While I was reading Khloé Kardashian’s book Strong Looks Better Naked in a Brooklyn café, the person sitting across from me gingerly asked, “What genre is that?” I had no answer.
The past month or so has seen the publication of two books from men who, a decade ago, created questionable blueprints of what dating should be like for an entitled generation of dudes. Unexpectedly (to their former selves, at least) the new stories from these teachers—who, not so long ago, were demonstrating how to…
In her 81 years on Earth, including a long former career as a journalist, Gloria Steinem has only written six books, three of which are essay compilations. None are specifically about her life, despite its figurative importance to so many people; she’s never quite explained how she’s accomplished all that she has, how…
The final tableau of To Kill A Mockingbird has always given me a sour feeling toward the book—it ends with the black man dead, the poor white man also dead, the law uninterested in prosecuting their murders. The white gentleman and his children are sadder and wiser, but the wisdom imparted is essentially about the…
A reminder: while Franny and Zooey is now considered quite the classic, it wasn't always looked at that way, and one Joan Didion was part of the horde of critics and writers who didn't take to it immediately.
There is no feeling quite like reading Bill Cosby's Love and Marriage in January 2015.
I excel at avoiding the ubiquitous—push notifications, Knausgaard; libertarians, pumpkin spice—and as a result I came to Not That Kind of Girl in a near-amniotic lack of context. I had never offered an opinion about Lena Dunham or listened to one consciously; except for the thing she wrote about her dog I had…
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.
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.
Rachel Shukert's new memoir Everything Is Going To Be Great does something unfortunately rare in women's writing: celebrating mistakes.
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?
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.
Are American kids overdiagnosed, overmedicated, overburdened with acronyms and diagnoses? In We've Got Issues, Judith Warner has a surprising answer.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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…
