Ivanka Trump’s Women Who Work is an incredibly and almost profoundly boring book. Mercifully, for those of us who have jobs to do, it’s also a pretty quick read.
In January 1977, I was riding north on the Pacific Coast Highway to interview Joan Didion at her home by the sea. I was euphoric and scribbling my impressions. It was raining that morning. On my left the bright gray ocean looked like wrinkled silver foil. On my right sat dirt-colored palisades, low cliffs covered by…
Though Emma Donoghue is likely best known for Room, her 2010 best-selling novel turned film, she more commonly writes historical fiction, raiding archives for odd and violent histories, particularly the lives of long dead women and children. With her latest novel, The Wonder, Donoghue has returned to this familiar…
Saying there’s a new book about the Mitford sisters is a bit like sharing the breaking news that the sun rose again. Of course there is a new book out about the six legendary ladies of the Mitford family; they are a well-tapped source of 20th century intrigue, with enough lingering questions about their lives and…
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 never…
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.
