‘Girl, Interrupted (30th Anniversary Edition)’ By Susanna Kaysen
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 […]
‘Erotica’ By Michael Dango
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 […]
‘I Must Be Dreaming’ by Roz Chast
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 […]
‘Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs’ By Josh Hawley
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 […]
‘Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir’ by Margo Jefferson
PANTHEON, APRIL 2022, 208 PP. Titling a book can be a tall order —finding the perfect, concise combination of words that announces your aim to an audience and entices them to read it. Margo Jefferson’s latest electrifying work of nonfiction, Constructing a Nervous System, is superbly titled. A nervous system, of course, is the […]
‘Sirens & Muses’ by Antonia Angress and ‘My Last Innocent Year’ by Daisy Alpert Florin
BALLANTINE BOOKS, JULY 2022, 368 PP. IF ART ALLOWS humans to touch the sublime, then one can’t help but ask where we went so wrong with art school, that expensive immersion in the petty and profane. Two recent debut novels recreate the world of visual and literary arts programs replete with the glittering currency of […]
‘Hit Parade of Tears: Stories’ By Izumi Suzuki
VERSO, APRIL 2023, 288 PP. THIS NEWLY TRANSLATED collection of Izumi Suzuki’s short stories first published more than forty years ago is jaunty, odd, violent, femme-centric, funny—but what strikes me most is its freshness. A few charming period details (the presence of a Walkman, cassette tapes, a rotary phone, the novelty of color TV) dotted […]
‘Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex’ By Sophia Giovannitti
‘The Road to the City’ By Natalia Ginzburg, Translated by Gini Alhadeff
NEW DIRECTIONS, JULY 2023, 96 PP. THE ROAD TO the City is, at face value, apolitical. In an afterword from 1964, when Natalia Ginzburg was forty-eight, she describes the conception and creation of this, her first published book: “And I remembered how my mother, whenever she read a novel that was too long and tedious, […]
‘A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell’ by Young Kim
Omnibus Press, May 2023, 254 pp. “EVERYONE THINKS THEY know what a love affair is. But what is a love affair really?” Young Kim asks this right off the bat in her debut memoir, A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell, the subject of which is her own personal experience of two love affairs with […]