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| Category: Fiction:Short Stories |
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| About the Book | |
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Eve has been condemned in the Western world as the agent by which evil distorts and saddens human experience. This attribution to Eve of primal evil is followed in due course by Western culture's traditional self-defeating patterns: its distrust and consequent suppression of women and feminine power; its anxiety over sexuality and the body; and its suspicion of knowledge and intellect. These currents still surge in and through today's cultural flow. But it is possible to see Eve in a different way: from Eve's defining act emerges full human consciousness and free will. In her liberating decision, Eve resists the limitations placed on her by her Creator, who, though He has made her and her mate in His image and likeness, would deny all that the divine image involves, condemning His children to a static mindlessness unshaped by desire or ambition or imagination or bold action in their garden confinement. Her loss of a limiting innocence in Eden may be codified as a fair exchange for her gain of knowledge and full autonomy. That one liberating bite of the apple in Eden revealed to Eve, with cosmic clarity, the long line of her numerous descendants in all their diversity and distinctiveness, all of whom exercise the freedom she claimed for them to determine the way their own lives would tend. Eve shared her apple with Adam so that together they could parent an immensity of unique human descendants. Some of the stories of their descendants are told in this collection of 60 stories (plus one for lagniappe).
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| About the Author | |
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Lucien L. Agosta, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English Literature at California State University, Sacramento, is the author of four books: HOWARD PYLE (1987); E. B. WHITE: THE CHILDREN'S BOOKS (1995); LOSING TIME: AIDS LESSONS IN LOVE AND LOSS (2019); and INVENTING THE TRUTH: MEMORY AND ITS TRICKS--A GAY LIFE (2022). |