Kate Chopin is a pioneer in the treatment of sexuality in American literature… She does not speak only to women,but she speaks most powerfully about them.

Chopin's (1850-1904) The Awakening, whose heroine rejects her husband and children as she indulges in solitude and in an adulterous infatuation, was embraced by the women's movement 70 years after its publication. Although they pale in comparison to the novel, these stories, which comprise Chopin's third and last short-fiction collection, serve to flesh out the Chopin oeuvre and deserve a place on women's studies syllabi. As in The Awakening , the author's social critiques here demythologize women, marriage, religion and family. A women escapes ``the incessant chatter'' of other females at a party and retires to the male domain of the smoking room, where she puffs on hashish and dreams of a love affair torn asunder. The perverse Mrs. Mallard revels in her newfound freedom when informed that her husband is a casualty of a train accident and dies of a heart attack when he shows up alive. Her fiance is wasted by illness and reeks death, and a repulsed Dorothea bolts; elsewhere, a monk is lured by the voice of a woman, a former intimate. And in a twist on the plot of The Awakening , a husband, plagued by suspicions of his late wife's infidelity, casts himself in the river.

[A] poignant spiritual tragedy.”

Kate Chopin was long before her time in dealing with sexual passion…and the personal emotions of women.”

Interesting and timely…Chopin’s oracular feminism and prophetic psychology almost outweigh her estimable literary talents.”

Her story is a tragedy and one of many clarion calls in its day to examine the institution of marriage and woman’s opportunities in an oppressive world.”

Chopin shares the boldness in technical experiment and moral relativism of her contemporaries in the 1890s…a writer of considerable sensibility and talent…in her stories she worked for breadth. In height, however, and depth, it is The Awakening that will serve as her passport into our time and posterity.”

Exquisite and sensitive…iridescent.”

Beautifully written.”

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
—Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer

"Small wonders."
—Time Out London

"[F]irst-rate…astutely selected and attractively packaged…indisputably great works."
—Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"I’ve always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it’s the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher’s fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
—The New Yorker

"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed—tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
—KQED (NPR San Francisco)

"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
—The Wall Street Journal

This landmark feminist novel, first published in 1899, remains startlingly relevant

A Creole Bovary is this little novel of Miss Chopin's

Chopin's slight, brittle and fierce novel became a classic and a cult, shocking readers with its candid and unsentimental portrait of marital infidelity . . . it remains delicately bitter and acidly angry

Even more powerful than I remembered

Sometimes bold, fearless writing really does have to wait for 'someone in some future time' for readers yet to come. Sleeping Beauties, once awakened, will always serve a contemporary agenda. But Chopin's The Awakening is now justly regarded as an American classic and read with passion and delight

Chopin's deceptively slight novel is the kind of book revolutions are made of . . . Reissued with a forward by Barbara Kingsolver, this angry, eye-opening novel is well worth adding to your reading list

I still marvel at Chopin's realism, her impatience with conventional trappings, her arresting honesty

Incisive, brilliant and haunting

The Awakening is not only one of the most important novels in the history of American women's writing, it is an acknowledged American masterpiece . . . Chopin offers a compelling portrait of female experience, one of the first of its kind

A quietly explosive study of female impotence, it is quite superb

Plucky and masterly