Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Novel

From the author the New York Times Book Review calls “a lavishly gifted writer,” this is the searing story of Tashi, a tribal African woman first glimpsed in The Color Purple whose fateful decision to submit to the tsunga’s knife and be genitally mutilated leads to a trauma that informs her life and fatefully alters her existence. Possessing the Secret of Joy, out of print for a number of years, was the first novel to deal with this controversial topic and managed to do so in a manner that Cosmopolitan called “masterful, honorable, and unforgettable storytelling.” The New Press is proud to bring the book back into print with a new preface by the author addressing the book’s initial reception and the changed attitudes toward female genital mutilation that have come about in part because of this book.

• The Temple of My Familiar
• The Color Purple
• In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
• Meridian
• Lolita
• We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness
• Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth
• Passing (Penguin Classics)
• The Third Life of Grange Copeland
• Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart