More Features The Green Motel | Rebecca Clarren The Dialectic of Fat | Catherine Orenstein Hanan Ashrawi: Creating a Common Language | Rebecca Ponton Still Carrying the Torch | Emily Dietrich
Poetry Hollywood Producer Orders Up a Sunset | Aleida Rodríguez
Hardscape | Eloise Klein Healy
Fiction Deja New | Lee Martin
Passing Andrea Dworkin | In her own words
Book Reviews
Celeste Fremon on Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’ Promises I Can Keep
Michele Kort on Johnette Howard’s The Rivals: Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova
Susan Straight on Alia Mamdouh’s Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad
Sarah Gonzales on Isabel Allende’s Zorro Samantha Dunn on Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation
Ever the actor, Fonda divides her life story into three acts, the first two heavily marked by male figures — dad Henry and three husbands. By the final act of this compelling read, she fully embraces feminism and spirituality, achieving a hard-earned sense of wholeness.
Wollstonecraft’s book The Vindication of the Rights of Women made her a celebrity of the Enlightenment. Her courageous roles as unwed mother, unconventional spouse, champion of sex education and advocate of intellectual ambition for girls remind us that in the less-than-enlightened 21st century, we can still learn from this indomitable woman.
Set in Nigeria, this debut novel follows two young girls as they come of age in a nation shaped by war, injustice and male domination.
Written on Water By Eileen Chang, translated by Andrew F. Jones
Columbia University Press
Chang won her fame as a novelist and critic in mid- 20th-century China, but in these joyfully self-absorbed essays she anticipated the New Journalism. Written in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the 1940s and only now translated into English, they combine timeless girlishness with utterly fresh feminism.
The cofounders of the grassroots antiwar movement CODEPINK have collected compelling insights on war and its injustices by the likes of Eve Ensler, Cynthia McKinney, Arianna Huffington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Helen Thomas and Granny D. Includes valuable resources for mobilizing yourself and your community.
Polish writer Krall’s 12 nonfiction accounts from the lives of Holocaust survivors hardly resemble journalism: The stories are magically realistic, and her spare, precise prose leaves indelible afterimages.
Harlem-raised artist Ringgold was twice brave in the 1960s-’70s: She stood up as an African American, then as a feminist. Her memoir, republished in a 10th-anniversary edition, includes color reproductions of her delightful oeuvre.
Feeling stuck between two worlds, an American journalist takes an eyeopening journey through modern-day Tehran in search of her ethnic identity and the culture her parents left behind.
72 Hour Hold By Bebe Moore Campbell
Alfred A. Knopf
Campbell tackles homosexuality and mental illness, subjects that are often taboo in the African American community of which she writes.
Based on more than 150 interviews conducted in the 1970s, this biography details Billie Holiday’s famously turbulent life in an unusual documentary style.
Told by one of China’s most successful journalists, this is the story of a Chinese woman’s 30-year search for her husband, who went missing in action in Tibet. The quest becomes a journey of profound personal transformation.
This collection of short stories is united by the theme of swiftly passing time — whether it’s a grandfather who suddenly feels the weight of years, or a mother who wonders about her half-grown sons, Whose boys are these?
