alix kates shulman

This million-copy bestselling 1972 debut novel was reissued by FSG/Picador with a new author preface in  2019. 

Decades after it first shocked readers nationwide, Shulman's portrait of one woman's intellectual and sexual awakening continues to hit home with its comic portrayal of growing up female in a man's world in white middle-class pre-feminist America. Inspired by the iconic protest of the 1968 Miss America Pageant, and called by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement," the book is now published as a "feminist classic." 

(Click title to read reviews)

Available in print and ebook editions

Portrait of a woman caught up in the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, this historical novel about the rise of the women's liberation movement "brought back to me in a rush of emotion the electric sense of discovery which really was how the women's movement began for all of us." Betty Friedan

available in ebook edition

Robin, a runaway teenager, arrives in New York's main bus terminal where Prince, a pimp, marks her as his next meal ticket, and Owl, a bag lady, mistakes her for her long lost daughter. Their lives become inextricably enmeshed against a seething urban backdrop in this novel about New York street life.

"A selfless, careful and satisfying book." NY Times

Available in ebook edition

In Every Woman's Life . . . a time must come to think about marriage. Three women, three lives, linked together by bonds of family and friendship, passion and deceit.

"An adroit, witty, and all too accurate portrait of an era." Margaret Atwood

"Fierce, funny, touching." NY Times Book Review

Available in ebook edition

Alix's latest novel about a real estate developer, his literary wife, and a celebrated writer in exile who moves into the couple’s mansion. A three-way game of wits ripe with sexual tension develops between Mack, the brash husband; Heather, the striving wife; and Zoltan, the dashing author. In her fifth novel Shulman explores some of the outlandish ways people use each other to achieve their ambitions--and gives us a perverse new twist on sexual, marital, and literary politics.

"delightfully wicked" --Kirkus Reviews
"a brilliantly wry and entertaining comedy of desires" --Booklist

(Click title to read reviews)

Available in print, ebook, and audio editions

Everyone over a certain age fears that one day a momentous event outside one's control may occur that will change one's life forever. It happened to Alix and her beloved husband, Scott, when he fell from a sleeping loft, permanently injuring his brain. This memoir explores life on the other side, with all its anxieties, risks—and surprising rewards.

"An extraordinary and important book...moves with elegance and deep insight between the past and the present, and magically unites them. TO LOVE WHAT IS celebrates the deep resilience of self, and the power of a loving relationship." —Oliver Sacks, MD
(Click title to read reviews)

Available in print and ebook editions

At age twenty, Alix wrenched herself from her middle-class Ohio family to lead a fiercely independent life in New York. In this intimate memoir, she explores what it means to do what's expected of a daughter, and discovers in the process the unexpected, complicated joys of going home. She navigates the emotional and practical difficulties of caring for the aging parents from whom she had once tried so hard to separate, weaving together the parallel stories of their growing old and her growing up.

“Profound, loving, and universal.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Available in ebook edition

Winner of the Body Mind Spirit Award of Excellence
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

At fifty, Alix left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine. Without plumbing, power, or phone, foraging for wild greens and shellfish, she faced challenges that helped redefine her notions of independence and courage, confidence and creativity. Among the hidden treasures of nature, she discovered sensual delights she had never before experienced.

"A magical book.... The writing is supple, precise, rippling with grace; the ideas are provocative." —Houston Chronicle

(Click title to read reviews)

Available in print and ebook editions

"A comprehensive introduction to the movement and a persuasive defense of its revolutionary nature."
—Publishers Weekly

(Click title to read reviews)

Available in print and ebook editions

Collected here for the first time are fifteen of Alix's most controversial essays. Grouped under the headings MARRIAGE, SEX, WRITING, and LATE LIFE, they range from the notorious "A Marriage Agreement" to "The War in the Back Seat," "Organs and Orgasms," "The Taint of Feminist Fiction," "Thoughts at Seventy," "Help Wanted: Other Woman" and many more. (2012)

Available in print and ebook editions

Alix's exposé and reevaluation of her controversial essay "A Marriage Agreement," proposing that spouses share childcare and housework equally. This idea was so explosive in 1970 that the Agreement was reprinted as a Life Magazine cover story (1972) and attacked by the likes of Norman Mailer and Russell Baker. "A Marriage Disagreement" was first published in Dissent (1998) and anthologized in The Feminist Memoir Project. Both essays are in Alix's collection A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays (2012).

Collection of the writings and speeches of Emma Goldman (1869-1939), anarchist agitator, feminist activist, free-love advocate, labor champion, writer, and first political deportee from the United States. Compiled and edited, with introducion, headnotes, and new foreword for the Third Edition, by Alix Kates Shulman.

Available in print and ebook editions

Biography of the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman (1869-1939). Published in T.Y.Crowell's Y.A. Women of America Series.

A New York Times Notable Book.

Available in ebook edition

Ellen Willis (1941-2006)   

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/nov/13/guardianobituaries.gender

Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012)

n+1, Issue 15, Winter 2013

Ann Snitow (1941-2019)

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ann-snitow-feminist-obituary/

Meredith Tax (1942-2022)

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/meredith-tax-1942-2022/

Norm Fruchter (1937-2023)

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/norman-fruchter-obituary/

In this mathematical fantasy for children who have learned to add and subtract, the hero, Bosley, is mysteriously transported to the Number Line, beyond the Milky Way. There strange adventures befall him. His mathematical ingenuity gets him out of various dangers, but a slight error in his calculations all but destroys the Number Line. He finally thinks of a solution which enables him to return home just in time for his first two-digit birthday.

Bosley on the Number Line is Alix's first published book (David McKay, 1970), and the only one (alas!) that came to her in one long flash of inspiration.

Have you ever dreamed you were awake when you were really asleep? Have you ever wondered if you were dreaming when you were really awake? This philosophical picture book for pre-schoolers explores the borderline between dream and reality. Illustrated by Frank Bozzo.

Lisa is good at finding things. When her friends lose their toys in the park, Lisa finds them for them. She also finds abandoned objects which she uses to construct a game of Finders Keepers. Emily McCully's charming illustrations hide the lost objects in the pictures for the reader to find.