For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Rachel Louise Snyder’s propulsive new memoir Women We Buried, Women We Burned begins with the death of her mother. Her father then marries another woman, moves to the Midwest, and raises Snyder in a suffocating Christian household where religion is repeatedly used to justify abuse. Snyder’s impeccable prose lets us live vicariously through her … Read more
[ad_1] The Western, as a genre, is rife with horrific elements: its frequently alienating landscapes, its history of violence, and its strange and unrestrained collision of cultures. In Lone Women, Victor LaValle takes horrors both human and supernatural as his subject: a haunted vision of the American dream that accelerates into a bloody exploration of … Read more
[ad_1] Jane Smiley’s newest novel A Dangerous Business begins in the 1850s. The Gold Rush is in full swing as the American Civil War begins bubbling to the surface of society. Eliza literally makes a name for herself—changing her last name from Cargill to Ripple—by seeking employment at a brothel in Monterey, California after the … Read more
[ad_1] American Book Award-winning author Sandra Cisneros has had a decades-long career publishing both prose and poems, and is perhaps most well known for her first book, The House on Mango Street, a novel told in vignettes. She often mixes Spanish and English, putting to words the in-betweenness of her dual U.S.-Mexico citizenship. Woman Without … Read more
[ad_1] In her 1938 essay, “The Three Guineas,” Virginia Woolf christened herself, along with her literary predecessors, as “the daughters of educated men.” Though she referenced only three fathers by name, the paternal influence she described can indeed be applied to a remarkable number of female writers from ages past. For varying reasons, Fanny Burney, … Read more
[ad_1] In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial, by Mona Chollet, is a revelatory collection of histories and experiences that have been carefully ignored across centuries of time. Even a devoted reader will find it difficult to think of a book besides Chollet’s that does … Read more
[ad_1] The literary critic James Wood once wrote dismissively of historical fiction, saying that it is “merely science fiction facing backwards.” We inject the concerns of the present into the past, Wood suggests, the same way that we do when we write about the imaginary future, and this can result in a text that feels … Read more
[ad_1] Henry David Thoreau observed that men often lead lives of quiet desperation, and although he omits women, they often also lead lives of quiet desperation, as is the case for the women under examination in Genevieve Plunkett’s debut story collection, Prepare Her. In this collection, the domestic lives of female protagonists come under scrutiny, … Read more
[ad_1] I was first introduced to Willa C. Richards’s The Comfort of Monsters in a 2018 graduate-level writing workshop when Willa brought in two early chapters for discussion. It was the type of reading experience a reader never forgets. In the excerpt, the narrator Peg remembers going to a bar in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood … Read more
[ad_1] Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World is an intriguing exploration of the history of women’s health, specifically how women are perceived as individuals and members of a larger healthcare system. The theme, across countries and time periods, is centered on disbelief. The female body, long-held in a place of … Read more