The Vagina Monologues to Be Published by Random House

Contact:
Brian McLendon

(212) 572-2681

January 20, 1998

The Vagina Monologues to be published by Random House

by Eve Ensler

Foreword by Gloria Steinem

"The value of The Vagina Monologues goes beyond purging
negative attitudes of the past. It offers a personal,
grounded-in-the-body way of moving towards the
future....With the help of outrageous voices like those in
this book, I believe the grandmothers, mothers, and
daughters of the future can mend ourselves. And weave a
world."

Gloria Steinem, from the Foreword

Originally written as individual performance pieces, Eve
Ensler's Obie Award-winning one-woman show, The Vagina
Monologues (Villard/Trade Paperback/Publication Date:
February 4, 1998), centers around one simple word: vagina.
These monologues grew out of interviews Eve had with more
than three hundred women ages six to seventy-six from around
the world, discussing the same forbidden subject -- "down
there."

The results are stunning, with soliloquies ranging from an
older woman's memory of her first experience with her own
sexuality to an account of rape by a Bosnian refugee to the
birth of Eve's own grandchild. Ensler's stories, facts, and
words give testimony to the power and vulnerability of
gender and womanhood in our society today.

As a play, The Vagina Monologues has been performed (and
sold-out) in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, Oklahoma
City, Baltimore, and Dallas. Now, published for the first
time, Ensler's vivid and diverse collage of the strengths,
fears, hopes and needs of women everywhere will transport
readers 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eve Ensler is an award-winning playwright, poet, activist,
and screen-writer whose many works for the stage include The
Depot, Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary
Measures, Lemonade, Ladies, and, most recently, Necessary
Targets, which was performed on Broadway to benefit Bosnian
women refugees.

She has presented her off-Broadway hit The Vagina Monologues
(winner of the 1997 Obie Award) at theaters and universities
around the United States, as well as in Jerusalem, London,
and Zagreb. She is currently writing a screenplay on women
in prison for Glenn Close at Miramax and a new play for the
Music Theater Group. An instructor in the graduate Dramatic
Writing Program at New York University, she lives in New
York City with her partner, Ariel Orr Jordan.

The Vagina Monologues

Eve Ensler

Villard

Trade Paperback/$12.00/144 Pages

Publication Date: February 4, 1998

ISBN: 0-375-75052-5

Be sure to visit the Random House website.