Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558614871
Publication Date: 09-01-2004

Foreword by Alix Kates Shulman

Women in the Trees marshals the power of literature to confront domestic violence, an experience that is still too often neglected or condoned, surrounded by silence and shame. Drawing on well over a century of research into American women's short stories, Susan Koppelman uncovers a powerful literary legacy of women speaking truth to power to write about the brutal reality in the lives of women.

While it resonates with the force of shared experience, Women in the Trees cuts across lines of race, ethnicity, class, region, and time. The Women's Review of Books writes, "One of the strongest aspects of this anthology is that while the collection as a whole reveals the similarities in the patterns of abuse, the stories singly do not read the same. Koppelman has selected well. These are not in any sense sociological tracts to prove a point. Focused, as fiction should be, on individual lives, they reveal the variations in the patterns as they are lived out by individual women, who come from different backgrounds, inhabit different communities, and respond to their situations in distinctly personal ways."

Acclaimed on its first publication by critics, educators, and activists, this new edition of Women in the Trees includes several new selections, over thirty stories in all. Together, these stories form a unique and ultimately empowering collection notable for both its emotional impact and its literary wealth.

"This is a first-rate collection that illustrates how universal and enduring this violence is. . . . But these stories aren't just history; they are also most definitely literature." —Publishers Weekly

"This outstanding collection . . . can be of use both to those who have been battered and those who need to understand, who will find themselves in these stories and in the larger story which, together, they tell." —Women's Review of Books

"These tales—at turns frustrating, heart-wrenching, gutsy, and inspired—are made all the more powerful by bringing them together." —Ms. magazine

"Koppelman brings together many of America's most serious writers to address one of America's most serious problems: domestic violence. This anthology may save your life or the life of someone you love." —Cathy N. Davidson, coeditor of The Oxford Companion to Women's Literature in the United States