Tag
Feminism
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“Seize the Means of Knowledge Production”: Durba Mitra on Third World Feminists and Their Fight Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism
“I suggest that the building of women’s organizations through cross border collaboration leads to a total transformation of civil society.”
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The End of Feminism? Far From It
The first explicitly feminist campaign I worked on took place during my sophomore year in college. At Brown University, the 1984/85 academic year saw successful campaigns around nuclear war and racial justice, and somewhat less successful but still important ones around needs-blind admissions and sexual orientation. By Spring Weekend, the women who had led these…
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McDreamy Is Dead
It’s been a fatal few seasons to be the primary love interest to an ambitious woman on television. Last year, The Good Wife killed Will Gardner, and the Internet refused to stop talking about it for weeks. The death of Derek Shepherd on Grey’s Anatomy, by contrast, has barely been mentioned in the critical-recapping genre…
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The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin
When did Ursula Le Guin last cross your radar screen? It could have been her memorable broadside at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony, against Amazon and “commodity profiteers” who “sell us like deodorant.” My favorite line: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”1 If you have…
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Can There Be a Feminist World?
The following is the lightly edited text of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2013, at the Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. I am pleased to be here at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. I lunched with the Vice President for Global Centers three days ago and told him, only half in…
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Do We Need Wonder Woman?
My two-year-old daughter plays on the beach in a tiny red, white, and blue swimsuit, her chest emblazoned with winged yellow Ws that need no explanation. At a glance, the suit appears of a piece with the branded Dora the Explorer and Mermaid Ariel gear sported by fellow toddlers frolicking on the shoreline. Unlike her…
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To Translate Is to Betray: On the Elena Ferrante Phenomenon in Italy and the US
The stunning fortunes of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels in the United States have only recently begun to affect their reception in the author’s native country, giving rise to competing theories and occasionally ugly polemics: Are Italians simply unable to recognize greatness in one of their own? Are American readers uncritically falling for sentimental “women’s” novels?…
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The New Self-Help
Now that self-help personalities Helen Gurley Brown and Pauline Phillips, the original Dear Abby, are gone, who will the new generation of millennial readers look to for advice? Some surprising frontrunners are not therapists or professional writers, but television comediennes, such as Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, and Amy Poehler, whose autobiographies offer counsel on subjects…
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A Riot Grrrl Zine in the Modern Age
A personal explanation: I grew up in a small town, and when I say that, I actually mean miniscule—exponentially smaller that most would assume when one describes the phenomenon of a small, rural town. 1200 people small, to be exact, and located smack dab in the heart of Texas. Land of exceedingly right-wing conservatives and…
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Give the People WhatThey Want
For Sarah Waters’s novel The Paying Guests, Public Books is simultaneously publishing an original one-panel illustration review by Alison Bechdel, “A Curious Feat of Description,” and a written review by Heather Love, below. Sarah Waters’s new novel, a beautiful account of love and loss in post-WWI London, marks a significant departure from the fantastic, ribald Victorian historical novels she is best…
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The Mixed-Up Kids of Mrs. E. L. Konigsburg
Imagine that you are a children’s book editor. An unproven writer who has only recently sold her first story sends you her second effort. The manuscript opens with a rich old lady’s note to her lawyer; she is sending him a story, she explains, to help him understand why she wants to change her will.…
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Translating The Magic Flute
When I got a call last year about translating a new Magic Flute libretto for an English-language production at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The Magic Flute had always been one of my all-time favorite operas, though I’d never paid particular attention to the libretto. Mozart composed the…
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Sweet Rage
Until the publication of the long-awaited See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s stories and novels had met with almost unqualified praise. When it appeared last year her latest book was almost unanimously trashed for what its reviewers saw as inappropriate and excessive rage directed at Kincaid’s former husband Allen Shawn. But reading the novel as a roman à clef…
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Working Girls
“A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance,” writes Hannah Horvath (played by show creator Lena Dunham) in the final episode of the second season of the HBO series Girls. This literary gem is the first, and only, sentence of an ebook for which Hannah has already received and spent…
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How Angry Is She?
In April of this year, an interviewer asked Claire Messud a silly question about Nora Eldridge, the complex and prickly protagonist of Messud’s new novel The Woman Upstairs: would Messud want to be friends with her?1 Messud’s exasperated answer—“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?”—was interpreted by some readers as evidence that the…
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In Praise of MA (Middle-Aged) Fiction
Reading what we might call MA (Middle-Aged) fiction, it’s easy to see how YA (Young Adult) fiction has become so popular among not-so-young adults. In the face of characters burdened with troublesome children, aging parents, failures of love and marriage, professional frustration (or even more frustrating professional success), depression, cancer, and obesity, who wouldn’t want…
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The End of the End of the World
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy may be one of the most significant works of 21st-century literature that you haven’t read. Which is surprising, since the novels have been well reviewed, avidly marketed, and abundantly sold. Yet they have been oddly absent from the radar screens of many who consider themselves aficionados of the contemporary novel. This…
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Naples into Words
In My Brilliant Friend, the fourth and most recent novel by Elena Ferrante to be translated into English, all by Ann Goldstein, Naples provides the absorbing backdrop to the narrator-protagonist Elena Greco’s memories of childhood and adolescence. The first volume of a proposed trilogy, the novel focuses on two young girls growing up in the…
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Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from unlikely friends from Boston with ambiguous relationships to exotic lands, to the “ordinary horror” of living through Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence; from…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Fifty Shades of Grey”
With over 29 million copies sold in trade paperback alone and translations afoot in languages from Arabic to Tagalog, the Fifty Shades trilogy …
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Animal Studies
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, without turning into a beast. In Lydia Millet’s Magnificence, a widow feeling guilty about her husband’s death compares herself to a taxidermy display of stuffed carnivores. In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a blonde dream girl fakes her own kidnapping, slaughters her ex-boyfriend in flagrante, and threatens to abort…
