Grab Your Edition You Cant Keep A Good Woman Down Assembled By Alice Walker Published As Digital Edition

last! I have learned to appreciate the art of the short story! Alice Walker has put together a collection of strong, buoyant heroines I want to be friends with.
And then I want to organize with them,

The back of the book advertises itself as a natural progression from its predecessor: "No longer do her heroines lean toward death or even toward the past no longer do they excuse the aggression of others no longer are they suspended in their unhappy condition.
The women here claim every bit of space they make, " I thought this was a curious blurb to put on the back of the book it certainly did make me want to read this one, but took away any inclination I might have had to read sitelinkIn Love amp Trouble: Stories of Black Women.


It's true, though, And it's beautiful to read the stories of smart, strong women and validating, too, after a summer of being told that people were uncomfortable when I said anything that made them think and that I should probably not play the piano so much.
It's great to feel in good company with other women who stand their ground,

More than that, though, these stories are just so well crafted, And remember, this is coming from someone who has previously claimed to enjoy pretty much only the short stories of sitelinkJhumpa Lahiri.
These stories each have vividly painted protagonists with clear, distinct inner lives, and relatable but never hackneyed conflicts, The often omniscient viewpoint of the narrator adds a lot, And these stories are often not more than ten pages long, How does she do so much in just ten pages

We wrestle along with our characters as they spar along with various topics and how they relate to their particular livesracism, abortion, rape, pornography reading these stories as I waited for my first graders to come back from lunch made me feel rather deliciously scandalousbut the questions they are asking never take away from the worlds they create and define for themselves.
YEAH. These stories and conversations actually made me feel in some ways like I was back at Carleton, in a very satisfying way the constant selfquestioning over a sometimes very academic background.


Actually, I thought the most academic story was the weakest written as an introduction to a book of essays by Audre Lorde amp co.
, it features a woman researching and quoting academia to her husband as a way to explain why his porn collection makes her uncomfortable.
Alice Walker has a preface to this story saying she thinks it works on its own I politely disagree, or am at least unconvinced by it.


After each story, I had to

put the book down, stop, think, and digest, And I put off reading the last story for an entire week after reading almost the whole thing in one week because I didn't want the book to end.


I've previously criticized Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories for having too much biographical similarity between the charactersand I suppose I could make that criticism here, but it doesn't ring true.
Many of the characters, like Alice Walker herself, came from Georgia and went to college in New York, and then after college engaged in various nonprofit/writing activities.
But, this did not bother me, Partly because the characters were so completely distinctdifferent lives, situations, interests, even take note, Jhumpa Lahiri social class backgrounds and probably partly because I find these themes quite easy to relate to.


At any rate, I absolutely loved this book and didn't want it to end, Along with sitelinkAunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, I will be lending this one out and recommending it for some time to come.
I can't believe I hadn't read any Alice Walker up till now, I must continue to fix this, starting immediately, Also, happy almost Banned Books Week! Sorry but I just didn't get it, I was just hoping for more, like something that would transcend racial themes and expand my understanding of women, There were moments but never the real "aha" moment where I felt connected with the author or the message, Beautiful vignettes, each offering a window into a different woman's life, . . stunning reflections on race and womanhood, Everyone should read this collection, The more I learn about black, especially AfricanAmerican history and culture, the more I understand how great Walkers writing is and how well she uses her fiction to impart knowledge.
Sure, stories are meant to entertain but in Walkers case they are also clearly written to educate, Every single one of these stories taught me something, For that reason I think of Walkers short stories as essays, in a sense,

Walker discusses lots of topics, including difficult ones such as interracial relationships, abortion, and pornography, Perhaps some of those topics arent for everyone and a few of the stories were quite explicit but if theres anyone who can handle such topics, its Walker.
I get the feeling that Walker weaves in some of her own experiences in her stories because quite a few of them did seem to have a semiautobiographical feel.


As the title suggests, the main topic of this book is women, in particular black women, One of the most interesting stories was “Nineteen FiftyFive,” which was about an older black woman who sold some of her songs to a white male singer.
Walker managed to address so many things that Ive been thinking about art and appropriation, and she also got me thinking about the disparity between group needs and what people from other groups race, class, gender, etc.
, think they want this is something that she illustrates quite well without explicitly stating it as such,

I know a little about the history of black music in the States and of how it has often been appropriated.
Yet, the whole point about art is that its supposed to come from within, from our experiences, But so much art has been appropriated anyway:

“Everybody still loves that song of yours, They ask me all the time what do I think it means, really, I mean, they want to know just what I want to know, Where out of your life did it come from”

“They want what I got only it aint mine.
Thats what makes em so hungry for me when I sing, They getting the flavour of something but they aint getting the thing itself, They like a pack of hound dogs trying to gobble up a scent, ”

The story “Coming Apart” was just a masterpiece, In it Walker uses excerpts of an essay I hadnt heard of, by Tracey A, Gardner, about the racial aspects of pornography, Ill let the following excerpts speak for themselves:

“For centuries the black woman has served as the primary pornographic “outlet” for white men in Europe and America.
We need only think of the black women used as breeders, raped for the pleasure and profit of their owners, We need only think of the license the “master” of the slave woman enjoyed, But, most telling of all, we need only study the old slave societies of the South to note the sadistic treatment at the hands of white “gentlemen” of “beautiful”, young quadroons and octoroons” who became increasingly and were deliberately bred to become indistinguishable from white women, and were the more highly prized as slave mistresses because of this.
”

“Because Tracey A, Gardner has thought about it all, not just presently but historically, and she is clear about all the abuse being done to herself as a black person and as a woman, and she is bold and she is coldshe is furious.
The wife, given more to depression and selfabnegation than to fury, basks in the fire of Gardners highspirited anger, ”

Im always interested by exotification being a rare minority where I live, In the story “A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring“, the female protagonist realizes that she is constantly being othered I could relate so much to that:

“How could they ever know her if they were not allowed to know Wright, she wondered.
She was interesting, “beautiful,” only because they had no idea what made her, charming only because they had no idea from where she came.
And were they came from, though she glimpsed itin themselves and in F, Scott Fitzgeraldshe was never to enter, She hadnt the inclination or the proper ticket, ”

Like I always say, Walker is one of the bravest and most honest writers Ive ever come across, And shes adept at creating multidimensional black women characters, She illustrates black women with agency, and with a much often denied by society inner life, For me, a black woman who not so long ago rarely read of black womens experiences in literature, Alice Walkers work is so important.
Her brand of feminism, womanism, is something I can feel comfortable with as encompassing of the black womans experience, which is very often so different from those in mainstream feminism.
Additionally, black feminist heroes are included in Walkers writing and to me that seems like not only is she paying homage, she is also encouraging us to read up on these greats and learn from them.
As I learned from doing my thesis, the main way that black women learn is from each other, and from reading black womens literature as a way to understand their complex identities.
Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Ida B, WellsIll be reading you all soon, لم تعجبني القصص. . I loved all these stories, Alice Walker can do no wrong in my eyes, These were cerebral, cutting and affirming, فشلت كل قصص المجموعة في اجتذابي إليها. . لم أحسها. After the wonder that was her debut novel and this wonderfully written and painfully human collection of short stories, Alice Walker is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.


In this short story collection, you're going to find the complex lives of several different women, Proud women, women who've suffered through real hardships, women who are still going through the death knells of adolescence, women who kill, women who make the hard choices, women who love themselves with every fiber of their being, etc.
The only thing I can call this collection is human, It's just so powerful, and I could definitely feel the callbacks to so many great authors in the AfricanAmerican tradition like the use of a certain rat.


Even if you're not wellversed in AfricanAmerican literature, I recommend you pick this book up or Walker's debut novel, She will not disappoint. This is one I need to read again and again because not only are the stories here so honest sometimes joyful, sometimes discomfiting but they stretched my definition of what it means to be a feminist.
Wonderful work. Alice Walker is an American treasure, DNF. I liked the first storybut the rest of the stories dont seem to be my thing, I doubt Ill revisit this,

I am struggling to get through every story, they just arent resonating with me at all, The cover and title of this book belied its content, At first thinking perhaps it had more to do with surface level relationships but then quickly realized shamefully that the author is of course Alice Walker and anything less than well balanced, sincere, and powerfully intuitive would simply not do.
Loved it, hard to believe I had not read it sooner! This volume has a whole range of characters, such as the guru who preaches that nobody's anything or the old comrade in the antisexist struggle who reveals that the feminist she most admires is Scarlett O'Hara.
This book tackles the taboos of modern America, .