Books by Nancy Bauer

"The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard" brings to life a kaleidoscopic relationship: on one side is Arlene Monson, with her daughter Alice and her "found" daughter Andrea; on the other side are their protector, James Bridgeford, and the enigmatic Mr. Gerard.Bauer's post-modern imagination creates a unique reality, with details from matriarchal religion, modern fine crafts, and a deep understanding of the ways in which children first upset and then reorder the adult world. In the startling denouement, solved mysteries open new doorways to mark, not an end, but many beginnings.

Nancy Bauer has the ability to create some of the most memorable female characters in contemporary literature. For Samara the Wholehearted, she has written a coming-of-age story, centred around Samara, an imaginative young woman whose maturity is marked by an impulsive examination of the inner life. A profoundly religious writer with a lively interest in Eastern spirituality, Bauer transports her readers in this novel to the slightly tilted world of Summerland, a communal summer retreat. Here she introduces Samara, her perpetually adolescent half-brother Fred, a disabled genius named Marty and a host of off-beat characters who form an unusual extended family in a world filled with marvel. Mixing rarefied prose with the traditional techniques of story-telling and post-modern innovation, Bauer produces a novel which is both technically adept and intensely memorable.

In Nancy Bauer's view, most feminist philosophers are content to work within theoretical frameworks that are false to human beings' everyday experiences. Here she models a new way to write about pornography, women's self-objectification, hook-up culture, and other contemporary phenomena, and in doing so she raises basic questions about philosophy.

In the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that "e;a man never begins by establishing himself as an individual of a certain sex: his being a man poses no problem."e; Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "e;Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?"e; Bauer's aim is to show that in answering this question The Second Sex dramatizes the extent to which being a woman poses a philosophical problem. This book is a call for philosophers as well as feminists to turn, or return to, The Second Sex. Bauer shows that Beauvoir's magnum opus, written a quarter-century before the development of contemporary feminist philosophy, constitutes a meditation on the relationship between women and philosophy that remains profoundly undervalued. She argues that the extraordinary effect The Second Sex has had on women's lives, then and now, can be traced to Beauvoir's discovery of a new way to philosophize-a way grounded in her identity as a woman. In offering a new interpretation of The Second Sex, Bauer shows how philosophy can be politically productive for women while remaining genuinely philosophical.