‘Our Share of Night’ by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell
HOGARTH, FEBRUARY 2023, 608 PP. “I THINK POLITICAL violence leaves scars, like a national PTSD,” the Argentine journalist and fiction writer Mariana Enriquez said in a 2018 interview with LitHub. “The scale of the cruelty in political violence,” she continued, “always seems like the blackest magic to me. Like they have to satisfy some ravenous […]
‘On Women’ by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff
MACMILLAN, MAY 2023, 208 PP. SUSAN ROSENBLATT WAS born in 1933 into a household that she would later describe as an utter cultural wasteland. Her family moved frequently, from New York to Arizona to California. Her father, a fur trader who worked in China, died of tuberculosis when she was five. Her stepfather, Nathan Sontag, […]
“Naudline Pierre: What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared’, & ‘This Is Not All There Is’
Naudline Pierre, Tell Me Where it Hurts, Oil on canvas, 66 x 48 in., 2020. ©Naudline Pierre, 2023. Images courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. ONCE, WHILE VISITING a friend who studied architecture in the Italian Alps, I tagged along on a field trip to the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana just […]
‘House of Cotton’ by Monica Brashears
FLATIRON, APRIL 2023, 304 PP. HALFWAY THROUGH MONICA Brashears’s debut House of Cotton, the narrator, Magnolia, observes, “Grief makes people slapstick.” Until then, I wasn’t entirely sure what sort of novel I was reading. The story is told by a young woman who takes a very strange job in a funeral parlor during a down-and-out […]
‘The Easy Life’ by Marguerite Duras, translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes
BLOOMSBURY, DECEMBER 2022, 419 pp. I’ve always found the question of what it is that a character wants very boring and annoying. I’ve heard it asked many times in creative writing workshops when someone, usually a woman (and sometimes that woman is me), has handed in a story where there are lots of pretty […]
‘Couplets: A Love Story’ by Maggie Millner
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, FEBRUARY 2023, 128 PP. ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET’S 1974 film Successive Slidings of Pleasure starts with the protagonist tying her nude female lover to the bed frame to paint flowers over her nipples. The next we see of this lover, she is dead, stabbed in the breast with scissors. While Successive Slidings of […]
‘HERmione’ by H.D.
NEW DIRECTIONS, OCTOBER 2022, 241 PP. I FIRST READ the poet H.D.’s autobiographical novel HERmione when I was twenty-four. This was 1981; the book had just been rediscovered in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and published by New Directions, more than a half century after its completion in 1927. Although […]
‘Miss Major Speaks’ by Miss Major and Toshio Meronek, and ‘Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation’, by Qween Jean, Joela Rivera, Mikelle Street, & Raquel Willis
Verso, 176 pp MISS MAJOR IS an icon of Black trans womanhood. Born in Chicago in 1946, she was on a path to some sort of Black middle-class life. At college in Minnesota, she left during her first term after a roommate discovered her femme wardrobe, came back to Hyde Park to live with her […]
‘Constance Baker Motley’ by Tomiko Brown-Nagin;
‘Shirley Chisholm’ by Anastasia C. Curwood;
‘Patsy Takemoto Mink’ by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink
Still from Shola Lynch’s documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004). WHEN WE CELEBRATE a political “first,” we’re heralding the beginning—not the end—of a struggle. And yet, understanding the lives of trailblazers can instruct us in how to pursue justice in spite of institutional prejudice. Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s recent biography of Constance Baker Motley, Civil Rights […]
‘Toad: A Novel by Katherine Dunn’
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 […]