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Dance the Eagle to Sleep: A Novel
Author: Marge Piercy
Publisher: PM Press
Published: January 2012
Format: Paperback
Size: 9 by 6
Page count: 265 Pages
Subjects: Fiction
$17.95
Originally published in 1970, Marge Piercy’s second novel follows the lives of four teenagers, in a near future society, as they rebel against a military draft and “the system.” The occupation of Franklin High School begins, and with it, the open rebellion of America’s youth against their channeled, unrewarding lives and the self-serving, plastic society that directs them.
From the disillusionment and alienation of the young at the center of the revolt, to their attempts to build a visionary new society, the nationwide following they gain and the brutally complete repression that inevitably follows, this is a future fiction without a drop of fantasy.
As driving, violent, and nuanced today as it was 40 years ago, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction by the author reflecting unapologetically on the novel and the times from which it emerged.
Praise:
“Dance the Eagle to Sleep bears a strong family resemblance, in kind and quality, to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. It would be no surprise to see it become, like these others, a totem and legend of the young.” —Time
“Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a vision, not an argument… It is brilliant. Miss Piercy was a published poet before she resorted to the novel, exploiting its didactic aspect, and her prose crackles, depolarizes, sends shivers leaping across the synaptic cleft. The ‘eagle’ is America, bald and all but extinct. The ‘dance’ is performed by the tribal young, the self-designated ‘Indians,’ after their council meetings, to celebrate their bodies and their escape from the cannibalizing ‘system.’ The eagle isn’t danced to sleep; it sends bombers to devastate the communes of the young... What a frightening, marvelous book!” —New York Times
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Vida
Authors: Marge Piercy
Publisher: PM Press
Published April 2011
Format: Paperback
Size: 9 by 6
Page count: 416 Pages
Subjects: Fiction
$24.95
VIDA is the most important novel yet written about the political '60s and '70s; it is at the same time a sensual and moving love story. Vida is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters and victories of an extraordinary band of people.
At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the '60s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement — a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of Life magazine — charismatic, passionate and totally sure she would prevail.
Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. She comes briefly to rest in a safe house on Cape Cod. To her surprise and annoyance, she finds another person in the house, a fugitive, Joel, ten years younger than she, a kid who dropped into the underground out of the army. As they spend the next days together, Vida finds herself warming toward a man for the first time in years, knowing all too well the dangers.
Praise:
"Real people inhabit its pages and real suspense carries the story along...VIDA of course means life and she personifies it...I found the book fascinating."
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The Chicago Tribune"A fully controlled, tightly structured dramatic narrative of such artful intensity that it leads the reader on at almost every page."
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The New York Times Book Review"Marge Piercy's strong, complex yet lucid political novel is a flame opus....a fire show: sometimes the explosion of a grenade, sometimes the glow of an oil lamp in a New England farm house, sometimes sparks from the friction of IRT subway wheels or the friction of passion between men and women or women and women, sometimes a veritable son et lumiere of the 60's and 70's..."
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The Washington Post
"An epic story fueled with intense commitment and sensuousness...Piercy shows characters surviving...with integrity and tenderness...in a political milieu. VIDA may be to women in the 80's what THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK was to women in the 60's."
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The Los Angeles Times"Marge Piercy tells us exactly how it was in the lofts of the Left as the 1960s turned into the '70s. This is the way everybody sounded This is the way everybody behaved. Vida bears witness;'
—The New York Times"Very exciting. Marge Piercy's characters are complex and very human
."— Margaret Atwood
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