Description

Origin: Classic Stories of Motherhood gathers ten unforgettable stories from world literature —by Honoré de Balzac, Hans Christian Andersen, Guy de Maupassant, Bret Harte, Charles W. Chesnutt, Maxim Gorky, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, and Isaac Babel — to explore the many lives hidden within the idea of motherhood.
These are not stories of idealized mothers or sacred domesticity. Here are mothers who wait, grieve, rage, endure, protect, abandon, and survive. A mother crosses forests and darkness to win her child back from Death itself. Another burns enemy soldiers alive in the ashes of war. A starving woman gives birth into famine and silence. Elsewhere, motherhood appears as burden, performance, sacrifice, obsession, tenderness, and violence — often all at once.
From revolutionary France and war-torn Europe to the American frontier and modern industrial worlds, these stories reveal motherhood not as a single moral truth, but as a deeply human condition shaped by hunger, class, memory, desire, loss, and survival.
Unsettling yet deeply compassionate, Origin: Classic Stories of Motherhood is an anthology about the fragile border where love and destruction share the same heartbeat.