Martha Moody: a novel

(Paperback)

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Description

At once a love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western which embraces the ordinary and gritty details - as well as the magic - of women's lives in the old west.

Reviews

Susan Stinson's substantial and delicious historical novel, Martha Moody, has been reissued by Small Beer Press, and it is certainly cause for celebration. . . . Stinson has invented substantial woman heroes who have agency and imaginations and she's placed them into a historical novel in ways we had not seen before. . . . But the tale of Martha Moody is just part of this novel's pleasure. Stinson's language is joyful and buoyant. Her frame of reference includes liberal doses of Shakespeare, the bible, and Zane Grey, all of which make the novel such a complex and wonderful gift. Read and enjoy-- preferably with a cup of tea and a luxuriously buttered biscuit nearby!" -- Judith Katz, Lambda Literary

A tale of longing and self identification and reconciliation. Amanda Linger pines for shop owner Martha Moody whose girth, sensuous folds of flesh and loving caresses pull Amanda out of the stasis of a loveless marriage...MARTHA MOODY is a tender exquisitely rendered story with strong characters, a sense of love and magic surrounding them, and one incredible cow. -- Icon Magazine, Toronto

Susan Stinson's deceptively svelte-seeming story is a lush comic masterpiece: a totally convincing celebration of the combined erotic power of untrammelled female flesh, forbidden sex and unleashed words. -- Mail on Sunday, London

Martha Moody, is a rich and complicated novel, nearly edible in its sensuous physicality. -- Sojourner

Stinson's follow-up to the utterly fantastic Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is so bloody good it made me want to run naked through a meadow." -- Time Out, London

Here we have a story of love spurned, uncommonly well told, in language that is rich and strange, erotic and fanciful. Set against the backdrop of Western frontier life, it's a powerful tale of seeming betrayal, and the value of friendships between women. The best book yet from The Women's Press. -- Gay Times, London

Stinson's celebration of the love and friendship of women deserves a larger audience than one made up of only lesbian feminists. -- Booklist

One of Stinson's triumphs is to make Amanda's fairy-tale success as a writer seem completely plausible amid the vivid depiction of the grime and hard work of her life as first a farmer's wife, then a single woman struggling to survive on the small homestead. -- Margot Livesey, Scotland On Sunday

Remarkable story . . . Amanda's fictional Martha is a wild and magical creature who churns clouds into butter with her magnificent thighs and flies on the back of a fabulous winged cow. -- Bay Area Reporter

Susan Stinson writes as though she means every word to be tasted, savoured. -- Women's Library Newsletter

A jewel . . . Martha Moody is magnificent. She is unashamedly fat and she is beautiful, dignified and desirable. She will take her place in modern literature as a truly marvellous role model for large women. Never before have I encountered the large body depicted with such beauty. -- Shelley Bovey, Yes Magazine, UK

Author Bio

Susan Stinson (susanstinson.net) is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree and Martha Moody, and a collection of poetry and lyric essays. Her work has appeared in The Public Humanist, The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review, Curve, Lambda Literary Review, and The Women's Review of Books. She has taught at Amherst College, been awarded the Lambda Literary Foundations Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and has received a number of fellowships. An editor and writing coach, she was born in Texas, raised in Colorado, and now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.