nine" is a tender hymn to her father. In "Family Of," Walker extends and internalizes the meaning of the American Indian term, "Wasichu," signifying greed and violence. In "My Daughter is Coming," she writes about the joys of a daughter's homecoming. "Each One, Pull One" tells of the absolute necessity for the writer to write. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
Alice Walker tells the stories of black women who vary greatly in background but who are bound together by their vulnerability to life: Roselily, on her wedding day, surrounded by her four children, pays that a loveless marriage will bring her respectability; a young writer, exploited by both her lover and her husband, wreaks an ironic vengeance; a jealous wife, looking for her husband's mistress, finds a competitor she cannot fight; an old woman, thrown out of a white church, meets God on a highway. These and nine other women represent the seekers of dignity and love portrayed in this new collection from the Pulitizer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
In this, her first collection of nonfiction, the author speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist in thirty-six pieces ranging from the personal to the political. Among the contents are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.
The author of The Color Purple meditates on planetary concerns as well as on feminist and political issues in her most deeply spiritual work yet. She writes of our intimate connection with nature, focuses on racial questions, reports on trips to China, Bali, and Jamaica, and more.
As she approaches the end of her teen years, Meridian Hill has already married, divorced, and given birth to a son. She’s looking for a second chance, and at a small college outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1960s, Meridian discovers the civil rights movement. So fully does the cause guide her life that she’s willing to sacrifice virtually anything to help transform the conditions of a people whose subjugation she shares.
Meridian draws from Walker’s own experiences working alongside some of the heroes of the civil rights movement, and the novel stands as a shrewd and affecting document of the dissolution of the Jim Crow South. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey.
In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her finest achievements: the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love.
Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.
Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author’s hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker’s most surprising achievement. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
This volume contains a collection of poems by a young Alice Walker (b. 1944). The subjects are about Africa and civil rights conflict in the American South. This first volume of poetry established Walker as a poet of unusual sensitivity and power. All of the poems in this collection were written either in East Africa, where Walker spent the summer of 1965 or during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College.
An American woman struggles with the genital mutilation she endured as a child in Africa in a New York Times bestseller “as compelling as The Color Purple” (San Francisco Chronicle).
In Tashi’s tribe, the Olinka, young girls undergo female genital mutilation as an initiation into the community. Tashi manages to avoid this fate at first, but when pressed by tribal leaders, she submits. Years later, married and living in America as Evelyn Johnson, Tashi’s inner pain emerges. As she questions why such a terrifying, disfiguring sacrifice was required, she sorts through the many levels of subjugation with which she’s been burdened over the years.
In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker exposes the abhorrent practice of female genital mutilation in an unforgettable, moving novel. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
In The Temple of My Familiar, Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of dozens of characters, all dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants, to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America, to Celie’s own granddaughter living in modern-day San Francisco, all must come to understand the brutal stories of their ancestors to come to terms with their own troubled lives.
As Walker follows these astonishing characters, she weaves a new mythology from old fables and history, a profoundly spiritual explanation for centuries of shared African-American experience. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Color Purple: A “moving, tender” novel of a Deep South tenant farmer’s quest for a new life (Publishers Weekly).
Grange Copeland, a deeply conflicted and struggling tenant farmer in the Deep South of the 1930s, leaves his family and everything he’s ever known to find happiness and respect in the cold cities of the North. This misadventure, his “second life,” proves a dismal failure that sends him back where he came from to confront his now-grown-up son’s disastrous relationships with his own family, including Grange’s granddaughter, Ruth Copeland, a child that Grange grows to love. Love becomes the substance of his third and final life. He spends it in devotion to Ruth, teaching and protecting her—though the cost of doing so is almost more than he can bear. (Google Books, viewed 29 November 2022)
"Poetry is leading us," writes Alice Walker in The World Will Follow Joy. In this dazzling collection, the beloved writer offers over sixty new poems to incite and nurture contemporary activists. Hailed as a "lavishly gifted writer" (The New York Times), Walker imbues her poetry with evocative images, fresh language, anger, forgiveness, and profound wisdom. Casting her poetic eye toward history, politics, and nature, as well as to world figures such as Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, and the Dalai Lama, she is indeed a "muse for our times" (Amy Goodman). By attentively chronicling the conditions of human life today, Walker shows, as ever, her deep compassion, profound spirituality, and necessary political commitments. The poems in The World Will Follow Joy remind us of our human capacity to come together and take action, even in our troubled political times. Above all, the gems in this collection illuminate what it means to live in our world today.
A natural evolution from the earlier, much-acclaimed collection In Love
& Trouble, these fourteen provocative and often humorous stories show
women oppressed but not defeated. These are hopeful stories about love,
lust, fame, and cultural thievery, the delight of new lovers, and the
rediscovery of old friends, affirmed even across self-imposed color lines. (Amazon.com, viewed 29 November 2022)