AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a letter to his publisher in response to the overwhelming success of female writers at the time. Novels such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1849), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1854) by Sara Payson Willis Parton …
Continue reading "THAT DAMNED MOB OF SCRIBBLING WOMEN: My July Column at Bookslut"
(Source: julipinup) (photograph by Laura McPhee)
ON A GOOD DAY AND THIS IS HOW I FEEL ON A BAD ONE
on a bad day (via @bobbycaputo) and this is how I feel on a good one:
Ruby Blondell argues dazzlingly in Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation that Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, possessor of "the face that launched a thousand ships," was the greatest bombshell of all time. "No other character in ancient Greek myth," Blondell writes, "plays such a prominent role in so many disparate kinds of work: …
Continue reading "The Helens of Troy: My June Column at Bookslut"
The damage Silvio Berlusconi has done to Italian politics and society is so overwhelmingly enormous it is very difficult as a citizen of that country (I have dual US/Italian citizenship) to feel anything but cynical and hopeless. For female Italian citizens, the situation is even more dire. Berlusconi’s blatant and public disdain for women both …
For my fifteenth birthday my mother gave me Willa Cather's My Ántonia, a novel I devoured and adored. The subject -- the life of immigrant homesteaders in early twenthieth-century rural Nebraska -- was curious and compelling for a girl growing up in 1970s suburban New Jersey. The women in her story were unusually complicated, unpredictable, and …
Woman Catching Fleas, Georges de La Tour (ca. 1638) Along with Muriel Spark, Natalia Ginzburg convinced me that I might as well be a writer since I wanted it so bad even though I was terrified I would never be any good at it. They assured me, through their work, that being any good at …
What is it that drives a human being to pursue an idea to death? To make order out of chaos, to please, impress, defy, or outdo a parent, to win a Nobel Prize, to attain immortality, to find truth, to know beauty? Whatever the motivation, such inexorable determination has led to our greatest scientific breakthroughs. …
Continue reading "I Died for Beauty: My April Column at Bookslut"
“There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, this is intrinsically artistic.” -Vladimir Nabokov Film by F. Percy Smith (1943)
Jenny McPhee 