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by Rachel Cooke
The first anthology devoted to women's friendship drawn from fiction, diaries, poetry, and letters.
As Marilynne Robinson writes in her 1980 novel Housekeeping, "having a sister or friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house." Bringing together work by more than 100 writers, the Book of Women's Friendship explores the rich subject of friendship between women from every angle: its particular intensity and miraculous ease, its tendency to wax and wane, its role not only as a comfort and a privilege, but as vital to our health.
Editor Rachel Cooke excerpts novels, poems, diaries, letters, comics, and graphic novels about women's friendship, placing work from a diverse array of artists in conversation across time and place. From Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, from Dolly Alderton to Sarah Waters, and from Zadie Smith to Meg Wolitzer, The Book of Women's Friendship celebrates and investigates friendship between women from first encounters to final goodbyes, from falling out to making up again.
"[A] rich anthology...a compassionate meditation on the power of female connection." —Publishers Weekly
"An exhilaratingly wide array." —Spectator
"An uplifting anthology." —Harper's Bazaar
This information about The Book of Women's Friendship was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rachel Cooke is an award-winning British journalist and writer. She lives in London, where she is a columnist at the Observer and the New Statesman. Her previous books are Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties and Kitchen Person: Notes on Cooking & Eating.
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