‘That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America’ By Amanda Jones
Librarians feature prominently in my two most “controversial” books for children. In Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, a white child visits the library with their mom and learns from a library book about the history of systemic racism in the United States and the legacy of white people who aligned with black leaders […]
‘Sandwich: A Novel’ By Catherine Newman
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 […]
‘On Strike Against God’ By Joanna Russ, edited by Alec Pollak
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 […]
‘Sally and Tom’ By Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III
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 […]
‘The Sexist Microphysics of Power: The Alcàsser Case and the Construction of Sexual Terror’ By Nerea Barjola, translated by Emily Mack
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 […]
‘1974: A Personal History’ By Francine Prose
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 […]
“The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports” By Michael Waters
It’s funny that the first question from many people, when they hear a positive stance on transness, is “But what do you think about transgender people in women’s sports?” As if these interlocutors had any stake in women’s sports to begin with. As if the most pressing issue facing trans people today is athletic events. […]
‘Martha Graham, A Life: When Dance Became Modern’ By Neil Baldwin & ‘Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham’ By Deborah Jowitt
Graham and Ted Shawn in Shawn’s duet, Malagueña, 1921. Photograph by Albert Witzel. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the New York Public Library. Martha Graham (1894–1991), whose dances—and the evolving technique for how to perform them—dramatically upended what audiences expected from theatrical dancing, did not identify as a choreographer. She was a dancer, even after she […]
‘The Loneliness Files’ By Athena Dixon
In 2012, responding to reports of a foul odor, a New York landlord discovered the groundbreaking feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone dead in her apartment. It was estimated her body had been there for a month. Firestone, who lived reclusively, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1980s. Still, it’s hard to ignore the implications: the […]
‘The Shining’ By Dorothea Lasky
Wave Books, October 2023, 88 pp. The writing mind is a haunted house ringing with the voices of the dead. When I told her that I’d never seen the film, Dotti was astounded. It was raining. From beneath the awning, the air was washed with streaky neon and headlights. Dorothea Lasky was dressed brightly, characteristically. […]