‘Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and’Beyond’ by Joyce Chopra
CITY LIGHTS, DECEMBER 2022, 232 PP. BY PAGE 33 of her engrossing and candid memoir, filmmaker Joyce Chopra has revealed that while growing up in 1950s New York, men regularly exposed themselves to her in cruising cars, on the subway, and under the Coney Island boardwalk. She has been sexually assaulted by her brother […]
‘Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us’ by Rachel Aviv
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, SEPTEMBER 2022, 288 PP. WHEN DIAGNOSED WITH a chronic illness, it’s easy to split your life into two periods: prediagnosis and postdiagnosis. Maybe you’ve suffered mysterious symptoms for years, but (finally) having a name for your experience ostensibly gives you a pathway forward. In the last few years, a swell of […]
‘Ordinary Wonder Tales:’ Essays by Emily Urquhart
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 […]
‘Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan’ by Darryl Pinckney
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, OCTOBER 2022, 419 PP. THE FRENCH, ELIZABETH Hardwick wrote, “have a nearly manic facility and energy” for the art of homage. The literary guest of the French table rushes off, perhaps leaves early, to transcribe the night’s witticisms. So copious is this national record keeping that a meeting between artists […]
‘Our Missing Hearts’ by Celeste Ng
PENGUIN, OCTOBER 2022, 352 PP. A DYSTOPIA IS an imaginary place where neither you nor I would want to dwell, for it dramatically extends the most painful and dangerous features of the present moment. As such, a dystopia warns us to change the present while we can. The imagined United States of Celeste Ng’s […]
‘Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory’ by Janet Malcolm
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, JANUARY 2023, 176 PP. NO ONE KNOWS why they remember anything. Even the details of a disaster, like your time as a hostage, or the hurricane that swept away your house, may be shrouded in protective amnesia, while you can precisely describe the insignia on a set of buttons you […]
‘Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women’ by Kristen Ghodsee
VERSO, JULY 2022, 224 PP. THE FIRST THING to like about Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Valkyries is how it disentangles liberal feminism from socialist feminism in easy language. Capitalism sits well with the former, she writes, because promoting women into executive positions may save their employers money (as women are generally paid less than men). […]
‘The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917’ by Meredith Tax
VERSO, APRIL 2022, 368 PP. Bread and roses loom large in activist and author Meredith Tax’s biography. She cofounded the early women’s liberation group of that name in l969, going on to cofound CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) in 1977, chair PEN American Center’s Women’s Committee in 1986, and spend […]
‘Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising’ by Brandi Morin
HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 224 PP. FOR DECADES, THE movement to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in North America has used a range of strategies to show non-Native people what Native people have known for hundreds of years: Indigenous women and girls, as well as […]
‘Louise Bourgeois: Paintings’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022
Louise Bourgeois, Fallen Woman (Femme Maison), 1946-47. Private collection, New York. Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Maison, 1946-47. Private collection, New York. I DIDN’T KNOW a painting could make me feel as if I were falling. It happened for the first time when I saw an untitled 1948 painting by Louise Bourgeois in the current exhibit of […]