NEW DIRECTIONS, OCTOBER 2022, 241 PP. I FIRST READ the poet H.D.’s autobiographical novel HERmione when I was twenty-four. This was 1981; the book had just been rediscovered in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and published by New Directions, more than a half century after its completion in 1927. Although I was of a different generation entirely, my life at the time resembled that of Hermione Gart, the novel’s heroine:
VERSO, OCTOBER 2022, 128 PP. I LOVE A good manifesto, and Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family is just that. Anchored in a strikingly hopeful feminist Marxism, Lewis leads the reader through a systematic, didactic introduction to the politics and possibilities of cutting ourselves loose from the constraints and impositions of the traditional patriarchal, capitalist family. Wisely, Lewis begins with an emotional negotiation, since part of the naturalization and success of the “family” as a concept
VERSO, JULY 2022, 224 PP. THE FIRST THING to like about Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Valkyries is how it disentangles liberal feminism from socialist feminism in easy language. Capitalism sits well with the former, she writes, because promoting women into executive positions may save their employers money (as women are generally paid less than men). The expansion of social services, on the other hand, costs money, and that means raising taxes or promoting more radical
Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Shaina Taub, Hannah Cruz, and Nadia Dandashi in the world premiere musical Suffs at The Public Theater. Photo by Joan Marcus. THE FIGHT TO pass the Nineteeth Amendment was full of firsts. There was the first women’s march on Washington: eight thousand women paraded along Pennsylvania Avenue on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration in March 1913. There was the first use of picketing as a form of political protest:
LITTLE, BROWN; APRIL 2022, 320 PP. In a late scene in Chantal V. Johnson’s novel Post-traumatic, Vivian, the central character, is confronted by two police officers knocking at her door. She’s a thirty-something Black and Latinx lawyer on hiatus; a concerned family member has called the cops to perform a “wellness check.” Calling the cops is one of the worst things you can do to a distressed person of color, especially one who happens
VERSO, AUGUST 2023 192 PP Harsh prison sentences are often depicted as feminist triumphs. Harvey Weinstein’s sentencing was covered as a vindication of the survivors of his crimes, some of whom advocated the “maximum sentence” in interviews; an attorney statement celebrated Weinstein’s having to “live out the remainder of his miserable life behind bars.” After Bill Cosby’s sentencing, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, an anti-sexual assault group, issued a statement of gratitude that
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, FEBRUARY 2023, 128 PP. ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET’S 1974 film Successive Slidings of Pleasure starts with the protagonist tying her nude female lover to the bed frame to paint flowers over her nipples. The next we see of this lover, she is dead, stabbed in the breast with scissors. While Successive Slidings of Pleasure is perhaps, as seventies art films go, not that grotesquely misogynistic, Robbe-Grillet inadvertently reveals his ignorance about lesbianism. The
GROVE ATLANTIC, NOVEMBER 2022, 672 PP. I’VE PREFACED FAR too many conversations lately with “I’ve just read Kafka’s diaries.” I actually read Kafka’s diaries about six months ago, but I can’t shake the feeling I’ve discovered something incredible. It’s silly, I know. Surprise, surprise: Kafka is good. But I’ve been acting like a teenager in love with a pop star. Recently, a Berliner boy I was on a date with informed me that his father
VERSO, APRIL 2022, 368 PP. Bread and roses loom large in activist and author Meredith Tax’s biography. She cofounded the early women’s liberation group of that name in l969, going on to cofound CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) in 1977, chair PEN American Center’s Women’s Committee in 1986, and spend the last thirty years fighting gender-based censorship and the rise of fundamentalism, among other radical acts. Tax recounts her own
Riverhead, September 2023, 272 pp. Lauren Groff’s new novel, The Vaster Wilds, is a survival story: in the early seventeenth century, a girl flees the starving, disease-ridden settlement at Jamestown, Virginia and makes her way alone through the wilderness. The novel is also a revision of the settlement narratives of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the myth of Manifest Destiny in which white settlers have God (and capitalism) on their side. In Groff’s version, as
