Issues

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

Verso, 176 pp MISS MAJOR IS an icon of Black trans womanhood. Born in Chicago in 1946, she was on a path to some sort of Black middle-class life. At college in Minnesota, she left during her first term after a roommate discovered her femme wardrobe, came back to Hyde Park to live with her parents, and was arrested at twenty for speeding as she fled Chicago for New York. She did six months in

  CITY LIGHTS, DECEMBER 2022, 232 PP. BY PAGE 33 of her engrossing and candid memoir, filmmaker Joyce Chopra has revealed that while growing up in 1950s New York, men regularly exposed themselves to her in cruising cars, on the subway, and under the Coney Island boardwalk. She has been sexually assaulted by her brother and raped by an ex-boyfriend, has had an illegal abortion, and moved to Paris to pursue filmmaking, where she’s repeatedly

  HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 224 PP. FOR DECADES, THE movement to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in North America has used a range of strategies to show non-Native people what Native people have known for hundreds of years: Indigenous women and girls, as well as queer, trans, and Two-Spirit people, are disproportionately victims of violence and homicide. Activists have employed a wide range of strategies—social

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2023, 392 pp. In July 2016, I knelt on the floor amid piles of dirty laundry in my apartment in Brooklyn, sorting clothes by what goes in the dryer and what doesn’t. Nobody was around me and no one needed me, so I could feel what I felt and think my own thoughts. The murders by police of two men in two days in two cities had been all over

Still from Shola Lynch’s documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004). WHEN WE CELEBRATE a political “first,” we’re heralding the beginning—not the end—of a struggle. And yet, understanding the lives of trailblazers can instruct us in how to pursue justice in spite of institutional prejudice. Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s recent biography of Constance Baker Motley, Civil Rights Queen, provides one such example, beginning with Motley’s birth in 1921 to West Indian immigrants in New Haven, Connecticut. In

BEACON PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 336 PP. IN THE ORIGINAL epilogue of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley writes, But now is the time to think like poets, to envision and make visible a new society, a peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imaginations. This passage was a universal favorite at the University of Louisville’s Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research (ABI), where staff like me

FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, SEPTEMBER 2022, 288 PP. WHEN DIAGNOSED WITH a chronic illness, it’s easy to split your life into two periods: prediagnosis and postdiagnosis. Maybe you’ve suffered mysterious symptoms for years, but (finally) having a name for your experience ostensibly gives you a pathway forward. In the last few years, a swell of illness memoirs has described this journey, including Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus, Lara Parker’s Vagina

Viking, August 2023, 304 pp. Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words reminds us that patriarchy is not only terrifyingly huge but nightmarishly granular. This spirited, scholarly book marshals a languageful of evidence to prove that our external bodies, actions, and rights are not all that have been colonized by men—so have our words. Jenni Nuttall’s book belongs in the tradition of feminist takes on the English language including Monique Wittig and Sandy Zerg’s

GROVE ATLANTIC, DECEMBER 2022, 192 PP. IN 2013, THE University of Iceland crowned ljósmóðir, a compound of ljós (light) and móðir (mother), the most beautiful word in the Icelandic language. The English word for ljósmóðir is midwife, and that most intimate occupation forms the core of Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s latest novel, Animal Life, her seventh to be translated into English—this time, by Brian Fitzgibbon. The premise: It’s late December in Reykjavík, and a massive storm