A Full Moon of Women: 29 Word Portraits of Notable Women - Softcover

Molinaro, Ursule

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0929701321 ISBN 13: 9780929701325

Publisher: McPherson, 1993

Synopsis

Subtitled "29 word portraits of notable women from different times and places, + 1 void of course," this book is a powerful, unsettling vision in the tradition of Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes of those heroines whose rebellious daring shaped the meaning of the feminine experience. In these miniature biographies of Charlotte Corday, Joan of Arc, Lucy Goodale Thurston, Clara Schumann, Simone Weil, Alice Neel, Zenobia, Mu-Lan Hwa, Adele Hugo, among many others, and naturally including Snow White, Molinaro's prose impacts with consistent force, resurrecting these forgotten or disparaged women in all their talent and suffering.

About this title

About the Author

Ursule Molinaro authored more than a dozen novels, two dozen widely produced one-act plays, three volumes of non-fiction, and over one hundred short stories. Her novels and stories have been published also in England, France, and Japan. She was a self-trained artist (her paintings and collages appear on her McPherson titles), and avid acrosticist. Her correspondence includes letters from Marguerite Yourcenar, W. H. Auden, Raja Rao, Henri M. Peyre, Leon Kelly, Gunter Grass, Altert Camus, John Dos Passos, Marianne Moore, Anais Nin, Robert Cordier, and Edith Piaf.

Recipient of awards and fellowships from the McDowell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the PEN American Center, Ms. Molinaro also translated from four languages, including notable works by Hermann Hesse, Dino Buzzati, Nathalie Sarraute, Phillipe Sollers, Uwe Johnson, Reinhard Lettau, Audiberti, Gunter Eich, Edith Bruck, Claude Ollier, Bertolt Brecht, Francois Mauriac, Jean Vautier, Jean-Paul Weber, Walter Hollerer, Vincenzo Accame, Paolo Carra, Edward Albee (into French), and films by Jean Luc-Godard and Agnes Varda.

During her lifetime, Ursule Molinaro's poems and short stories appeared in a wide variety of magazines, including Quixote, Chelsea Review (of which she was a founding editor), Noonday, Provincetown Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Cosmopolitan, Swank, La Fiera Litteraria, Harlequin, Western Humanities Review, Minnesota Review, Les Lettres Nouvelles, Lotus, Extensions, Works, Bachelor, Panache, Carolina Quarterly, Midstream, Oyez, Triquarterly, New Letters, The Little Magazine, NAR, and Formations. Ursule Molinaro died in New York City on July 12, 2000.

From Publishers Weekly

The quirky author of 13 returns with fleeting, fictional glances at her "sisters in irony," 29 women "whose talents, unusual (usually unwomanly) interests, & dedications singled them out for notice by their contemporaries. --Rarely for their admiration."stet this oddball punctuation Her gallery features the heroine of Molinaro's own adolescence, Charlotte Corday, murderess of French Revolution leader Jean-Paul Marat; Marie Laurencin (" 'She was not a great artist, far from it, but a pleasing one' Somerset Maugham said, perhaps to erase the long nose & fastidious mouth from the portrait she painted of him in 1936"); hapless Cassandra; controversial mystic Madame Blavatsky. However, Molinaro's evocations of these dazzling figures rarely evince much imagination or reveal more than established facts (a notable exception is her piece on nuclear physicist Lise Meitner); the bonds among the women are suggested but not developed. Molinaro closes her final chapter, on Snow White ("the perfect victim every man dreams of rescuing"), by citing Apollinaire: "Mirrors should reflect more deeply." So should fiction.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: McPherson
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0929701321
• ISBN 13: 9780929701325
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 149