LITTLEPUSS PRESS, OCTOBER 2022, 208 PP. TRANS WOMEN MOTHER each other when nobody else will. Cecilia Gentili is a legend among New York trans women; there must be hundreds for whom she is “mom.” It’s a hard role to play for trans women whose relationship to their own mothers is fraught. As Gentili says of hers, “I saw in your eyes so many times the wish that I was not your child.” While mom
MCD X FSG ORIGINALS, JUNE 2022, 288 PP. TO REREAD IMOGEN Binnie’s cult classic Nevada nearly ten years after its first publication is to remember the seismic shift this novel created in both queer/trans literature and in life. Nevada, initially published in 2013, was the crest of the wave that was Topside Press, a small-but-mighty, short-lived press run out of a New York living room by trans friends that became, for a few years, the
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, MARCH 2022, 600 PP. In a hair under fifty years, American women’s history was born, died, and is being reborn as something else. Call it the history of gender if you like, or the history of sexuality and the body. What it means to be a woman today has become uncertain, fraught—and maybe, just maybe, more interesting. A case in point: in the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings to elevate Judge
Bloomsbury, August 2023, 144 pp. In 1986, when I was a 24-year-old graduate student with an interest in women’s images in the media, I attended a feminist conference on the subject in New York. “Sexuality in Rock Videos on MTV” was the session that really excited me. MTV then was like TikTok now—its videos were extremely familiar to a younger generation and shaped the larger culture. MTV was not receiving any academic attention, but I
MARINER BOOKS, SEPTEMBER 2022, 256 PP. AMY FUSSELMAN WRITES like a comic—or a “stand-up philosopher,” as Mel Brooks’s character describes himself at the ancient Roman unemployment office window in History of the World, Part I. No matter how serious the topic, Fusselman reveals the humor. Her 2007 memoir, 8: All True: Unbelievable, for instance, delves into her experience with childhood rape in a way that leaves her reader unburdened and happy. Likewise, in The Pharmacist’s
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, OCTOBER 2022, 419 PP. THE FRENCH, ELIZABETH Hardwick wrote, “have a nearly manic facility and energy” for the art of homage. The literary guest of the French table rushes off, perhaps leaves early, to transcribe the night’s witticisms. So copious is this national record keeping that a meeting between artists can be viewed from multiple perspectives, like sculpture in the round. Not so, Hardwick argues, in the United States, where
DRAWN & QUARTERLY, SEPTEMBER 2022, 436 PP. YEARS AGO, MY parents gave me Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton for Christmas. It was a collection of short, witty comics about literature, history, and feminism, a follow-up to the best-selling 2011 collection Hark! A Vagrant, which began as a webcomic Beaton created while studying history and anthropology in college. I obsessed over Step Aside, Pops for the rest of my adolescence. I read it late at
SOFT SKULL PRESS, JULY 2022, 320 PP. FIFTY PAGES INTO Elvia Wilk’s new essay collection, Death by Landscape, I did something kind of weird: I contacted Elvia Wilk on Instagram. I told her I was reading the book and intended to review it, and I tried to express how it seemed to be explaining my own inner life to me, articulating connections between my current, inexplicably disparate preoccupations. These preoccupations include stories of women turning
EUROPA EDITIONS, MAY 2022, 224 PP. Fuyuko Irie is a thirty-four-year-old freelance proofreader from Japan. One of her most defining characteristics, in her opinion, is that she likes to go for a walk once a year on Christmas Eve, her birthday. “But I was sure that no one else could comprehend what made this fun,” she admits, “and I never mentioned it to anyone before. I had no friends to talk to on a
Vintage, May 2023, 192 pp. I first read Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted in high school, in 2010 or so. I found a copy for 25 cents at a used bookstore, read it, then loaned it to all of my friends. We had all heard of it, but in 2010, Girl, Interrupted was not the popular phenomenon it had been when it was published in 1993 or when the movie adaptation with Winona Ryder and
