“You must read this book and let your heart be broken.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“You are about to give the life of your reading to a forgotten American classic, Rebecca Harding’s Life in the Iron Mills, reprinted here after 124 years from the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly. Without precedent or predecessor, it recorded what no one else recorded; alone in its epoch and for decades to come, saw the significance, the presage, in scorned or unseen native materials—and wrought them into art. Written in secret and in isolation by a thirty-year-old unmarried woman who lived far from literary circles of any kind, it won instant fame—to sleep in ever deepening neglect in our time.”
—Tillie Olsen
“One of the earliest recognitions in American literature of the existence of the very poor.”
—Michele Murray, National Observer
“Life in the Iron Mills has been described as the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin of American capitalism,’ a work which first acknowledged the dignity and intelligence of working people. . . . It’s an American classic that foreshadowed the naturalist technique of later nineteenth-century writers.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Not So Quiet ...
Helena Zenna Smith
eISBN: 9781558616325 | ISBN: 9780935312829
Praised by the Chicago Sun-Times for its “furious, indignant power,” this story offers a rare, funny, bitter, and feminist look at war. First published in London in 1930, Not So Quiet ... (on the Western Front) describes a group of British women ambulance drivers on the French front lines during World War I, surviving shell fire, cold, and their punishing commandant, “Mrs. Bitch.” The novel takes the guise of an autobiography by Smith, pseudonym for Evadne Price. The novel’s power comes from Smith’s outrage at the senselessness of war, at her country’s complacent patriotism, and her own daily contact with the suffering and the wounded.
“A powerful condemnation of war and the societies that glamorize it.”
—Kirkus
“This intriguing book . . . vividly and impressionistically tells of the author’s tour of duty in France. . . . One welcomes its return to print.”
—William Boyd, New York Times Book Review
“The reader of Not So Quiet . . . today is immediately gripped by its furious, indignant power.”
—Alida Becker, Chicago Sun-Times
Now in November Page 18