Maxima Library

Vincitore del premio Hugo per il miglior romanzo breve

(Novella)

in 1983.

Nominato per il premio Nebula per il miglior romanzo breve

(Novella)

in 1983.

Review

Four women living in parallel worlds, each with a different gender landscape. When they begin to travel to each other’s worlds each woman’s preconceptions on gender and what it means to be a woman are challenged.

Acclaimed as one of the essential works of science fiction and an influence on William Gibson, THE FEMALE MAN takes a look at gender roles in society and remains a work of great power.

Nebula and Hugo Award winner Joanna Russ is the author of The Adventures of Alyx, Extra(Ordinary) People, and To Write Like a Woman, among many other books.

‘Her finest novel.’

‘An explosion of witty and savage writing.’

‘A writer of energetic clarity. The power of her writing is always complexly vivid… Ms Russ is a major writer.’

"As hard and mean and fine as Flannery O'Connor… I wish that everyone would read Joanna Russ' books." -Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina "Joanna Russ offers a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction, women who are rarely victims and sometimes even victors, but always engaged sharply and perceptively with their fate." -Marge Piercy "A stunning book, a work to be read with great respect. It's also screamingly funny." -Elizabeth Lynn, San Francisco Review of Books "A work of frightening power, but it is also a work of great fictional subtlety… It should appeal to all intelligent people who look for exciting ideation, crackling dialogue, provocative fictional games-playing in their reading." -Douglas Barbour, Toronto Star

"Joanna Russ offers a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction… – Marge Piercy, American Poetry Review

A stunning book, a work to be read with great respect. It's also screamingly funny. – Elizabeth Lynn, San Francisco Review of Books

A work of frightening power, but it is also a work of great fictional subtlety. – Douglas Barbour, Toronto Star

[The Female Man] is as hard and mean and fine as Flannery O'Connor. – Dorothy Allison, Salon

It's influenced William Gibson and been listed as one of the ten essential works of science fiction. Most importantly, Joanna Russ's THE FEMALE MAN is a suspenseful, surprising and darkly witty chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael-four alternate selves from drastically different realities-meet.

Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s

SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the biggest and best survey of the female tradition in American science fiction ever published, a thrilling collection of twenty-five classic tales. From Pulp Era pioneers to New Wave experimentalists, here are over two dozen brilliant writers ripe for discovery and rediscovery, including Leslie F. Stone, Judith Merril, Leigh Brackett, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin. Imagining strange worlds and unexpected futures, looking into and beyond new technologies and scientific discoveries, in utopian fantasies and tales of cosmic horror, these women created and shaped speculative fiction as surely as their male counterparts. Their provocative, mind-blowing stories combine to form a thrilling multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery.