Doctor Who: The Complete Sixth Series

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

The Feminist Hate-Read Book Club Reads Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography

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Introduction In the weeks since Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography was released, feminists have enjoyed a rare moment of widespread agreement: This book, without a doubt, is awful. In the New Statesman, Laurie Penny explained how and why "this sort of excuse for feminism" hurts women. In the New York Review of Books, Zoë Heller was so scathing, a friend of ours who hasn't read the book said he thought, "This can't possibly be a fair account of Wolf's thesis because it would entail -- among many other things -- that Wolf doesn't know what the nervous system is." (It was a fair account.) Jaclyn Friedman declared in The Prospect, "The book collapses under the weight of a breathtaking narcissism: If it doesn’t apply to Naomi, it doesn’t exist." And at The Nation, Katha Pollitt wondered if "opinion-mongering, black-and-white thinking and relentless TMI are the price of remaining a world-class celebrity feminist." Meanwhile, a shady cabal of feminist writers were conducting a week-long roundtable discussion of the book, occasioned by the following e-mail conversation: Kate Harding: Hello, internet feminist friends. Would you like to join me in a group hate-read of Naomi Wolf's Vagina? Roxane Gay: God, yes. Michelle Dean:  Let's all suffer together! Jess Zimmerman: I'm good at hating stuff. Nicole Cliffe: In. Who Are These People? Nicole Cliffe is the books editor at The Hairpin, and writes The Awl's monthly Classic Trash feature. She has a lot to say about Edith Wharton and Doctor Who. Michelle Dean is a journalist and essayist who lives in New York and writes for a variety of publications including the New Yorker's Page Turner, Slate, Salon, and The Awl. Roxane Gay's writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, The Rumpus, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, and others.) Kate Harding has been ranting on the internet since 2005, most notably at now-retired blogs Broadsheet and Shapely Prose. She recently launched a new blog, Don't Get Raped. She apologizes to Nicole and Jess for cutting a vagina-TARDIS joke below. Jess Zimmerman writes mostly about science and cute animals at Grist, and yells about feminism on Twitter. She has written about ladybusiness and books (and dogs) for xoJane, and about ladybusiness and Doctor Who for ThinkProgress. Mostly observing were Feministing Executive Editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Jezebel Deputy Editor Dodai Stewart, and Big Girls Don't Cry author Rebecca Traister, (who flatly refused to read it from the outset). Exclusively observing were Tomorrow editor and writer Ann Friedman and Amanda Hess, plus Salon's Irin Carmon. The Feminist Hate-Read Book Club was going to be a lot bigger, but then nobody really wanted to read the fucking thing, basically. Background If you've read any reviews at all, you already know that Naomi Wolf stopped having toe-curling orgasms, discovered she had an injured pelvic nerve, had surgery to fix it, and set out to tell the world about the little-known "Brain-vagina connection." You know it contains bad science (a doctor friend tells Naomi he has an unproven hunch that sexual assault survivors have more balance problems than other women, and she turns around and offers his anecdata as Serious Scientific Support for her thesis); downright anti-scientific bullshit (she speaks highly of a "tantric sex master" who offers "yoni massage" to traumatized clients); and a vagina-themed dinner party (where pasta was referred to as "cuntini") that so offended Wolf's delicate yoni, it wouldn't let her write for six months. You should also read at least Pollitt's first paragraph, which covers Wolf's public transformation from author of The Beauty Myth to the kind of person who A) has visions of herself as "a teenage boy who saw Jesus," and B) has repeatedly used her status as an internationally known feminist and self-styled rape expert to cast doubt on the Swedish women who've accused Julian Assange of sexual assault. Among other things. Oh, and here's a fact-check on the science. The Part Where We Make Vagina Jokes Zimmerman: There should be a prize for the person who can work the most puns into her review. Don't muff this opportunity, you eager beavers! Cliffe: Oooh, I'm going all Shakespearean and seeding it with references to "country manners." Dean: But if we put too many vagina-insulting puns in, we may find that we cunt write anymore. Harding: Look, I'm not going to pussyfoot around the subject or clam up just because of this theory -- obviously full of gaping holes -- that invoking its name might snatch my ability to write. Come, now. Zimmerman: Gee, spot the crotchety one! Dean: Y'all, this is getting heated. Here, have a biscuit. Anyway Gay: The folds of Naomi Wolf's Vagina are very slick, which is to say the book was waiting at my apartment when I got home from work. The most important question, really, is, what is our girl Naomi smoking and why won't she share? I mean! Harding: And how long has she been smoking it? Did she dive off the rails at some point when I wasn't looking, or was she always this bad? I'm 37 now, and I was 16 when The Beauty Myth came out. Shameful confession: Despite being a body image activist, I never read the whole thing. (I did read Promiscuities and Misconceptions at the time they came out, and liked both.) If I went back and read those old books, would they hold up, or would I cringe as hard as I do at my own high school journals? Traister: I am of the school that believes she was only ever really a feminist thinker by chance and accident, in that her narcissism intersected with feminism for The Beauty Myth (and MAYBE Promiscuities) but that essentially her thinking and writing has mostly been downright anti-feminist (insofar as it's only self-interested and exhibits no regard for other women and their issues, priorities, or perspectives). Harding: I do recall being amazed and a little furious at the way she talked about pregnancy making her no longer hot in Misconceptions. "I was suddenly both fat and obviously another man's property, so no one hit on me anymore. IT WAS HORRIBLE. This is the unspoken feminist issue of our time!" (I paraphrase.) I was like, "Didn't you write The Beauty Myth? And wasn't that about... really not this?" Gay: She's really one of those magical thinking writers who wants you to forget her previous body of work with each new book. Fascinating. Cliffe: I re-read The Beauty Myth recently, and it's still okay, although dated, and then I re-read Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, and it's just as great as ever. She came to talk at my college reunion, and instead of being "hey, ladies, look how much better things are now!" she was this hardcore "your feminism must be intersectional and we need to talk about poverty and debt relief in the developing world" force, and totally bitched everyone out. It was great. Dean: Gloria Steinem came to my law firm and she hugged me and compared me to Portia. Naomi Wolf came to my law firm and began reciting 9/11 conspiracy theory. First Impressions Gay: I love what they did with the back cover, vaguely alluding to Wolf's "work" because they couldn't get great review clips for this book. Adorable! The most bizarre thing is how Wolf reduces female sexuality to the vagina. It's so.... like, I don't know, but Freud would approve. Dean: Nah, Freud eventually abandoned the seduction thesis and as such ended up disconnecting from the body, no? Isn't that what In the Freud Archives is all about? Gay: I don't know. I'm not well read on Freud. It just sounded fancy. Dean: I am not either, just on JANET GODDAMN MALCOLM. Zimmerman: Gay: Fannie Flagg was all about the vagina goddessness well before Wolf came to it. Dean: I was thinking the book sounds like Naomi Wolf's version of the Matrix, where the Matrix plugs into our pelvic nerve. Yeah? All Right, Let's Read the Damned Thing Zimmerman: I've been mostly avoiding reviews, so I didn't fully realize that Wolf doesn't just reduce female sexuality to the vagina -- she reduces the entire female experience to the vagina. To be a fully-realized woman in any area of your life, you need world-changing orgasms provided by attentive men who lick your ass while you eat chocolate, or whatever (I haven't gotten to the specifics of the "Goddess Array" yet). All of which is presented with a heavy salting of "I know it's not PC to say women only reach their full potential when they're getting really good orgasms from solicitous men, but I am a TRUTH-TELLER and this is SCIENCE." Which works a lot better when you don't ignore major scientific facts such as everything we know about the brain. Gay: We also need to talk about the overwhelmingly heterosexual stance she takes, practically erasing queer women. It's really quite something. Zimmerman: Right, vaginas are only properly activated by penises, by means of some kind of cervical toggle switch. Dean: I think that all of this is a function of the essential narcissism of work like this. I want to be hard on Wolf and will be hard on Wolf, but the truth is, the way she universalizes and politicizes her personal experience here as that of "women" is of a piece with the rise of a lot of personal essaying on sexuality among young hetero white women I see right now, and it would be unfortunate to me to critique her for this without mentioning she's hardly outside the mainstream in doing so. Zimmerman: It makes me embarrassed on Wolf's behalf. If it weren't legitimized by being 300 pages with endnotes and published by HarperCollins, a lot of Vagina would basically read like stoned dorm-room revelations. "Dude, my vagina is huge." Gay: I agree with Michelle about this trend of young, straight white women essaying on sexuality as one or more of the following: self-expression, fast attention, "internet fame," etc. and it often seems like these young women think this is the only way to move through the world as a writer. In Vagina, Wolf takes this to the extreme. She also makes it seem like if you're not having vaginal orgasms that open up your world, thinking, soul, pores, and whatnot, you're doing it wrong. It's really disconcerting. Harding: Roxane, you were saying on Twitter that this book is actually not just ridiculous and snarkworthy, but dangerous? Gay: I do think this book is shamefully irresponsible. Once I calm down from saying, "What the fucking fuck in all fuckity is this bullshit," I will have deeper thoughts. Harding: What keeps striking me is that Wolf seems not to have read any new feminist thinkers since herself. It's like her big revelation is, "Second-wave feminism didn't get everything right!" -- and she has no idea that she is the last putative feminist intellectual on earth to discover this. ("If you liked this, you'll love Wolf's next book: WHITE FEMINISTS ARE PRETTY RACIST SOMETIMES.") For instance, page 100: "So is all rape about sexual aggression or male neurosis? Or can the sustained cultural presence of rape also or even instead, at times, be about reprogramming women...to be less brave, less secure, less robust in other ways, and to go through the rest of their lives, potentially with a less stable sense of self?" What I omitted there was the phrase "at a core physical level." Because if you remove her bizarre vagina über alles theory, the rest of it demands no response more elaborate or eloquent than "Doy." (Well, and "No" to the first question.) I mean, she actually writes, regarding rape as a tool of warfare, "There was nothing about the rapes, with these injuries, that seemed sexual to me..." Wait, you mean rape might not be all about sex? Go on! (Of course, she also admits she's "basing part of [her] argument" on William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, from 1902. So maybe I should just be happy she's not using pre-suffrage literature to build her feminist straw womyn.) Zimmerman: That's for sure one of the dorm room moments -- "oh my god, you guys, what if rape is NOT JUST ABOUT SEX?" Well hallelujah, Naomi, you have just solved the problem all feminists struggle with until they're about 22 and read some books. And where this gets dangerous, instead of just gross, is when Wolf looks at the psychological damage from rape, and speculates that it's worse than the psychological damage from any other injury because of some magical property of the vagina, the key to a woman's soul. But I'd hazard that it's worse because it is psychologically damaging to be treated as though you are nothing but a vagina. Ahem. Harding: I also can't get over the way she spews woo and science (however dubious) in the same breath, over and over, assigning equal credibility to OB/GYNS, neurologists, "energy healers," and Tantric sex masters. Actual quote: "The female sexual organ... is being proved by new science to be far more complex and far more magical than the utilitarian thrusting totted up by Masters and Johnson can account for..." PROVED BY SCIENCE TO BE MAGICAL. That is basically the deranged thesis of this whole book, right there. Dean: I had to stop reading here: Apparently the only way to retrieve one's rape from one's vagina is to hire a strange man to massage it and refer to it as a yoni. Hmm, all these years of rape counseling and psychological research, wasted, because we won't succumb to the charms of the nicest former investment banker in the world. Gay: That's actually where I stopped too. "Rape stays in the vagina," is so... infuriating. I threw the book and stared at it angrily for quite. some. time. I do not understand how a book like this is allowed to be published. The broad, dismissive statements she makes about rape victims are so offensive. The section on the women of Sierra Leone is patronizing in that way certain white women love to patronize as if by simply conjuring the African continent, they are demonstrating their global awareness. She also seems to project a great deal. When she's talking about the women in Sierra Leone, she makes a lot of assumptions, based on the narrowness of her mind, about the look in their eyes, their general outlook, and the motivations of their rapists. I cannot pretend to understand what goes through the mind of men who use rape as a weapon of war but she wants to turn their motivations into some mystical bullshit because for her, women's lives are centered around their vagina. She's no better than... a misogynist! I simply cannot understand how this book exists. Zimmerman: Oh man, combining this fucking chapter with Wolf's comments about Assange just gave me a really skin-crawly image of a Naomi Wolf-led Rape Legitimacy Panel, which would evaluate your rape claims based on eye light, soullessness, ability to stay standing when pushed, and generally whether you still have some rape stuck in your vagina or not. Harding: I was also just getting to that point of wondering how a book like this makes it all the way through the publishing process. I'm having way less fun laughing at it than I thought I would, because it's so fucking shameful. The line about sexual assault survivors in Sierra Leone having "soulless" eyes stopped me cold. That is just not something a white American ever needs to say about African people, even if it's only to illustrate that their vaginas are broken. By systematic rapes. Also, her whole theory of the real tragedy of rape being a traumatized vagina suggests that rape victims who don't have vaginas should be A-OK...? Gay: And she suggests that once a woman has been raped, she is essentially mentally damaged. I will not deny that rape has very lasting effects for many women but it's like she wants to think of women who have been raped strictly as victims. She gives the impression that women (and men) who are raped cannot transcend their victimhood and this is something both feminism and the mental health industry have worked against for like the past thirty years. Harding: YES. This is the yoni massage guy, btw. By whom I am so utterly disgusted, I am shaking right now. I mean, the thought of telling rape survivors they should pay a shady-as-fuck professional fingerer to cure their broken vaginas is bad enough, but here he is describing a typical "healing" session: Once they feel safe enough to move from "freeze" to "fight or flight," they are likely to be moving also from numbness to pain or masking orgasms, absolute rage -- they may start yelling at that point, or revisit the trauma, but this time with a different outcome. They might shout, this time, "Get your fucking hands off me!" Memories may surface. They move into "flight": sometimes the legs will involuntarily start kicking. Sometimes the legs will involuntarily start kicking. But wait! "Eventually intimacy doesn't retraumatize them." OH, GOOD. (Update: And as Katha Pollitt points out in The Nation, "It is unclear what separates Lousada from the Victorian doctors Wolf disapproves of, who genitally massaged their frustrated women patients to orgasm.") Gay: I will tell you this. I think this yoni massage is total bullshit. He is a male escort and there's no shame in that but trying to dress that in new age healing is absurd. I also know that if I had to choose between some creepy ass vaginal massage as a means of healing from trauma given by this guy with a 1986 haircut and, say, death, well, I have lived a good life. Dean: I just showed his picture to Maura Johnston and she started to sing "Kiss from a Rose," FYI. #icant Harding: Also: HE SAW THE VIRGIN MARY IN A CROTCH. (p. 123) Dean: About publishing, I think perhaps people have too exalted a view of the mainstream publishing process. The risk, contractually and industry-culture-wise, is on the writer as far as accuracy and thoroughness of the information goes. Editors give writers fairly healthy leeway from what little I know; it's not like they read the studies themselves, or even really test the arguments against logic in most places. It obviously depends on the editor and the type of book. But one assumes everyone knows what they are getting with Wolf at this point, and sort of leave her to her own devices. Cliffe: Having returned from my plunge into the book, and in firm agreement with the political objections and criticisms above, I would like to add that the vagina is completely unimportant as A Concept, which, oddly enough, I had not internalized until I read an entire book about it. Two, if you count The Vagina Monologues, which I did not particularly enjoy, but could appreciate as a series of personal narratives, you can have a compelling personal narrative about your vagina. You can have a compelling personal narrative about having been born a woman without a vagina. I fully support the rights of women who were born without vaginas to decide that it is fundamentally important to their well-being to acquire one surgically. I am not an evo-psych person, not even a little bit, but I AM an atheist who is reasonably relaxed about The Void We Stare Across (zerooooo pun intended), and as a result, this book just made me want to grab her and say: it is a fucking gap in your body which evolved to vent menstrual fluid and infants and to give you enough physical pleasure so you might get conned into the latter. I'm not a vagina/brain scientist (and this article suggests Wolf is not either) but it is not A Concept, it's more like your armpit than it is like your soul, and I think if one MUST write a cultural history of a body part (I await the Sack Chronicles with bated breath), it does not follow that you need to say, unblinkingly, a series of made-up things and wave your hands and say GOSH SO MANY DIFFERENT THINGS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE! IS IT A POMEGRANATE OF DELIGHT OR A CAVE OF DESPAIR? So much woo. Dean: I just want to note I'm having trouble getting through this, post the Terrible Rape Chapter. An editor should have stepped in and made this later stuff more narratively-driven. I wonder if some of these chapters aren't chapters of her D.Phil thesis or something. They're written in another voice altogether. Harding: Oh, I'd bet money that's exactly what the endless Victorian lit part is. In other news, Sady Doyle reviewed it for In These Times, and her angle (besides "Boooorrrrring") is that we're all freaking out too much and trying to kick Wolf out of feminism because 1) Assange and 2) Impossible standards for feminist perfection. Or something. I'm sympathetic to the basic argument -- I don't think one book should necessarily undo a history of good books, and we don't want to be chucking people out of feminism willy-nilly -- but I really think she picked the wrong peg for it. First, as far as I can gather from my own reading and your comments, Wolf really only has one good book and a bunch of pretty crappy ones. Second: There is some fucked-up, retrograde, anti-woman, unscientific shit in here, and as with Sarah Palin, when you promote fucked-up, retrograde, anti-woman, unscientific shit, you actually do lose the right to call yourself a feminist, on grounds of "words mean things." Gay: I must say my response to this book has nothing to do with Assange (which I'm a little embarrassed to admit I didn't know about until recently). As for impossible standards, if a desire for coherence, ethical discussions of rape, non-essentialist discussions about women that don't reduce them to a body part, and cultural histories that sidestep flagrant narcissism are impossible standards for perfection, I am absolutely fine with that. The critical response to Vagina has interested me a great deal. If you haven't read the book, the criticism and the glee with which it has been offered seems a bit like a pile on. Then you read the book. Cliffe: I paid more attention to the Assange-based character played by Ryan Phillippe in the last season of Damages, but that's probably because I now select news stories based on what my yoni wants. Harding: Do I have to be the one who speculates that perhaps Naomi Wolf's yoni wants Julian Assange? Zimmerman: We should probably all be wearing these while we read. Stewart, suddenly moved to speak: omfg Harding: I was born via c-section. Where's THAT t-shirt? Stewart: Hole in the market, heh. Cliffe: I had a natural birth, which is 90% for suckers, 10% great (of which, 8% is bragging rights and 2% is effective pushing and rapid recovery for some people, not others), and I'm hearing a lot of echoes with the ridiculous nonsense about the wisdom of the female body that you have to put up with during pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding. Zimmerman: The incredibly boring/facile "My Summer Reading, by Naomi, Age 15" section totally lulled me into letting my guard down, but I should have known it was going to get bad again because I hadn't yet gotten to the famed "cuntini" scene. As it turned out, that part was way less ridiculous and more offensive than I'd been prepared for. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was ridiculous! Obviously! But it's one thing to complain about someone giving you a nice meal that you interpret as being improperly laden with metaphor, and it's another thing to follow that up by saying "I felt... that I had been punished for 'going somewhere' that women are not supposed to go" and then DESCRIBING FEMALE PROTESTORS DURING THE ARAB SPRING GETTING FORCED VAGINAL EXAMS FROM THE ARMY. WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK. "I was being punished for speaking up, and while we're on the subject, here are some other women who had a similar experience! Truly do I understand their pain at being sexually assaulted by the military, for I was once served fish shortly after someone called pasta an off-color name." Traister: I am not sure I've ever felt more affirmed in a decision NOT to read something than I do right now. Conclusion Harding: OK, so, final thoughts. Did you make it to the end of the book, or give up? If you made it, is there anything really important that we've missed? Zimmerman: Well, we haven't yet gotten to the specifics of the Goddess Array! Thoughts: - It is in a crazy order! "Don't Be Scary" comes AFTER "Find Her 'Sacred Spot,' Then Hang Out There Far Longer Than You Think Reasonable." NO. Don't be scary FIRST. - Apparently I am supposed to get a "vaginal thump" when my husband does things like buy cat food or talk to my grandma. Basically, this book makes me feel like I might be asexual. - There is a subsection in the Goddess Array chapter labeled "Do Whatever She Likes To Her Nipples." That seems like it's on the right track! Inexplicably, though, the other sections are not titled things like "Talk To Her However She Likes" and "Do Activities You Enjoy Together." - The secret life of the male armpit. THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MALE ARMPIT. Honestly, what the hell is this book. It's like a Tantric yoga pamphlet fucked a seminar paper which fucked a self-help book which fucked an MRA forum, and then they all had a joyous vaginal birth. Stewart: clitoronomy is beautiful!! am reading "VAGINA" by @naomirwolf if you haven't read it yet, read it, then send it to all the men you know! — Courtney Love Cobain (@Courtney) September 16, 2012   its all about neurology in pelvic nerves and its important to know that every woman has different clitoral maps.@naomirwolf I love it! — Courtney Love Cobain (@Courtney) September 16, 2012   its very tantric , very scientific , NOT some scree by a crazed feminist its just shit any sexual man should know. Perfect stocking stuffer! — Courtney Love Cobain (@Courtney) September 16, 2012 Zimmerman: Hey, at least now they'll have some blurbs for the paperback edition that are actually about this book. "Naomi Wolf's Vagina is a perfect stocking stuffer." -- Courtney Love Dean: I've been thinking about Sady's piece and here is where I am with her: I think the New Agey-ness of this all is so easily mocked, but though I made those jokes too I'd actually be fine with a book that took these tropes seriously and discussed them seriously. I'm not an atheist, like Nicole, but even if I was, I think I would feel this way. I'm interested in the way people find meaning in their lives, and if there are women out there who really think their yoni (or whatever) is it, fine. I'm listening. I can be open-minded about that. And I think it would be wrong -- and dare I say "anti-feminist," though more on that in a minute -- for me to just mock it emptily. That said, this is not a book that takes this stuff seriously either. It is lightly researched not just scientifically, but also where the religious/meaning aspect is concerned. It doesn't move out of the realm of very bare self-help. It doesn't feel particularly raw or honest, either. The tone is weirdly arm's length even in the sections where she talks about her own orgasms, which seem more like abstractions, in the text, than things that actually happened to her. The more I think about it, her ability to easily place her orgasms in a descriptive category is a bit... bizarre to begin with, but it's the maneuver on which the whole book is founded. It's the terrible lightness of this book, in the end, that makes it so... bad, to me. And, though I guess I use the term loosely here, "anti-feminist." I used to be rather programmatic about feminism, used to think it ought to contain certain base prescriptive rules. But what I found most frustrating on the level of lady-politics was that such a badly-edited, poorly-written, and indifferently-researched book was being wielded as a consumer tool to sell "feminism" as the "Naomi Wolf" brand. Katha Pollitt had that line in her piece about this being the cost of a "celebrity feminist" being a lot of TMI, but I would add "TME" -- too much ego. Increasingly, I don't write explicitly as a "feminist" anymore, and that's largely because it feels like it would be aligning myself with this kind of cynical claptrap. Gay: I went into this book with a fairly open mind (really). I've only read The Beauty Myth so I still had a bit of goodness in my heart as I considered Naomi Wolf's Vagina. I don't mind that she has an alternative, vaginally-based spirituality or that she has vaginal orgasms that open up her creativity and generosity of spirit. As I read Vagina, I went from bemusement to irritation to anger. One of the biggest problems feminism faces is how all too often, the movement's mission is defined by the public feminists with the loudest voices and furthest reach. The way feminism will be mischaracterized by the content of this book concerns me a great deal. Vagina is part memoir, part literature review, part inflammatory nonsense, part spiritual treatise instead of a biography or cultural history. I love cultural histories about niche topics. One of my favorite books remains Taking the Waters by Alev Lyle Croutier, about the history of bathing. I've read books about salt and dinner and breasts. I'm down with the genre. There is very little resemblance to a cultural history in Vagina. One of the biggest weaknesses in the book is the sheer scope of the solipsism. Most of Wolf's observations are dictated solely by her personal experiences and the kinds of orgasms she prefers. She makes loose associations with questionable science as if this might endow her with some kind of authority when it doesn't actually work like that. The thing about the vagina, at least in my experience, is that no two are alike. As such, writing a cultural history of the vagina is quite a daunting task. The female body is as complex as it is simple. I am fairly certain my vagina doesn't do a fraction of the things Wolf's is capable of, and I'm fine with that but I do think it shows how the subjectivity of desire and pleasure mean that it is inadvisable to make blanket, overly generalized statements about the vagina.  I remain deeply skeptical about the vagina-brain connection. The thinking behind the vaginal pulse throbbing when men are considerate is the same kind of thinking that leads to 0% fat yogurt and women dancing in commercials about cleaning products and this pervasive cultural notion that when a man watches his own child, he is babysitting while when a woman watches her child, she is parenting. On page 275, Wolf offers some examples of when women felt this magical vaginal pulse which included a father teaching his son to ride a bike, a husband giving up his pillow while camping, a phone call to a grandmother, and driving well on a rainy road. Apparently basic human decency will get a woman revved right up. It is also troubling that so much of womanhood is reduced to the vagina and it's intersection with virile men. One of the many things feminism tries to work against is the objectification of the female body but that's just what Wolf does for more than three hundred pages. I cannot pretend to understand the vagaries of publishing but it says something that a book like this, one that is so essentialist and dismissive of too many women's experiences, was published. And then there's Chapter 6. I admittedly have a bit of a blind spot in this regard but Wolf's biggest problem throughout Vagina, and particularly in Chapter 6, is that she was not careful. A couple years ago I wrote this essay called "The Careless Language of Sexual Violence" and it was an initial attempt to think through how we write about sexual violence both in fiction and nonfiction. How do we write about sexual violence without exploiting the experiences of people who have been violated in this way? The questions are still on my mind, but I keep coming back to the idea that we need to take care in the words we use and the why of the words we use. I was struck, throughout Chapter 6, and at other points in the book, with the utter lack of care Wolf used in writing about women, bodies, and sexual violence. Her approach was very much a surface approach, a very dated approach, and one that made some really sweeping assumptions about victims of sexual violence. I don't think that kid gloves need to be worn but I do think serious consideration and smart language needs to be used. I do think there is an ethic that must be followed when framing the experiences of victims of sexual violence in ways that are meant to support a broader argument. At this point, people are spending more time talking about the critical reaction to the book than the book itself and that says something rather disheartening about Vagina. I really wanted to have a lively discussion about Vagina. I hoped we could find some merit in the book even as we giggled and made some clever vaginal jokes. Instead, I found the book not only careless but infuriating and irresponsible and at times, just fucking silly. This is a cynical, cynical book and feminism and the vagina both deserve a better figurehead. Zimmerman: Obviously this is all amazing, but because I can't shut up about this book (seriously, ranting about Vagina has become my new party trick), I wanted to respond to one small part: Personally, I'm not in the least bit skeptical about the brain-vagina connection -- of course your brain is connected to your vagina! It's just that it is also connected to every other part of your body. The only thing that makes the brain-vagina connection more special is that Naomi Wolf has decided that it's more special. I'm anti-woo and would never deliberately read a book about spiritual vaginas and whatnot, but I wouldn't really have a problem with such a book existing. But that's not the book Wolf thinks she's writing -- she believes, or wants us to believe, that she's writing a knock-down scientific argument backed up by firm evidence. And yet what she presents is isolated facts that she's layered with her own a priori interpretation, then labeled as "data." It's like chipping some rocks off the coastline, setting them adrift in the ocean, stapling together some kind of ramshackle network of scaffolding between them, and saying you live in America. And furthermore that you want Congressional representation. Cliffe: Exactly, exactly! It's woo disguised as neuroscience, and it's chock-full of pointless biological determinism, and it is frivolous on the topic of sexual violence. I wouldn't buy a woo book about the vagina, but I also would feel zero need to criticize it in a public forum, or even to give it more than a second glance on my way to the cash register at Barnes & Noble. Harding: Nothing to add. Thank you so much, everyone! You guys are tits. Image via base2wave/Flickr