About
Told as a series of interconnected stories, Jane Rule's fifth novel-offering six characters' shifting perspectives-takes us to a place where feminism, creativity, and sexual politics collide Contract with the World follows a group of friends, artists, and lovers as they negotiate the shifting terrain of the 1970s-a time when gay and lesbian politics were just emerging. Divided into six parts, the novel enters a world marked by desire, ambition, jealousy, and love. We follow these sexually adventurous thirty-something friends as they marry, divorce, take lovers, lose love, and never stop searching for personal and artistic fulfillment. Whether gay, straight, or bisexual, Rule's characters are as much a product of the era that defines them as of the wise and foolhardy choices they make in their own turbulent lives-choices that will have inevitable, sometimes tragic consequences.
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Reviews
"Her most outspoken and most sensitively handled book to date."
Kate Millett
"Rule's persistent theme is the tyranny of conventional morality, which marginalizes the handicapped and nonconforming, set against a more generous and innovative concept of community, which values human differences."
Contemporary Novelists
"This is good writing. You know it from the first page: the wonderful relief of being in competent hands, the sense of adventure in language, in characterization, in perception. It is a fine portrait of a generation."
Kate Millett