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Sara Marcus's Girls To The Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution is a history of a group of young, punk women who refused to shut up. And if you listen, you can still hear them. More »
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Cordelia Fine's thorough (and funny!) Delusions of Gender punches a giant hole in the idea that women's brains are somehow "hardwired" for nurturing and domesticity. After the jump, five ladybrain myths Fine handily busts. More »
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Rachel Shukert's new memoir Everything Is Going To Be Great does something unfortunately rare in women's writing: celebrating mistakes. More »
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Chastened, Hephzibah Anderson's memoir about her year of celibacy, reveals a deep confusion about how to live and love in a (sort of) sexually liberated world. It left us wondering: how come dudes never write books like this? More »
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The title Lonely tends to conjure up words like shy, sad, and withdrawn, so it's something of a surprise that Emily White has written an impassioned call to arms on behalf of a condition no one wants to talk about. More »
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Are American kids overdiagnosed, overmedicated, overburdened with acronyms and diagnoses? In We've Got Issues, Judith Warner has a surprising answer. More »
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Julie Klausner's I Don't Care About Your Band is the anti-Marry Him — a celebration of self-love in the face of laughably bad dudes. More »
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We've already argued at length against Marry Him's pro-settling premise, but reading the whole book reveals a whole new level of crazy. Lori Gottlieb's version of dating and marriage is basically calorie-counting for the soul. More »
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The title of Best Sex Writing 2010 may mislead some people — this (mostly) isn't porn, but rather a collection of essayistic pieces on topics ranging from condoms to fisting. More »
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How, you wondered, could an author follow the smash finding-herself chartbuster Eat, Pray Love? Here's your answer: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. More »
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Julie Powell: "Somehow, it seems to me, there's something particularly eye-opening about the pans for Cleaving...some way in which writing about the book seems to reveal as much or more about the reviewer as about the book being reviewed." [XX] More »
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Zadie Smith established herself as a literary wunderkind when she published White Teeth at the age of 25. Her collection of essays on topics ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to 50 Cent shows she's grown into something more. More »
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Obviously, we ordered this newly-reissued book immediately, eager for advice. Yes, Edward Gorey, the master of pen-and-ink, tackles what to say after Deflowerment-by-Marimba-Player, Deflowerment-on-Cross-Country-Bus, and, obviously, Deflowerment-at-Seance. But the modern age has wraught a whole new batch of dubious occasions: More »
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Is there anything left to say about Sarah Palin? Going Rouge, the just-released liberal answer to Palin's memoir, has something to say, which is that strikingly little has changed about her a year later. That's both good and bad news. More »
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Carrie Prejean has complained of being "Palinized" — that is, discriminated against because she's a conservative woman — but she and Sarah Palin have more in common than just a victim complex. More »
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Publishers Weekly didn't include any female authors on its list of the 10 best books of 2009. Is a counter-list in order, or should we just do away with such lists entirely? More »
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Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of Superfreakonomics, cast themselves as iconoclastic contrarians. But in many ways, their book is actually pretty conventional. More »
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You may scoff at the mere idea of a dating guidebook. You may almost certainly scoff at one that matches people by their mythological creature -type. I did too at first, and I have a professional astrologer on speed-dial. More »
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According to Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided, the much-vaunted "power of positive thinking" won't cure cancer, make us rich, or necessarily even keep us happy. In fact, it may be harming us. More »
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In Impossible Motherhood, Irene Vilar writes, "I want to explore how when abortion takes on repetitive and self-mutilating qualities it can point to an addiction." But her book is really an exploration of a single tragedy-stricken life. More »
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In the much-ballyhooed Prospect Park West, Amy Sohn welcomes her readers to Park Slope, where the women are mean, the men are asexual, and all the children wear kneepads. More »
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From force-feeding to tooth removal to stomach surgery, mental patients throughout history — many of them women — have endured some pretty horrific therapies. In Mad, Bad & Sad, Lisa Appignanesi questions whether modern treatments are much better. More »
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The gym where George Sodini went on his shooting rampage reopened this weekend, and today, we look at a book that some believe could help prevent future violence there and everywhere: Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear. More »
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Hannah Friedman's Everything Sucks is billed as the anti-Gossip Girl, but it speaks to the same cultural obsession: a combined envy of and disgust for the very rich and very young. More »
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I'm So Happy For You, a new novel by novelist Lucinda Rosenfeld, makes female friendships seem like a supremely unpleasant, never-ending status game. More »
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Is Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson's young adult novel about anorexia and bulimia, a dangerous trigger for eating-disordered readers, a thoughtful examination of a terrible disease, or both? We read it to find out. [Spoilers follow.] More »
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"A good mother [...] doesn't need her kids to like her all the time. Of writers and their readers, Waldman's book leaves me thinking, the same might be true." — Susan Dominus [NYT] More »
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Ayelet Waldman, who famously wrote about loving her husband more than her kids, just published Bad Mother, a parenting memoir she describes as a "f&%k you to the insane Urban-Baby types." More »
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In Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon tries hard to make Helen Gurley Brown look like an unjustly overlooked feminist icon — and she kind of succeeds. More »
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