It’s ingenious, the idea for this book. Francine Prose has written twenty-two works of fiction, and 1974 is her first memoir. She takes one year in her life and one dramatic relationship she formed in that year, and she tells you everything she wants to about being twenty-six back then. You can’t tell the difference between the voice of the girl she was and the voice of the person talking to you now. It’s a
Front Cover: Bayan Kiwan. Lesser Legible Love, 2023. Oil on canvas draped in tulle; 44 × 35.8 in. I grew up in many different places, so belonging was always fraught,” says Bayan Kiwan. She hands me a bottle of coconut water. A weak but hopeful December light pours through the grimy window of her Soho studio at Hunter College, where she is working on her MFA in studio art. (They will clean the windows tomorrow,
María Folguera called in early 2019 to offer me space in the book she was putting together: Tranquilas: Historias para ir solas por la noche (Keep Calm: Stories to Help You Walk Alone at Night). Two years earlier, I had published the Spanish edition of Rape New York (Feminist Press, 2011) and María wanted to enlist me in this new project aiming to counteract the culture of fear in which women exist. This wasn’t necessarily
Dear Readers, This morning, as I traipsed the mile or so from my apartment in Greenwich Village to our new office on the Lower East Side, the Missing Persons song “Words” popped into my brain. It starts with “Do you hear me? / Do you care?” and the chorus is “What are words for / when no one listens anymore.” Not to project epistemological profundity on an early-eighties pop song, but “Words” is about the
On an overcast Saturday afternoon, I attended a press showing of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Sally and Tom at the Public Theater in Lower Manhattan. What I anticipated: a historical play, dark and complex, about the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Parks’s oeuvre, after all, includes rich and complex plays inspired by the darkest portions of American history, including Topdog/Underdog and Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. What I did
If you don’t know Alissa Quart’s poetry—and you definitely should—you may know her as the prose writer of Bootstrapped, Squeezed, and numerous other books about the economic struggles of ordinary Americans. (She’s also the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, which supports journalism about low-income people.) Her poems here are in a different vein, but have the toughness, humor, and barely suppressed rage that marks her prose. I love
Is heterosexuality a choice? A new edition of Joanna Russ’s 1980 novel On Strike Against God asks us to reckon with this and other questions posed by an earlier generation of feminists. Heterosexuality warps the thirty-eight-year-old protagonist Esther’s life—until she figures out how to shake it off. Esther describes her engagements with heterosexuality as a kind of pathology. Sex with her ex-husband was painful yet bland. She became “sexually dead,” suffering physical symptoms. An affair
Old Westbury Gardens, Smoggy Afternoon, by the author. The biggest book I own is the Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition. It’s all the plays, annotated: 3,600 pages. Lately I’ve used it to prop up my computer, to enable a more flattering angle on Zoom calls. In the fall of 2020, I was meeting every week on Zoom with a class taught by the writer Anne Carson and her husband Robert Currie. Anne announced one week that
The other day, while walking down my driveway to get in my car, I noticed what looked like an enormous tangle of grape jellyfish: my bloody tampons, littered all over the street, spilling out of our garbage cans. Someone had rifled through our bins, looking for recyclables or whatever, and instead found bags of bloody tampons, which they decided to fling into the air like biological confetti. I started to shovel the purplish stumps back
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