‘The Rabbit Hutch’ By Tess Gunty
KNOPF, AUGUST 2022, 352 PP “ON A HOT night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body.” So opens Tess Gunty’s feat of a novel, The Rabbit Hutch, which begins with the death of its central character. Blandine is an orphan who recently graduated from the foster system, is obsessed with Catholic mysticism, and has […]
‘Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist’ by Frans de Waal
W. W. NORTON, APRIL 2022, 409 PP. SEXUAL ESSENTIALISM—the idea that men and women differ from each other in various innate and permanent ways—has rarely been a friend to feminists. Charles Darwin thought the rules of inheritance would prevent women from ever becoming the intellectual equals of men. E. O. Wilson, in his 1975 […]
‘Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist’ by Cecilia Gentili
LITTLEPUSS PRESS, OCTOBER 2022, 208 PP. TRANS WOMEN MOTHER each other when nobody else will. Cecilia Gentili is a legend among New York trans women; there must be hundreds for whom she is “mom.” It’s a hard role to play for trans women whose relationship to their own mothers is fraught. As Gentili says […]
‘Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands’ by Kate Beaton
DRAWN & QUARTERLY, SEPTEMBER 2022, 436 PP. YEARS AGO, MY parents gave me Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton for Christmas. It was a collection of short, witty comics about literature, history, and feminism, a follow-up to the best-selling 2011 collection Hark! A Vagrant, which began as a webcomic Beaton created while studying history and […]
‘Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation’ by Nuar Alsadir
GRAYWOLF PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 320 PP. A POET AND a psychoanalyst walk into a bar. That sounds like the setup to a joke, but really, it’s a scene from Nuar Alsadir’s enthralling new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and, in this case, the poet and the psychoanalyst are one and the […]
‘Suffs’ by Shaina Taub and ‘for colored girls’ by Ntozake Shange
Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Shaina Taub, Hannah Cruz, and Nadia Dandashi in the world premiere musical Suffs at The Public Theater. Photo by Joan Marcus. THE FIGHT TO pass the Nineteeth Amendment was full of firsts. There was the first women’s march on Washington: eight thousand women paraded along Pennsylvania Avenue on the eve of […]
‘Death by Landscape: Essays’ by Elvia Wilk
SOFT SKULL PRESS, JULY 2022, 320 PP. FIFTY PAGES INTO Elvia Wilk’s new essay collection, Death by Landscape, I did something kind of weird: I contacted Elvia Wilk on Instagram. I told her I was reading the book and intended to review it, and I tried to express how it seemed to be explaining my […]
‘Eating While Black: Shaming and Race in America’ by Psyche A. Williams-Forson
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 320 PP. EVERYBODY EATS, SO what’s political about eating? After reading Eating While Black, the answer is clear: everything. As a sociologist who studies Black beauty and hair, another topic that at first glance is often misjudged as banal, I was immediately drawn to anthropologist Psyche Williams-Forson’s analysis […]
‘Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It’ by Kaitlyn Tiffany
MCD X FSG ORIGINALS, JUNE 2022, 320 PP. “IF YOU CAN stand it, I’m going to describe a six-second video.” Kaitlyn Tiffany opens her engaging and persuasive book on online fandom with an apology and a question. She’s about to immerse you in the pleasures of Internet culture, and what she’s asking is: Can you […]
‘Hurricane Girl’ by Marcy Dermansky
KNOPF, JUNE 2022, 240 PP. WHAT SORT OF novel is Marcy Dermansky’s Hurricane Girl? This is not an easily answered question, and I suspect it may depend somewhat on the mood of the reader. A book with girl in the title signals a page-turner, and Hurricane Girl does compel us with sex, violence, the open […]