The Female Man (ePub)

Joanna Russ (1937-2011) was a radical feminist writer and academic who became one of the seminal figures of science fiction during the 1960s and '70s, when women began to make major inroads into what had long been a bastion of male authorship. Her best-known novel, The Female Man, is a powerful mix of humor and anger told from the alternating points of view of four women-genetically identical, but coming from different worlds and vastly different societies. Russ wrote five other novels-including the children's book Kittatinny-and is renowned for her literary criticism and essays. Her short stories appeared in leading science fiction and fantasy magazines and have been widely anthologized as well as collected into four volumes. She received the Nebula Award for her short story "When It Changed" and a Hugo Award for the novella "Souls."
Russ received a master of fine arts degree from the Yale School of Drama and was a 1974 National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. She was a lecturer at Cornell and other universities and a professor of English at the University of Washington, where she taught from 1984 to 1994. Her scholarly work includes How to Suppress Women's Writing and To Write Like a Woman, among others. Her papers are collected at the University of Oregon.

“A wonderfully inventive novel, this interplanetary exploration of feminist inner space, this sophisticated, playful fantasy book is, of course, all about reality.” —Phyllis Chesler
 
“The narrative muscularity of the book, its sustained rage about the condition of women in contemporary America, and its intensely loaded manipulation of levels of reality, all . . . betray [Russ’s] undoubted knack for telling a gripping tale.” —The Washington Post
 
“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
 
Praise for Joanna Russ
“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
 
“As hard and mean and fine as Flannery O’Connor . . .  I wish that everyone would read Joanna Russ’s books.” —Dorothy Allison
 
“Beyond questions of genre or gender, Joanna Russ is one of the best prose writers working in the English language.” —Marilyn Hacker
 
“One of the pioneers and luminaries of women’s science fiction!” —Ms. Magazine
 
“Joanna Russ . . . four decades ago helped deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen—women. . . . She helped inaugurate the now flourishing tradition of feminist science