Not Magical, Not Realism | The New Republic. Naomi Daremblum reviews Isabel Allende’s latest novel, Island Beneath the Sea. It may be heresy to challenge the literary reputation of Isabel Allende, but reading Island Beneath the Sea one cannot but conclude that some essential inspiration and vitality is now missing from her work. Yes, she [...]
Archive for the ‘Reference’ Category
The Brazilian Sphinx
Lorrie Moore reviews Benjamin Moser’s, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, at the New York Review of Books. Before beginning this review, I took a quick unscientific survey: Who had read the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector? When I consulted with Latin American scholars (well, only four of them) they grew [...]
Rebecca Donner reviews the novel, A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert, at bookforum.com. Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries—relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert’s remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations [...]
Poems from the Women’s Movement
Elizabeth Lund reviews Poems from the Women’s Movement by Honor Moore for the Christian Science Monitor. This “landmark collection” is powerful precisely because it is not a manifesto. Instead, the power of these poems comes from the fact that one writer after another – from the 1960s to the 1980s – dared to say what [...]
Bad Girls Go Everywhere
Gina Bellafante reviews Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere The Life of Helen Gurley Brown for the New York Times. Beginning in the early 1960s, Brown, who had married at 37 and remained childless, advocated for the primacy of work in women’s lives, rejecting essentialist ideas about motherhood and believing women ought to delay marriage, [...]
Review of A Jury of Her Peers
Katha Pollitt reviews Elaine Showalters, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. The 350-year span of A Jury of Her Peers takes in more than 250 writers and covers sweeping tides of history and social change. It’s a long book, but it doesn’t feel long at all because [...]
Sources for Bad News
Figures for U.S. women who are living in poverty, and those who are unemployed, are found on Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census bureau web sites listed.
