Books published by Beacon Press

A pioneering collection of essays exploring what it means to some women to be lesbian.

The most reliable and comprehensive source of information about every major aspect of te lives of gay men and lesbians.

Boucher celebrates the many contributions of women to American Buddhism and provides an intimate look at the lives of women who are the teachers, scholars, nuns, and followers of a newly evolving Buddhist practice in this country. "A thought-provoking examination".--Victoria Scott, San Francisco Chronicle. Photos.

Starting in 1964, writes Margot Adler in this dazzling memoir, ';I found myself mysteriously at the center of extraordinary events.' Now a correspondent for National Public Radio, Adler was a young woman determined to be taken seriously and to be an agent of changeon her own terms, free from dogma and authoritarian constraints. From campus activism at the University of California at Berkeley to civil rights work in Mississippi, from antiwar protests to observing the socialist revolution in Cuba, she found those chances in the 1960s. Heretic's Heart illuminates the events, ideas, passions, and ecstatic commitments of the decade like no other memoir. At the book's center is the powerfuland uniquecorrespondence between Adler, then an antiwar activist at Berkeley, and a young American soldier fighting in Vietnam. The correspondence begins when Adler reads a letter the infantryman has written to a Berkeley newspaper. ';I've heard rumors that there are people back in the world who don't believe this war should be. I'm not positive of this though, 'cause it seems to me that if enough of them told the right people in the right way, then something might be done about it. ... You see, while you're discussing it amongst each other, being beat, getting in bed with dark-haired artists ... some people here are dying for lighting a cigarette at night.' Heretic's Heart also explores Adler's attempt to come to terms with her singular legacy as the only grandchild of Alfred Adler, collaborator of Freud and founder of Individual Psychology, and as the daughter of a forceful beauty who bequeaths her spunk and adventurousness to her daughter, but whose overpowering personality forces Adler to strike out on her own. Adler's memoir marks an initiatory journey from spirit through politics and revolution back to spirit again. Revealing, funny, joyful, and often wise, Heretic's Heart will restore the spirit of the 1960s: the passion, the confusion, the sense of social transformation and limitless possibility, and the ecstatic feeling that the world is on the cusp of change.

A Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book of 1996'Without books how could I have become myself?' In this wonderfully written meditation, Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers deeply felt insight into why we read and how what we read shapes our lives. An enchanting celebration of the printed word.

Brimming over with the inspirational words and thoughts of some of our finest writers, Cries of the Spirit is a beautiful sourcebook of poetry and prose in praise of life and all that it entails. Here women's voices fill the age-old silence about matters central to their experience-from menstruation, sexual intimacy, and childbirth to caretaking, household rituals, and death. These writings represent a healing vision of the sacred that emerges from the particular consciousness of women-a vision that partakes of the world of earth and flesh.

Renowned African-American poet Sonia Sanchez explores the pain, self-doubt, and anger that emerge in women's lives: an unfaithful life partner, a brutal rape, the murder of a woman by her granddaughter, the ravages of drugs. Sanchez transforms the unspoken and sometimes violent betrayals of our lives into a liberating vision of connection in emotional redemption, compassion, and self-fulfillment.