Issue 2.3

Oakland-based artist Wendy MacNaughton spent 2017 at the Zen Project Hospice in San Francisco, sitting with residents, listening to them reflect on death. She wrote down what she heard and drew what she saw. “Drawing is a way we can look closely at something we might otherwise be afraid to look at,” is one lesson in How to Say Goodbye. MacNaughton gave away the first edition of two hundred books, asking each recipient to pass

Harper, November 2022, 224 pp. We All Want Impossible Things, the first novel for adults by Catherine Newman, traces two best friends—Ash and Edi—in their last few weeks together as Edi dies of ovarian cancer. We open on Edi, Ash, and Edi’s husband learning that there is nothing more the doctors can do and that there are no beds available in inpatient hospice. Home care is out of the question; Edi’s young child has been

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloomsbury, October 2023, 192 pp. Some artists dedicate a whole career to the scrutiny of a particular feeling. Proust did nostalgia; Updike did extracurricular lust. The cartoonist Roz Chast does anxiety. Take, for example, “The Party, After You Left,” a single-panel cartoon of a group of people milling about on a New York rooftop at night. “Thank God she’s gone!” someone says. A friend agrees: “Now we can really have some fun!” Across the panel,