V (formerly Eve Ensler)

"I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them. . . . So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women. I talked to old women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. At first women were reluctant to talk. They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn't stop them."So begins Eve Ensler's hilarious, eye-opening tour into the last frontier, the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman. Adapted from the award-winning one-woman show that's rocked audiences around the world, this groundbreaking book gives voice to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, and thoroughly human stories, transforming the question mark hovering over the female anatomy into a permanent victory sign. With laughter and compassion, Ensler transports her audiences to a world we've never dared to know, guaranteeing that no one who reads The Vagina Monologues will ever look at a woman's body the same way again.

This program includes a bonus interview with Tony Award-winning author Eve Ensler and Audible Editor Rachel Smalter Hall, as they talk about the inspiration behind this story.Like millions of women, Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her lifetime for an apology. Sexually and physically abused by her father, Eve has struggled her whole life from this betrayal, longing for an honest reckoning from a man who is long dead. After years of work as an anti-violence activist, she decided she would wait no longer; an apology could be imagined, by her, for her, to her. The Apology, written by Eve from her father's point of view in the words she longed to hear, attempts to transform the abuse she suffered with unflinching truthfulness and compassion and an expansive vision for the future. Remarkable and original, The Apology is an acutely transformational look at how, from the wounds of sexual abuse, we can begin to re-emerge and heal. It is revolutionary, asking everything of each of us: courage, honesty, and forgiveness.

Botox, bulimia, breast Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation The Vagina Monologues , is back, this time to rock our view of what it means to have a “good body.” “In the 1950s,” Eve writes, girls were “pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist-pinchers. . . . In recent years good girls join the army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. . . . They wear painful pointy shoes. They don’t eat too much. They . . . don’t eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin. I could never be good.”The Good Body starts with Eve’s tortured relationship with her own “post-forties” stomach and her skirmishes with everything from Ab Rollers to fad diets and fascistic trainers in an attempt get the “flabby badness” out. As Eve hungrily seeks self-acceptance, she is joined by the voices of women from L.A. to Kabul, whose obsessions are also laid A young Latina candidly critiques her humiliating “spread,” a stubborn layer of fat that she calls “a second pair of thighs.” The wife of a plastic surgeon recounts being systematically reconstructed–inch by inch–by her “perfectionist” husband. An aging magazine executive, still haunted by her mother’s long-ago criticism, describes her desperate pursuit of youth as she relentlessly does sit-ups.Along the way, Eve also introduces us to women who have found a hard-won peace with their an African mother who celebrates each individual body as signs of nature’s diversity; an Indian woman who transcends “treadmill mania” and delights in her plump cheeks and curves; and a veiled Afghani woman who is willing to risk imprisonment for a taste of ice cream. These are just a few of the inspiring stories woven through Eve’s global journey from obsession to enlightenment. Ultimately, these monologues become a personal wake-up call from Eve to love the “good bodies” we inhabit.

“Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? Nothing is secure. And this is the good news. But only if you are not seeking security as the point of your life.”–Eve EnslerWhen her stage play The Vagina Monologues became a runaway hit and an international sensation, Eve Ensler emerged as a powerful voice and champion for women everywhere. Now the brilliant playwright gives us her first major work written exclusively for the printed page. Insecure at Last is a timely and urgent look at our security-obsessed world, the drastic measures taken to keep us safe, and how we can truly experience freedom by letting go of the deceptive notion of vigilant “protection.”Ensler draws on personal experiences and candid interviews with burka-clad women in Afghanistan; female prisoners in upstate New York; survivors at the Superdome after Katrina; and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan–sharing unforgettable snapshots that chronicle a post-9/11 existence in which hyped obsession for safety and security has undermined our humanity. The us-versus-them mentality, Ensler explains, has closed our minds and hardened our compassionate hearts.Provocative, illuminating, inspiring, and boldly envisioned, Insecure at Last challenges us to reconsider what it means to be free, to discover that our strength is not born out of that which protects us. Ensler offers us the opportunity to reevaluate our everyday lives, expose our vulnerability, and, in doing so, experience true freedom and fulfillment.

In her first new work since The Vagina Monologues, her Obie Award-winning smash hit, Eve Ensler tells the story of two American women, a Park Avenue psychiatrist and a human rights worker, who go to Bosnia to help women confront their memories of war and emerge deeply changed themselves. Necessary Targets is a groundbreaking play about women and war—about the violence of dark memories and the enduring resilience of the human spirit.Melissa, an ambitious young writer, and J.S., a successful but unsatisfied middle-aged psychiatrist, have nothing in common beyond the methods they have been taught to distance themselves from other people. As J.S. begins to feel compassion for the women whose tragedies she has been sent to expose, she turns on Melissa, who finds safety in control. In an unexpected moment of revelation, J.S. and the women she is supposedly treating find a common ground, a place to be taught and a place to learn.Necessary Targets has been staged in New York by Meryl Streep, Anjelica Huston, and Calista Flockhart, and performed in Sarajevo with Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei.

A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Memoir of the SeasonThe work of a lifetime from the Tony Award-winning, bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues -political, personal, profound, and more than forty years in the making.The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer's and activist's life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V's lifelong journals that takes readers from Berlin to Oklahoma to the Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family.Unflinching, intimate, introspective, courageous, Reckoning explores ways to create an unstoppable force for change, to love and survive love, to hold people and states accountable, to reckon with demons and honor the dead, to reclaim the body, and to see oneself as connected to a greater purpose. It reimagines what seems fixed and intractable, providing a path to understand one's unique experience as deeply rooted in the world, to break through one's own boundaries, and to write oneself into freedom.

Vagina Warriors is a unique collaboration between playwright/performer-activist/V-Day founder Eve Ensler, creator of the international hit The Vagina Monologues, and world-renowned photographer Joyce Tenneson, whose book Wise Women changed the way people look at women and aging.Every year from February to March, local activists raise awareness and funds through benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues and other events as part of V-Day, a global movement founded by Ensler. Vagina Warriors- people committed to ending violence against women and girls around the world- are at the heart of V-Day. This powerful book features Ensler's essay "Vagina Warriors: An Emerging Paradigm, An Emerging Species" alongside Tenneson's portraits of V-Day activists, many of them well-known celebrities, with personal statements and quotations from the subjects. The celebrities featured include Glen Close, Salma Hayek, Gloria Steinem, Isabella Rossellini, Jane Fonda, and numerous others.

This two-character drama delves into the layers of power, fear and intimacy that exist between a traumatized soldier (and former military interrogator) and the female psychologist colonel who is assigned to give him routine treatment. THE TREATMENT is a blunt exploration of torture, accountability and a soldier s "duty" to commit atrocities in the name of democracy.

In Eve Ensler's "Floating Rhoda And The Glue Man" time and space are playfully elastic. As Rhoda and her lover, Barn, attempt to make contact in this tender and funny love story, they frequently float away from their "stand-in" selves and watch their own scenes with bemused detachment, or freeze their stand-ins for a moment while they speculatively play out a fantasy encounter. A comedy of sexual manners—hetero, homo, and bi—a satire on the gender wars in '90s America, where everybody wants to claim victim status, "Floating Rhoda" celebrates lovers, and the messy, earthbound struggle that is loving.~ intro by Liz Diamond from "Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 1993" edt. Marisa SmithIn my late 30's I fell in love with a gentle man. To my surprise, I realized then that for all my supposed liberation and openness, I was essentially terrified of a kind, available man. I was terrified of being seen, terrified of being touched. His tenderness ripped open big aching wounds and desires.It is very late in the 20th century. We are caught, women and men, in this wild zone of gender mystification. Each of us longing, (sometimes secretly, sometimes unconsciously) to break out of one sexual assumption or another. Each of us desperately wanting to connect, to discover what we're really feeling, and then, to go beyond fear."Floating Rhoda And The Glue Man" demands that we unlock our private and limited notions of sexual identity and love. That we embrace a world where women rediscover their softness by kissing another woman's lips, where men refuse to participate in violence because they crave connection. Where each of us speaks what is there raging beneath the mask and loneliness, so that we are able finally to be still with one another, and not float away.~ Eve Ensler, Author's Note

A play that speaks to these explosive times and charts the journey of women, from the disembodiment that comes from violence to the embodiment that comes from self-love. From the Tony Award–winning author of The Vagina Monologues, The Good Body, and In the Body of the World comes three short plays that give a voice to defiant, ordinary women: POMEGRANATE—two women for sale, another morning on the shelf; AVOCADO—a young woman on her chaotic, shocking journey toward freedom; and COCONUT—from the bliss of her bathroom, a woman connects with the one thing she has never fully owned…her body. Woven together with dark humor and heightened theatricality, FRUIT TRILOGY explores the humanity behind the headlines.

Après le succès mondial de sa pièce de théâtre Les Monologues du vagin, Eve Ensler a publié aux États-Unis ce récit à la dimension politique mêlant son expérience personnelle et sa rencontre, au fil de voyages successifs, avec des femmes du monde entier : de jeunes Afghanes, des rescapées de l'ouragan Katrina, des victimes de viols en Bosnie, ou encore l'activiste pacifiste américaine Cindy Sheehan. Interpellée par l'obsession sécuritaire de nos sociétés contemporaines post-11 septembre, Eve Ensler évoque avec elles ce sentiment partagé d'insécurité et de vulnérabilité dans un environnement dangereux et menaçant pour les unes, ou au contraire ultra-vigilant et protégé pour les autres. Le principe de précaution est-il appliqué à outrance en Occident, au mépris de notre humanité et de notre ouverture sur le monde ? Tour à tour éclairante, provocatrice et visionnaire, cette enquête nous force à nous demander ce que signifie vivre libre et épanoui(e) aujourd'hui et si, de la capacité de notre société à nous protéger, dépend nécessairement notre bien-être.

A collection of 10 cds from the 3rd Women & Power Conference in September 2004, includes seven keynote addresses, two panels and an interview of Sally Field by Eve Ensler.