Issues

Regnery Publishing, May 2023, 248 pp. Twice the editors of LIBER asked the publisher of Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs by Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) for a review copy. Twice, they were met with silence. Undeterred, the editors went to Amazon. I now have a copy of this screed, in which the author fashions himself as prophet, life coach, and imperfect spiritual striver in our broken world. The jacket photo shows a white man

MCD/FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, NOVEMBER 2022, 352 PP. FROM THE ARCHIVE of a literary icon, shouts the jacket copy. This novelist shudders. What do we fear more than to die and leave a manuscript unpublished? That fact represents years of effort, humiliation, discard, disappointment, setbacks, shirks, and ultimately, failure. And in this case, the late Katherine Dunn (1945–2016) was the author of one of our most popular of iconoclastic novels, Geek Love (1989), which created

THE NOVELS BELOW revolve around abortions, but they are also about community, mutuality, the blurring of the lines between self and others. The connections and collaborations here remind us that people will always band together during the most difficult times and decisions of their lives. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore KNOPF, 1994 It’s the summer of 1972, and Sils Chaussee is fifteen and pregnant.  Her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, Mike, wants to raise

  W. W. NORTON, APRIL 2022, 409 PP. SEXUAL ESSENTIALISM—the idea that men and women differ from each other in various innate and permanent ways—has rarely been a friend to feminists. Charles Darwin thought the rules of inheritance would prevent women from ever becoming the intellectual equals of men. E. O. Wilson, in his 1975 landmark Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, cited the sex division of hunter-gatherers as evidence for women’s natural inclination for homemaking. In

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, APRIL 2022, 688 PP.Bronislava Nijinska and Valslav Nijinsky in L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1912. BRONISLAVA NIJINSKA (1891-1972) first made her mark as the kid sister and muse of the famous dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Nijinsky, the “God of Dance,” was a troubled genius⎯his original works include some of the first modern ballets–L’Après-midi d’un Faune, The Rite of Spring–whose legendary career was cut short at the age of thirty, when he was institutionalized

  HACHETTE, MAY 2022, 272 PP. Advice: if you ever talk to Kim Gordon, don’t ask her what it’s like to be a “girl in a band.” “The often-repeated question throughout my career as a musician made me feel disrupted, a freak or that we are all the same,” she notes on Instagram when announcing her new book, a coedited essay collection called This Woman’s Work. “Hopefully this book begins an unraveling of the myth

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,

  GRAYWOLF, FEBRUARY 2023, 192 PP. STERLING KARAT GOLD, the new novel by the London-based writer Isabel Waidner, begins in what we might call consensus reality: “I’m Sterling. Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservatism, my language to PTSD.” Relatable. But the novel tumbles headlong into a surrealism that harkens to Kafka and seems the only logical strategy to interact with a global culture gone mad with fascism.

BIBLIOASIS, NOVEMBER 2022, 240 PP. IN 1846, THE British writer William Thoms coined the compound word folklore to describe “the traditional beliefs and customs of the common people,” replacing prior terms popular antiquities or popular literature. Lore in this coinage derives from learning or instruction to evoke the way in which this body of shared knowledge is passed along orally among the folk who practice it. Within the category of folklore nests the subcategory of

  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