Blueprints for Building Better Girls

Blueprints for Building Better Girls
Author: Elissa Schappell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2012-07-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 074327671X

Elissa Schappell, “a diva of the encapsulating phrase, capable of conveying a Pandora’s box of feeling in a single line” (The New York Times Book Review) delivers eight provocative, darkly funny linked stories that map America’s shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day. Blueprints for Building Better Girls delves into the lives of an eclectic cast of archetypal female characters—from the high school slut to the good girl, the struggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child to the reluctant mother—mapping America’s shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day. Its interconnected stories explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell alters how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.

The Dating Blueprint

The Dating Blueprint
Author: Jason Evert
Publisher: Totus Tuus Press
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2019-10-11
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 1944578005

Women don’t feel comfortable telling a man what they wish he knew about dating. He’s expected to know it. Unfortunately, the only time men receive specific guidelines is when they’re being told what they’re notsupposed to do. As a result, very few know what they are supposed to do! What men want is a clear blueprint. Imagine how much simpler dating would be if women could just speak their minds! Therefore, Jason Evert surveyed more than a thousand women and asked them questions such as: · How would you want a man to ask you out? · How do you not want to be asked on a date? This book reveals their surprising answers, plus: · How to know if she’s the right one · Where women don’t want to go on a first date · What word they want a man to say when he asks · When, where, and how he should ask · What she hopes the date will include · How a man can save his marriage before he’s married Dating doesn’t need to become a relic of the past. It needs to be revived. For this to happen, men need to put down their screens, look a woman in the eye, and ask her on a date. The Dating Blueprint explains how.

UN/MASKED

UN/MASKED
Author: Donna Kaz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1510709452

An unknown actress on movie star’s arm was how she began. An anonymous activist in a rubber gorilla mask is where she wound up. UN/MASKED: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl On Tour follows the surprising twenty-five-year journey of a young artist, Donna Kaz, who is swept off her feet by Willliam Hurt, a rising star, and carried to a beach house in Malibu. The actor William Hurt introduces her to Hollywood’s elite by day and knocks her head in by night. When OJ Simpson kills his former wife in Brentwood, a bell goes off and awakens her angry, activist spirit. Always an outsider, she takes one step further into invisibility and becomes a Guerrilla Girl, a feminist activist who never appears in public without wearing a rubber gorilla mask and who uses the name of a dead woman artist instead of her own. As a Guerrilla Girl, Aphra Behn creates comedic art and theatre that blasts the blatant sexism of the theatre world while proving feminists are funny at the same time. These two narratives—that of a young victim of domestic violence at the hands of a successful actor and that of an artist so fed up with sexism in the theatre world that she puts on a gorilla mask and takes the name of a dead woman artist to provoke change—have been lived by one woman. Donna Kaz offers her compelling first-hand account—illuminated by twenty behind-the-scenes photographs—of her transition from a silent observer to an unapologetic activist. This is the memoir of a woman-turned-survivor-turned-radical-feminist who takes off her mask and, by merging her identities, reveals all.

Vital Voices

Vital Voices
Author: Alyse Nelson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-06-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118184777

How women around the world are leading powerful change Women's progress is global progress. Where there is an increase in women's university enrollment rates, women's earnings, and maternal health, and a reduction in violence against women, we see more prosperous communities, better educated, healthier families, and the preservation of equal human rights. Yet globally, women remain the most consistently under-utilized resource. Vital Voices calls for and makes possible transformative leadership around the world. In Vital Voices, CEO Alyse Nelson shares the stories of remarkable, world-changing women, as well as the story of how Vital Voices was founded, crossing lines that typically divide. For 15 years, Vital Voices has brought together women who want to enable others to become change agents in their governments, advocates for social justice, and supporters of democracy. They equip women with management and business development skills to expand their enterprises and create jobs in their communities. Their voices, stories, and hard-earned lessons—shared here for the first time—are deeply authentic and truly vital. Features interviews and first-person accounts of global leaders, such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, and Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prize-winning Burmese pro-democracy leader, as well as business leaders Draws on the work of the Vital Voices, the organization founded by Hillary Clinton in 1997 as a government initiative that transformed into a leading non-profit, which enables a network of 10,000 emerging women leaders in politics, human rights, and economic development in 127 countries. These women have gone on to mentor and train more than 500,000 Focuses on the key elements of the Vital Voices five-step model of transformational leadership, including how to find a voice, lead with purpose, cross lines that divide, and more Through the firsthand accounts of trail-blazing leaders, Vital Voices introduces unforgettable, inspiring women who are shaping our world.

Use Me

Use Me
Author: Elissa Schappell
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 006188216X

The exquisitely artful fiction debut of Vanity Fair columnist Elissa Schappell is a novel told in ten stories that resonate with the most profound experiences in the life of a young woman -- friendship and rivalry, the love for a man, the birth of a child, and the death of a father.

Brown Girls

Brown Girls
Author: Daphne Palasi Andreades
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593243439

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “boisterous and infectious debut novel” (The Guardian) about a group of friends and their immigrant families from Queens, New York—a tenderly observed, fiercely poetic love letter to a modern generation of brown girls. “An acute study of those tender moments of becoming, this is an ode to girlhood, inheritance, and the good trouble the body yields.”—Raven Leilani, author of Luster FINALIST: The New American Voices Award, The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, The New American Voices Award, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Kirkus Reviews If you really want to know, we are the color of 7-Eleven root beer. The color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters the bottoms of our feet. Color of soil . . . Welcome to Queens, New York, where streets echo with languages from all over the globe, subways rumble above dollar stores, trees bloom and topple over sidewalks, and the funky scent of the Atlantic Ocean wafts in from Rockaway Beach. Within one of New York City’s most vibrant and eclectic boroughs, young women of color like Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, Angelique, and countless others, attempt to reconcile their immigrant backgrounds with the American culture in which they come of age. Here, they become friends for life—or so they vow. Exuberant and wild, together they roam The City That Never Sleeps, sing Mariah Carey at the tops of their lungs, yearn for crushes who pay them no mind—and break the hearts of those who do—all while trying to heed their mothers’ commands to be obedient daughters. But as they age, their paths diverge and rifts form between them, as some choose to remain on familiar streets, while others find themselves ascending in the world, beckoned by existences foreign and seemingly at odds with their humble roots. A blazingly original debut novel told by a chorus of unforgettable voices, Brown Girls illustrates a collective portrait of childhood, adulthood, and beyond, and is a striking exploration of female friendship, a powerful depiction of women of color attempting to forge their place in the world today. For even as the conflicting desires of ambition and loyalty, freedom and commitment, adventure and stability risk dividing them, it is to one another—and to Queens—that the girls ultimately return.

The Myth of the Perfect Girl

The Myth of the Perfect Girl
Author: Ana Homayoun
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-12-31
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1101619007

New insights and practical solutions for overworked and stressed-out girls and their parents. In today's achievement culture, many girls seem to be doing remarkably well—excelling in honors and sports and attending top colleges in ever greater numbers—but beneath the surface, girls are stressed out and stretched too thin as they strive to be “perfect.” In their efforts to juggle schoolwork and extracurriculars, family life and social lives, friends and frenemies, as well as relationships online and IRL (in the real world), many girls begin to lose sight of who they really are, and instead work overtime to please their friends, parents, teachers, and others. With honesty, empathy, and a fresh perspective, The Myth of the Perfect Girl presents advice to empower both parents and girls themselves to discover what true success and happiness means to them — and how to work to achieve it.

Handy Dad

Handy Dad
Author: Todd Davis
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 570
Release: 2012-01-20
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0811879852

The host of HGTV’s Room Crashers presents twenty-five awesome projects for dads to build with their kids—including skate ramps, zip lines, go-carts, and more! On his popular home improvement show, Todd Davis is known for transforming interiors with eye-popping DIY design. But in Handy Dad, he uses his know-how to create twenty-five simple yet super-fun projects that dads can build with their kids. Dads can choose from projects that range from basic to challenging and take anywhere from five minutes to a full weekend. Readers are given all the directions they need to grab materials that can be found around the house or at the local hardware store and get to work banging up a sweet BMX ramp or half-pipe, building a tree house or tire swing, or throwing together a slip-and-slide or tie-dye station for an afternoon of fun. With plenty of color photographs, easy-to-follow instructions, and detailed illustrations, Handy Dad is chock-full of creative and inexpensive ways to keep kids (and dads) endlessly entertained.

Pizza Girl

Pizza Girl
Author: Jean Kyoung Frazier
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385545738

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST • An audacious and wryly funny coming-of-age story about a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers. Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial. She's grieving the death of her father, avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.

The Spring Girls

The Spring Girls
Author: Anna Todd
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1501130722

Four sisters desperately seeking the blueprints to life—the modern-day retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women like only Anna Todd (After, Imagines) could do. The Spring Girls—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—are a force of nature on the New Orleans military base where they live. As different as they are, with their father on tour in Iraq and their mother hiding something, their fears are very much the same. Struggling to build lives they can be proud of and that will lift them out of their humble station in life, one year will determine all that their futures can become. The oldest, Meg, will be an officer’s wife and enter military society like so many of the women she admires. If her passion—and her reputation—don’t derail her. Beth, the workhorse of the family, is afraid to leave the house, is afraid she’ll never figure out who she really is. Jo just wants out. Wishing she could skip to graduation, she dreams of a life in New York City and a career in journalism where she can impact the world. Nothing can stop her—not even love. And Amy, the youngest, is watching all her sisters, learning from how they handle themselves. For better or worse. With plenty of sass, romance, and drama, The Spring Girls revisits Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women, and brings its themes of love, war, class, adolescence, and family into the language of the twenty-first century.