Books by Barnard Authors

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Saturnalia
by Stephanie Feldman ’05
In this dystopian thriller, set in a hazy future Philadelphia saturated with climate crises and economic disasters, Nina surreptitiously returns to the exclusive Saturn Club, known for its mysterious occultist practices, where she was once a member. At the club’s wild masquerade party, she uncovers a horrifying secret and realizes she must act quickly to save lives, including her own.

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A Small Door
by Michele S. Lowy ’76
A Jewish family is forced to evacuate their home in Belgium after the Nazi invasion during World War II. As they attempt to escape war-torn Europe, 19-year-old Rachel and her brother, Alexander, articulate the despair felt throughout the continent, from occupied France to Auschwitz. While Lowy’s characters are fictional, her debut novel is based on the experience of escaping the Nazis as recounted in her grandfather’s unpublished postwar memoir.

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Climate
by Julie Carr ’88 and Lisa Olstein ’96
These epistolary essays, a collaborative call-and-response between the two poets, express deeply sensitive concerns about the disturbing issues that infiltrate modern life, including climate change, school shootings, and sexual abuse. The friends, writing to each other about their lives and hearts with poetic language, prompt contemplations on philosophical and political issues that often go unnoticed or seem unsayable.

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Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran
by Seema Golestaneh ’06
Through ethnographic case studies, Golestaneh delves into how the texts and practices of classical Sufism remain in dialogue with contemporary Iranian life. Exploring the Sufist idea that human knowledge is bounded and some parts of the sacred world will remain unreachable, Golestaneh proposes that this limit is actually a starting point for humans to reconfigure notions of self and reality. 
 

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Miriam Hearing Sister
by Miriam Zadek ’50
In this evocative memoir, Zadek recalls growing up with two deaf sisters and a hard-of-hearing father in a Jewish community with a constrained understanding of deafness and explores how this experience morphed into her lifelong advocacy for deaf people. In brief, affecting vignettes, Zadek reveals the dynamics of mid-20th-century Jewish and deaf communities in a distinctive and potent way. 
 

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Daughter of History
by Susan Rubin Suleiman ’60
Suleiman, a professor emerita of French and comparative literature at Harvard, explores her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant, taking herself as an example of how historical events shape our individual lives. The author tells her story through such everyday objects as a traveling chess set, and her narration inquires into the complexities of immigrant families and losses that carry over generations. 

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The Politics of Religious Literacy: Education and Emotion in a Secular Age
by Justine Ellis ’11
Ellis offers a new approach to engaging with and understanding how the popular conception of religious literacy affects today’s modern multifaith democracies. Her book details the practices that create so-called secular societies while questioning the true nature of their status quo.

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Buried Beneath the City
by Amanda Sutphin ’92 (co-author)
This book explores the archaeological history of New York City alongside lavish images of objects excavated there. Through daily items that illuminate the details of everyday life across eras and cultures, this urban archaeology reveals how the City has been constantly rebuilding itself, from the first traces of Indigenous societies more than 10,000 years ago to its transformation into a modern metropolis.