The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.

KINGSTON, Maxine Hong.

Item Number: 45638

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

First edition of this work which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of TIME magazine’s top nonfiction books of the 1970s. Octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed by Maxine Hong Kingston on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket illustration by Elias Dominguez. Jacket design by Lidia Ferrara.

In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American. As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present. “Superb. . . . We are in the presence of a splendid raconteur, who shares with us the myths and stories that emerge from the lode of a culture’s deepest realities" (Chicago Tribune).