Lisa Appignanesi Libri

"Paris, 1990" on back cover should read: Paris, 1900.

"Freud's Women examines biography, case history, dreams, correspondence, journals, and theory to chart Freud's views on femininity. It also tells the many stories of Freud's women and explores their influence on him and his on them: dutiful daughter Anna, who carried on his work; the novelist and turn-of-the-century femme fatale, Lou Salome; Marie Bonaparte, who mixed royalty and perversity with effortless ease and became the head of the French psychoanalytic movement; the early hysterics who were the cornerstone of psychoanalysis--all these and more emerge vividly from the pages of this important study as it assesses Freud's contemporary legacy." -- Publisher

Maria d'Este is effortlessly beautiful. Her seductive power has attracted men and worldly success in equal measure. In ordinary women's lives, she is the dreaded "other woman". But now Maria has to face the destructive side of her allure and begins to realize the price is too high.

The antidote to the idea that being a woman is all about submitting to desire. There are many more shades than that and here are fifty women to explore them.

Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day becoming a journalist and was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. Her school was closed and from that moment she became a prisoner in her own home at just 16. Latifa was now forced to wear a chadri. With painful honesty and clarity Latifa describes the way she watched her world falling apart, in the name of a fanatical interpretation of a faith that she could not comprehend. Her voice captures a lost innocence, but also echoes her determination to live in freedom and hope. Earlier this year, Latifa and her parents escaped Afghanistan with the help of a French-based Afghan resistance group.

Mad, bad and sad. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan's construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood mental disorders and extreme states of mind in women over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists.

In autumn 1934, Dr Jacob Jardine glimpses a figure from his deepest imaginings - Sylvie Kowalska. Despite himself he is drawn into a troubled erotic world in which the past haunts the present.

Lisa Appignanesi was born Elsbieta Borenztejn in Poland. Unlike other holocaust memoirs, hers is the story of how the nucleus of a family survived outside the camps, beyond the ghetto and eventually made it to the new world, where Lisa's mother found that her years of masquerading as an Aryan stood her in great stead in anti-semitic post-war Catholic Quebec. As her mother's memory fails, Lisa finds her self trying to unravel the truth about her family, searching not only for signs of her mother's lost brother - a Jewish Schindler character, making money and saving Jews in Warsaw - but also for the truth about how her parents managed to survive, and for her own birth certificate. It's above all the compelling story of one woman's determination not to go under, and the story of her father, who learned to make himself invisible and hide behind silent rage. This is a remarkable tale of terror, courage, deprivation, persecution, survival, and Jewish family life.

Paris 1899. Theaters and galleries are vibrant with artistic energy. The new Metro is under construction, and so is the site for the centennial Universal Exhibition. But there is also savage political upheaval. Asylums and jails are overcrowded. The Dreyfus Affair has released a riotous surge of anti-Semitism. Bostonian lawyer James Norton has been sent by his mother to bring back his invalid sister Elie and his younger brother Raf, a journalist., but the brutal deaths of the actress Olympe Fabre, and then of her sister Judith in the asylum of Salpêtrière, draw the siblings into a dark web of violence.

A love story and an exploration of brothers and brotherhoods, fathers and fatherlands, set against the unfolding history of 20th-century Europe.