Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women and the classic Woman on the Edge of Time; seventeen volumes of poetry; and a critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. Born in center-city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, and the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time, including the anti-Vietnam war and the women’s movement, and more recently an active participant in the resistance to the war in Iraq.

Praised as one of the few American writers who are accomplished poets as well as novelists — Piercy is one of the country’s bestselling poets — she is also the master of many genres: historical novels, science fiction (for which she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom), novels of social comment and contemporary entertainments. She has taught, lectured, and performed her work at well over 400 universities around the world.


• Book events
• Reviews
• More from Marge

---

---

Praise

“Marge Piercy is not just an author, she’s a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence.”
—Boston Globe

“As always, Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion and innate feminism.”
—Adrienne Rich

“One of the most important poets of our time.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Piercy’s writing is as passionate, lucid, insightful, and thoughtfully alive as ever.”
—Publishers Weekly

---

---

Praise

“The author displays an old-fashioned narrative drive and a set of well-realized characters permitted to lead their own believably odd lives.“
—Thomas Mallon, Newsday

“This reviewer knows no other writer with Piercy’s gifts for tracing the emotional route that two people take to a double bed, and the mental games and gambits each transacts there.“
—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

“Marge Piercy is not just an author, she’s a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence.“
—Boston Globe

“What Piercy has that Danielle Steel, for example, does not is an ability to capture life’s complex texture, to chart shifting relationships and evolving consciousness within the context of political and economic realities she delineates with mordant matter-of-factness. Working within the venerable tradition of socially conscious fiction, she brings to it a feminist understanding of the impact such things as class and money have on personal interactions without ever losing sight of the crucial role played by individuals’ responses to those things.“
—Wendy Smith, Chicago Sun-Times

“As always, Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion and innate feminism.“
—Adrienne Rich

---

---

Praise

“This book demonstrates the maturation of Piercy’s native talent for story-telling…we would have to look to a French writer like Colette or to American writers of another generation, like May Sarton, to find anyone who writes as tenderly as Piercy about life’s redeeming pleasures—sex, of course, but also the joys of good food, good conversation, and the reassuring little rituals like feeding the cats, watering the plant, weeding the garden.” —Judith Paterson, Washington Post Book World

“A delicious binge of a book. I had a wonderful time reading Braided Lives, crying real tears at the sad parts and feeling real elation at the happy ones.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Braided Lives is a big, rich book. This writer just gets better and better. She is allowing more flashes of humor and more generosity…her sure novelist’s hold on making a good story, her poet’s eye for careful detail… Braided Lives is a novel that tries not to simplify but to clarify and by so doing, it adds a great deal to our understanding of how things came to be as they are, and what some of yesterday might have meant.” —Marcie Hershman, Boston Globe

“Marge Piercy is the political novelist of our time. More: she is the conscience.” —Marilyn French

---

---

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

“It’s so good I don’t even know how to write a coherent blurb. It tore me apart. It’s one of the first really honest books this country has ever produced. In lesser hands it would’ve been just another propaganda pamphlet, but in Marge Piercy’s it’s an all-out honest-to-God novel, humanity and love hollering from every sentence and the best set of characters since, shit I dunno, Moby Dick or something. At a time when nearly every other novelist is cashing in on masturbation fantasies, the superhip college bullshit stored up in their brains, even on the revolution itself, here is somebody with the guts to go into the deepest core of herself, her time, her history, and risk more than anybody else has so far, just out of a love for the truth and a need to tell it. It’s about fucking time.”  —Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity’s Rainbow

“Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a frightening book, which will reassure only those who can take solace from the fact that it is cast as a futuristic novel. This is no real solace, since Marge Piercy has used the future only as a parabolic mirror of the recent past: her novel is indirectly about the Movement, more specifically about the rise, fragmentation, and fall of the Students for a Democratic Society.”  —The New Republic

“Dance the Eagle to Sleep is a cautionary tale, but it is more than that. It is an important political document. I hope the book is read.”
 —The Nation

---

---

Praise

“Real people inhabit its pages and real suspense carries the story along… ‘Vida’ of course means life and she personifies it.”  —Chicago Tribune

“A fully controlled, tightly structured dramatic narrative of such artful intensity that it leads the reader on at almost every page.” —New York Times Book Review

“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.” —New York Times

“Very exciting. Marge Piercy’s characters are complex and very human.”  —Margaret Atwood

---

Book Events

---

Reviews

• My Life, My Body: A Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review
• My Life, My Body: A Review in Peace News
• What Life Was Like Before Roe v. Wade in 7 Books
• Jewish Noir on Killer Nashville
• Jewish Noir— A Publishers Weekly Review
• “…a first-rate collection of short stories…” Jewish Noir on Booklist
• “…this anthology is heartrending and spine-chilling in its entirety.”
• “This is an excellent anthology.”
• “Check your expectations at the front cover; they’re bound to be exceeded.”
• For Chanuka, books that bind us
• Jewish Noir: Contemporary Tales of Crime and Other Dark Deeds: A Review
• Jewish Noir Reviewed in The Big Click
• Jewish Noir Reviewed on New York Journal of Books
• Jewish Noir in New Pages
• Jewish Noir & The Very Dark Egg Cream

---

Interviews

• When Love Could Kill Us: Marge Piercy on BillMoyers.com

---

Mentions

• New Book ‘Jewish Noir’ Serves Up a Unique Collection of Crime Stories

---

Blog

• Ken Wishnia: Putting on The Editor’s Hat on Trace Evidence