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Mothers and Daughters:
That Special Quality:
An Exploration in Photographs
Copyright © 1995
by Tillie Olsen and Estelle Jussim
Aperture
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Mothers and Daughters is a moving tribute to that most
extraordinary emotional bond,
that between a mother and daughter. Whether it is cherished or despised,
the bond
remains. Mothers and Daughters
is a collection of photographs chosen from the work
of 90 photographers. Robert Adams, Harry Callahan, Jill Freedman, Sally Mann,
Bruce Davidson, Niki Berg, Barbara Crane, Abigail Heyman, and Milton Rogovin
are
among the many photographers who contributed to this beautiful volume. The
photographers are joined by many extrodinary leading writers and poets,
including
Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Nikki Giovanni, Marge Piercy and Adrienne Rich,
in
offering us a harmony of insights and observations. A very special gift for
any mother or daughter. — Word
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Silences
Copyright © 1989
by Tillie Olsen
Bantam, Doubleday, Dell
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This book is about silences. It is concerned with the relationship of
circumstances — including class, color, sex; the times, climate into
which one is born — to the creation of literature. In the United
States,
why are there so many more male authors than female authors listed in
literary course offerings, reviews, and anthologies? Why, especially,
when as far back as 1971, one out of every four or five books
published were written by women? Is this more proof, "in this so
much more favorable century," that women are innately incapable of
artistic literary achievement? With poetic language and painstaking
thoroughness, Tillie Olsen articulates the obstacles, difficulties,
frustrations, and imperatives faced when non-privileged people — women
especially — are driven to write: How do working people get
sustained periods of time not devoted to wage labor or corrupted by
economic pressures? Where do women writers find sufficient space
and encouragement to keep writing? Written over a period of fifteen
years in time squeezed between wage work and mothering, Silences
continues to serve as a model of inviting and accessible scholarship:
"A passion and purpose inform its pages: love for my incomparable
medium, literature; hatred for all that, societally rooted, unnecessarily
lessens and denies it; slows, impairs, silences writers. It is written to
re-dedicate and encourage. — Jesse Larsen, 500 Great Books by
Women
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Tell Me a Riddle
Copyright © 1989
by Tillie Olsen
Delacorte Press
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This collection of stories...has become an American classic. Since the title
novella won the First Prize O Henry Award in 1961, the stories have become
staples in literature classes. They have been anthologized over a hundred
times, made into three films, translated into thirteen languages, and —
most
important — once read, they live forever in the hearts of their readers.
— from the jacket
When she wrote Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen, like William Blake,
covered paper with words "for the angels to read." — John Leonard
Tillie Olsen's stories have an extraordinary purity and dignity. Every time
I read Tell Me a Riddle it breaks my heart. — Alice Munro
These stories have the lyric intensity of an Emily Dickinson poem and the
scope of a Balzac novel. — from the judges' citation for the Rea
Award for the Short Story
They are alive, her people ... she creates them with a feeling and
understanding
so deep as to be literally painful. — New York Times Book Review
Everything she has written has become almost immediately a classic. —
Robert Coles
Her fictional world portrays the people who fall
outside the Plains stereotypes. — Linda Ray Pratt
There are stories in this collection which are perfectly realized works of
art. — RM Elman, Commonweal
What Tillie Olsen has
to say ... is of primary importance to those who want to understand
how Art is generated or
subverted and those trying to create it themselves. — Margaret Atwood
Exists in the realm in which craftsmanship is transformed into mystery,
and criticism comes close to irrelevance. — Saturday Review
Explores the deep pain and real promise of fundamental American experience.
As a work of great literary art, it will be read as long as the American
language lasts. — Julian Moynihan
Tillie Olsen writes about those people who, because of their class, sex,
or race, have been denied the opportunity to express and develop themselves.
In a strongly emotional style, she tells of their dreams and failures, of
what she calls "the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into
being but cannot." — Contemporary Authors
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Yonnondio:
From the Thirties
Copyright © 1994
by Tillie Olsen
Delacorte Press
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Set during the Depression, Yonnondio: From The Thirties
is the timeless and
hauntingly timely story of the Holbrook family, struggling
for a more tolerable existence. Written by
the author in the 1930s and rediscovered by her in the 1970s,
Yonnondio will always be an
unfinished work that makes us long for more of that young
author's brilliance. This reissue presents
newly discovered fragments and scenes that satisfy some of
that longing and give a more complete
picture of the fate of the mother, Anna, one of literature's most
believable and enduring woman. — from the jacket
I know of no work that bespeaks the consciousness and roots of the 1930s as
brilliantly as Yonnondio.
Yonnondio, whose language is often achingly beautiful,
is an elegy that acts on the reader
indirectly by its emotional suggestiveness, rather than by its direct
succession of events. — The New Republic
Tillie Olsen is one of the greatest prose stylists now writing. ... a
magnificent novel. ... the best novel to come out of the so-called
proletarian movement of the '30s. — Jack Salzman, Book World
Almost unbearable in its harsh poetry and bitter fidelity to lives that are
now forgotten, or never known, except by hearts that once comprehending
suffering never forget it. — Alice Walker
On every page, a sense of teeming, tumbling life. ... Mrs Olsen is a most appealing writer,
a strange new charmer in the wilderness that is fiction today. — The New
Yorker
Yonnondio clearly must take its place as the best novel to come out of the
so-called proletarian movement of the '30s. ...
Mrs Olsen's richness of style, her depth of characterization, make for a
work which must not, cannot be restricted by a particular time or
place. — Washington Post
The heart of meaning in this book, the key to its rhythm, is the
phoenix rebirth of the spirit. — Village Voice
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What the Critics Say
Bibliography
