“What are Marge Piercy’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Piercy’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!

We took all of the books written by Marge Piercy and looked at their Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.

The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Book’s Of Marge Piercy

39 ) The Third Child

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 39
• Amazon: 33
• LibraryThing: 37

Under her mother’s constant scrutiny and lost in the shadow of her famous senator father, Melissa is the third child in the politically prominent Dickenson family, where ambition comes first and Melissa often comes last. In college, she meets Blake, a man of mixed race and apparently unknown parentage. His adoptive parents are lawyers whose defense of death-row cases in the past brought them head-to-head with Melissa’s father when he was the governor of Pennsylvania. While Melissa and Blake’s attraction is immediate and fiery, a dangerous secret lurks beneath their relationship — one that could destroy them … and their families.

38 ) Breaking Camp Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 38
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 35

37 ) Dance The Eagle To Sleep

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 33
• Amazon: 30
• LibraryThing: 36

They call themselves the Indians. Shawn, a magnetic rock star; Corey, part Indian, whose heritage gave the movement its name; Billy, a brilliant young scientist; and Joanna, a pretty runaway “army brat” who survives on pot and sex. Through the experiences of four young revolutionaries, this macabre and moving adventure brings an all-too-possible future into shattering focus.

36 ) Three Women

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 32
• Amazon: 32
• LibraryThing: 33

The heroine of Marge Piercy’s Three Women is something of a feminist trailblazer: the first woman to teach constitutional law at her big-city university. At five feet three inches, however, Suzanne Blume feels “too small for her role in the world.” To compensate, this pint-sized divorcee has transformed herself into a human dynamo, obsessively slicing and dicing the time she devotes to her mother, her two daughters, her students, and her e-mail boyfriend. Yet this rigorously arranged world is turned upside down when her problematic older daughter moves in, followed by her stubborn, ailing mother.

35 ) Storm Tide

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 37
• Amazon: 28
• LibraryThing: 26

After his dreams of playing baseball in the Majors fall short and his marriage ends, David Greene returns to his small hometown on Cape Cod. There he meets the eminent professor, Gordon Stone, and his beautiful wife, Judith Silver, with whom he soon falls into a passionate affair. Into this explosive mix, a young woman appears–a single mother at the end of her emotional rope. Crystal desperately needs David. Yet caught between two women, David bears witness to a heartbreaking turn of events that seems as inevitable as the push and pull of ocean waves. . . .

34 ) Fly Away Home Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 29
• Amazon: 29
• LibraryThing: 29

Successful Boston cookbook author Daria Walker, whose greatest pleasures are her home and family — and who loves her husband deeply — is devastated to learn he wants a divorce. Now she must put her life back together. But as she strives to understand the life she is losing, Daria must face the shocking truth behind the smooth facade of her prominent attorney-husband, Ross — and recreate her own values, her own sense of family, and herself.

33 ) Summer People

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 34
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 38

Dinah, Willie, and Susan have long outlived the scandal associated with their ten-year-old menage-a-trois. Dinah, an avante-garde compler, treasures her independence. Yet it takes Willie’s kindness and Susan’s fire to sustain her. Willie is a left-wing sculptor in a right-wing age. And Susan, his wife, is a fabric designer who craves glamour, wealth, and the attentions of the summer people who visit Cape Cod every year. Then one summer, the balance shifts. Passions are tested, honesty forsaken, and the trio must face the changes brought by their beautiful visitors . . .

32 ) Going Down Fast Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 31
• Amazon: 23
• LibraryThing: 23

As a blighted neighborhood is invaded by a university — an institution that promises to bring new life — the people who live there are forced to go along with too many changes, too fast. There is Anna, a woman living through a succession of losses — marriage, job, home, and lover. And Rowley, a blue-eyed soul singer whose greatest limitation is his belief that he is powerless. Together with Leon, an underground filmmaker, and Caroline, a beautiful woman with a dark and desperate secret, they watch the progress of the wrecking ball, hoping, as always, for something better . . . maybe even love.

31 ) Small Changes

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 25
• Amazon: 23
• LibraryThing: 28

Set against the early days of the modern feminist movement, SMALL CHANGES tells the story of sensual Miriam Berg, who trades her doctorate for marriage and security, but still hungers for a life of her ow,n and shy, frightened Beth who is running from the life Miriam seeks and into a new world of different ideas and a different kind of love….

30 ) Vida

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 27
• Amazon: 20
• LibraryThing: 27

Vida was their star–the beautiful, charismatic radical from the pages of LIFE magazine–the symbol of the passionate rebellion of the sixties. Now, ten years later, the shouting is over, but Vida is still on the run. Staying in Network hideouts, traveling disguised, fearing every glance, she finds her best protection is her distrust of everyone–a lesson learned from past treacheries. And now, knowing the dangers, she finds herself warming again toward a man, an outcast ten years younger than herself.

29 ) Sex Wars

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 29
• Amazon: 18
• LibraryThing: 23

Post–Civil War New York City is the battleground of the American dream. In this era of free love, emerging rights of women, and brutal sexual repression, Freydeh, a spirited young Jewish immigrant, toils at different jobs to earn passage to America for her family. Learning that her younger sister is adrift somewhere in the city, she begins a determined search that carries her from tenement to brothel to prison—as her story interweaves with those of some of the epoch’s most notorious figures: Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony; sexual freedom activist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; and Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose censorship laws are still on the books. In the tradition of her bestselling World War II epic Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy once again re-creates a turbulent period in American history and explores changing attitudes in a land of sacrifice, suffering, promise, and reward.

28 ) The High Cost of Living

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 35
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 32

For Leslie, the cost of living–and loving–is getting higher and higher. She has become involved in a strange erotic triangle with Honor, a romantic young woman, and Bernie, a homosexual street hustler. Both Leslie and Bernie want Honor, but all Honor wants is fun. Here is a powerful novel of three young dreamers cuaght up in a life-style they can neither accept nor change..

26 ) Sleeping with Cats

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 23
• Amazon: 23
• LibraryThing: 21

Marge Piercy, a writer who is highly praised as both a poet and a novelist, turns her gaze inward as she shares her thoughts on life and explores her development as a woman and writer. She pays tribute to the one loving constant that has offered her comfort and meaning even as the faces and events in her life have changed — her beloved cats. With searing honesty, Piercy tells of her strained childhood growing up in a religiously split, working-class family in Detroit. She examines her myriad friendships and relationships, including two painful early marriages, and reveals their effects on her creativity and career. More than a reminiscence of things past, however, Sleeping With Cats is also a celebration of the present and the future, as Piercy shares her views on aging, creativity, and finding a lasting and improbable love with a man fourteen years younger than herself. A chronicle of the turbulent and exciting journey of one artist’s life, Sleeping With Cats is a deeply intimate, unforgettable story.

26 ) City of Darkness, City of Light

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 21
• Amazon: 27
• LibraryThing: 19

In her most splendid, thought-provoking novel yet, Marge Piercy brings to vibrant life three women who play prominent roles in the tumultuous, bloody French Revolution–as well as their more famous male counterparts. Defiantly independent Claire Lacombe tests her theory: if men can make things happen, perhaps women can too. . . . Manon Philipon finds she has a talent for p In her most splendid, thought-provoking novel yet, Marge Piercy brings to vibrant life three women who play prominent roles in the tumultuous, bloody French Revolution–as well as their more famous male counterparts. Defiantly independent Claire Lacombe tests her theory: if men can make things happen, perhaps women can too. . . . Manon Philipon finds she has a talent for politics–albeit as the ghostwriter of her husband’s speeches. . . . And Pauline Léon knows one thing for certain: the women must apply the pressure or their male colleagues will let them starve. While illuminating the lives of Robespierre, Danton, and Condorcet, Piercy also opens to us the minds and hearts of women who change their world, live their ideals–and are prepared to die for them.

25 ) The Longings of Women

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 26
• Amazon: 18
• LibraryThing: 20

“Her marriage over, her life unraveling, writer Leila Landsman turns to work, and finds herself drawn to the sensational story of Becky Burgess, a young woman accused of killing her husband with the help of her teenage lover. Becky thought she’d escaped the grim poverty of her childhood when she married up, but her husband was soon planning to trade her in for a newer model. And that’s just what happened to Mary Burke, whose middle class life ended with her divorce. Now Leila’s housecleaner, Mary has a secret: she is homeless.
They are three very different women who share the same longings: to be seen for who they are, to be valued and loved, but most of all, to have a physical and emotional home that can’t be taken away….”

23 ) Early Grrrl

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 18
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 11

The ‘Grrrl’ phenomenon is a contemporary expression of young women’s humor and rage exploding in books and zines, concerts, films, and the internet. In homage to a new generation of tough young feminists, Marge Piercy presents a gathering of poems that reveal the poet as an early ‘Grrrl.’ Comprising over ninety poems selected from four books now out of print; poems previously published in literary magazines but never before collected and very early poems never published, this volume presents the bold and passionate political verse for which Piercy is well known alongside poems celebrating the sensual pleasures of gardening and cooking and sex; funny poems about New Year’s Eve and warring boom boxes; vulnerable poems in which a young working class woman from the Midwest takes stock of herself and the limits of her world. For longtime fans and those new to Piercy’s early work, this volume is an indispensable addition to the oeuvre of one of America’s best-known and best-selling poets.

23 ) Parti-Colored Blocks For a Quilt

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 18
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 11

Piercy writes of women and poetry and of woman becoming poet

22 ) The Cost of Lunch

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 35
• Amazon: 22
• LibraryThing: 4

In this collection of short stories, bestselling author Marge Piercy brings us glimpses into the lives of everyday women moving through and making sense of their daily internal and external worlds. Keeping to the engaging, accessible language of Piercy’s novels, the collection spans decades of her writing along with a range of locations, ages, and emotional states of her protagonists. From the first-person account of hoarding and a girl’s narrative of sexual and spiritual discovery to the recounting of a past love affair, each story is a tangible, vivid snapshot in a varied and subtly curated gallery of work. Whether grappling with death, familial relationships, friendship, sex, illness, or religion, Piercy’s writing is as passionate, lucid, insightful, and thoughtfully alive as ever.

20 ) Woman on the Edge of Time

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 18
• Amazon: 26
• LibraryThing: 16

Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow.

20 ) Hard Loving

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 11

These poems are tough and tender, gritty with the urban landscape yet alive with reverence for the earth, enraged at the violence and injustices of man yet hopeful at the prospect of true community.

19 ) Available Light

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 22
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 34

Pierce’s most compelling book of poems expresses the delights of the senses and the hard play of emotion. They celebrate the wonders of nature and explore the nature of love and friendship.

18 ) Braided Lives

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 24
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 31

Growing up in Detroit in the 1950s, and going to college when the first seeds of sexual freedom are being sown, Jill and Donna are coming of age in an exciting, turbulent time. Wry, independent Jill thrives in the new free-spirited world, while her beautiful cousin Donna desperately searches for a man to make her life whole. As each cousin is driven by different demons and desires, they eventually realize that they cannot overcome fundamental differences in each others’ lives. Still, as their futures assume contrary paths, Jill and Donna realize that they may be separated, but they’ll never be truly divided from one another.

17 ) Living in the Open

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 18

14 ) The Earth Shines Secretly: A book of Days

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 9
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 39

14 ) So You Want to Write

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 28
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 6

A featured selection of the Writer’s Digest Book Club; chosen by The Writer Magazine as a Best Book of the Year; compared by the American Library Association to Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style; acclaimed by critics, students and teachers and adopted by universities across the country, the unique collaboration between a major American novelist and a publisher is back in a revised second edition, bigger and better than ever. The most useful and entertaining writing book on the market, the updated second edition has new exercises and expanded essays, covering every aspect of writing and publishing fiction and memoir: How to begin a piece so that a reader can’t put it down How to create compelling characters How professional writers use dialogue How to narrow a strategy for telling the story of your life How to write about painful material without coming off as a victim Included are hundreds of insider tips, such as: The seven important things when writing about loved ones The 10 most destructive things writers do What no one will tell you about rejection letters FAQs about agents and how much writers really earn What to do if your work is continually rejected Marge Piercy is a New York Times best-selling novelist and memoirist. Ira Wood is a novelist and publisher. Their workshops, given nationally, address overcoming the inner and outer barriers to creativity.

14 ) The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 11

A record in verse of one year integrates the political, intellectual, and emotional aspects of the poet’s experiences

13 ) To Be of Use

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 30
• LibraryThing: 9

12 ) He, She And It (aka Body of Glass)

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 20
• LibraryThing: 10

“In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman’s marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up. There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions–and the ability to kill….
From the imagination of Marge Piercy comes yet another stunning novel of morality and courage, a bold adventure of women, men, and the world of tomorrow.
“

11 ) Colours Passing Through Us

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 30

In Colors Passing Through Us, Marge Piercy is at the height of her powers, writing about what matters to her most: the lives of women, nature, Jewish ritual, love between men and women, and politics, sexual and otherwise. Feisty and funny as always, she turns a sharp eye on the world around her, bidding an ex-hausted farewell to the twentieth century and singing an “electronic breakdown blues” for the twenty-first. She memorializes movingly those who, like los desaparecidos and the victims of 9/11, disappear suddenly and without a trace. She writes an elegy for her mother, a woman who struggled with a deadening round of housework, washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, and so on, “until stroke broke / her open.” She remembers the scraps of lace, the touch of velvet, that were part of her maternal inheritance and first aroused her sensual curiosity. Here are paeans to the pleasures of the natural world (rosy ripe tomatoes, a mating dance of hawks) as the poet confronts her own mortality in the cycle of seasons and the eternity of the cosmos: “I am hurrying, I am running hard / toward I don’t know what, / but I mean to arrive before dark.” Other poems-about her grandmother’s passage from Russia to the New World, or the interrupting of a Passover seder to watch a comet pass-expand on Piercy’s appreciation of Jewish life that won her so much acclaim in The Art of Blessing the Day. Colors Passing Through Us is a moving celebration of the endurance of love and of the phenomenon of life itself-a book to treasure.

10 ) Mars and her Children

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 21

A major new collection of poems about women’s lives and the closing circle of nature, from a bestselling poet. These poems celebrate the beauties of nature and the eternal cycle of love, death and birth that is being interrupted by the assault on the environment.

9 ) My Mother’s Body

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 7
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 25

My Mother’s Body, Marge Piercy’s tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification.

8 ) The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 10
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 11

This new gathering of Marge Piercy’s poems—energetic, funny, political, full of vitality—brings us the heart of her mature work, the first selected since Circles on the Water in 1982. Here are poems that chart the milestone events and fierce passions of her middle years: the death of her mother, whom we meet first as a young woman, “awkwardly lovely, her face / pure as a single trill perfectly / prolonged on a violin,” and again as an older woman musing on what the afterlife may hold for her. There is a new marriage which she celebrates not only for romantic beginnings but also for the more intimate details that emerge over time: “love cherishes too the backpockets, / the pencil ends of childhood fears.” Some poems convey her long-held, never-wavering political convictions, which she declares in language unmistakably and colorfully her own, as when she encourages her feminist readers to go to the opera instead of the movies because at least there the heroine is real, “fifty and weighs as much as a ’65 Chevy with fins.” Living out to sea on Cape Cod settles her into the rhythm of seasons and provides poems of planting and harvests, odes to tomatoes and roses, tributes to the power and freedom of whales. And in these years she rediscovers her Jewish heritage, celebrating holidays and making of them something new and original. She begins to examine her own legacy: I have worn the faces, the masks of hieroglyphs, gods and demons, bat faced ghosts, sibyls and thieves, lover, loser, red rose and ragweed, these are the tracks I have left on the white crust of time.

6 ) What are Big Girls Made Of

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 11
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 16

Opening with a powerful cycle of elegies for her long-distant, half-brother, this major new collection by one of our bestselling poets then goes on to include both serious and funny poems about women and poems about the precarious balance of nature, ending with the beautiful, life-affirming “The Art of Blessing the Day.”

6 ) The Moon is Always Female

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 6
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 7

Her seventh and most wide ranging collection. In the 1st of 2 sections, the poems move from the amusingly elegiac to the erotic, the classical to the funny. The 2nd section is a series of 15 poems for a calendar based on lunar rather than solar divisions

5 ) Made in Detroit

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 14
• LibraryThing: 1

A treasure trove of new poems by one of our most sought-after poets: poems that range from descriptions of the Detroit of her childhood to her current life on Cape Cod, from deep appreciations of the natural world to elegies for lost friends and relationships, from a vision of her Jewish heritage to a hard-hitting take on today’s political ironies. In her trademark style, combining the sublime with the gritty, Marge Piercy describes the night she was born: “the sky burned red / over Detroit and sirens sharpened their knives. / The elms made tents of solace over grimy / streets and alley cats purred me to sleep.” She writes in graphic, unflinching language about the poor, banished now by politicians because they are no longer “real people like corporations.” There are elegies for her peer group of poets, gone now, whose work she cherishes but from whom she cannot help but want more. There are laments for the suicide of dolphins and for her beloved cats, as she remembers “exactly how I loved each.” She continues to celebrate Jewish holidays in compellingly original ways and sings praises of her marriage and the small pleasures of daily life. This is a stunning collection that will please those who already know Marge Piercy’s work and offer a splendid introduction to it for those who don’t.

4 ) Gone To Soldiers

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 3

In a stunning tour-de-force, Marge Piercy has woven a tapestry of World War II, of six women and four men, who fought and died, worked and worried, and moved through the dizzying days of the war. A compelling chronicle of humans in conflict with inhuman events, GONE TO SOLIDERS is an unforgettable reading experience and a stirring tribute to the remarkable survival of the human spirit.

3 ) Circles on the Water

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 3
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 5

More than 150 poems from her seven books of poetry written between 1963 and 1982

2 ) The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems With a Jewish Theme

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 10
• LibraryThing: 7

The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, by Marge Piercy, is that rare book of self-avowedly religious poetry whose devotional purpose actually enhances its poetic strength. Piercy’s poems, organized in chapters with thematic headings like “Family,” “Marriage,” and “Prayer,” are plainly presented as help for living. Readers will turn to poems such as “Putting the Good Things Away” when they need inspiration for understanding their self-sacrificing mothers. Yet Piercy’s devotions are real poems with a literary integrity whose strength and beauty are free of sentimentality.

1 ) Stone, Paper, Knife

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 14
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 2

Marge Piercy’s Best Books

Marge Piercy Review Website Bibliography Rankings