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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Why Does the Historical Novel Need to be Rescued?
Hilary Mantel has won two Booker Prizes for her re-imagination of the court of Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, the first two installments in a planned trilogy narrating one of the most famous and most represented episodes in English history. Reviews of both books inevitably begin with a…
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Transatlantic Feminism Post–DSK Affair
Autumn 2012 in Paris, la rentrée, and a host of new books dealing with the aftershocks of summer 2011’s biggest political scandal are piled up on bookstore tables. A novel by Stéphane Zagdanski, Chaos brûlant (Burning Chaos), is particularly sensational, featuring the spectacular demise of former International Monetary Fund (IMF) director Dominique Strauss-Kahn as seen…
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Graphic Fables of Old New York
Two recent books serve as potent reminders of the ongoing historiographic obsessions of graphic narrative. Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn and Mark Siegel’s Sailor Twain are both ambitious historical graphic novels that return to early periods of New York history. Using strikingly different visual styles and narrative techniques, both create deeply haunting fables that, like much of…
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Turn, Turn …
Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, set in the near future, begins with an “invisible catastrophe” known as the slowing, a gradual deceleration of the earth’s rotation that extends days and nights, disrupts crop cycles, and even alters the effects of gravity. The novel’s title, however, refers to a far more distressing phenomenon: middle school, “the…
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The Mom Problem
For hard-core fans of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home—and we are legion—the publication of its follow-up, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, was a major event …
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Raging Against Obscurity
Two recent books give new spins on the artist’s life: both writers had raging youths but one got famous and one didn’t. Jeanette Winterson and Eileen Myles, tough, smart, ambitious women who escaped the hard-laboring worlds into which they were born, grapple with what it means to seek literary fame. Myles’s Inferno is a grand and…
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Dollars and Sex
House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s celebrated return to dirty fiction, conjures an alternate sexual universe, where a broad range of heterosexual men and women (and one detached male body part) find deep, gushing satisfaction with one another, largely unconstrained by the anxieties, frustrations, and misunderstandings that bedevil modern sexuality. Slipping out of their unfulfilling lives…
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A Conversation with Ellis Avery
Set in 1927 Paris, The Last Nude is inspired by the Russo-Polish Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young woman who modeled for her most famous painting, Beautiful Rafaela. De Lempicka met Rafaela on a walk in the Bois de Boulogne and drove her back to the studio: the two women became lovers,…
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The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
In The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides asks what would happen if nineteenth-century literature married twentieth-century theory, and the result is many brilliant novels in one: a romance, a coming-of-age story, a travelogue, an account of madness, and a tale of religious quest. Its protagonists are Brown University students, Class of 1982, which also makes The…
