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“Judy Blume: A Life” and the Problem of Biography
When Blume started writing, the market category of young-adult (as opposed to children’s) literature was defined by politically motivated…
Tag
book review
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The Feminist Visionary Who Lost the Plot
Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that she was a person of “superior intelligence and courage.” This fuelled her radical politics—and her…
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Why a Woman Would Rather Love a Statue Than a Man
As Venus educates Rika in the art of self-possession, we are only moderately surprised when Rika informs us, “I was in love with the…
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Sam Shepard’s Enactments of Manhood
In the older Rogers’s case, the alcohol and the trauma worked a deep transformation; he grew paranoid about his family, and would go on…
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The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon
In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary…
Culture
The Nineteen-Thirties Novel That’s Become a Surprise Hit in the U.K.
The town of Schliersee, about an hour south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps, has long been a favored holiday retreat, both for summertime…
Culture
James Frey’s New Cancelled-Guy Sex Novel Is as Bad as It Sounds
The author page of “Next to Heaven,” James Frey’s new novel, breathlessly notes that Frey “was called America’s Most Notorious Author by…
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Neige Sinno Doesn’t Believe in Writing as Therapy
“Because for me too, when it comes down to it, the thing that’s most interesting is what’s going on in the perpetrator’s head.” So begins…
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“Airless Spaces” Captures the Nadir of the Second Wave
At one point in “Airless Spaces,” a largely autobiographical book about madness and institutionalization by the radical feminist Shulamith…
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The Ecstatic Intimacies of Joe Brainard
“I am a sucker for people who seem to do what they do just for you (me).” The artist and writer Joe Brainard dashed off this thought in…
Culture
A Novelist’s Unnerving Memoir of Disordered Eating
“My Good Bright Wolf,” a new memoir by the novelist Sarah Moss, begins in dishabille. A narrator is speaking to herself in the second…
News
The Complex Politics of Tribal Enrollment
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, a former Obama Administration official, was six years old when she became, as she puts it, “a card-carrying…