Tag: feminism

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Elsa on the Longlist for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation! And what an extraordinary list of amazing books in translation it is! Let’s read them all!

Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante Translated by Jenny McPhee #NameTheTranslator Longlist 2025 The 14 longlisted titles are: Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing, And the Walls Became the World All Around, translated from Swedish (Sweden) by Sigrid Rausing (Granta) Evelyne Trouillot, Désirée Congo, translated from French (Haiti) by M.A. Salvodon (University of Virginia Press) Fatma Aydemir, Djinns, translated …

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My Latest Review @ Air Mail

Marriage Story … In The Marriage Question, Claire Carlisle explores how George Eliot’s unconventional union with George Lewes, a married philosopher, shaped the Middlemarch writer’s career. Jenny McPhee reviews.  In October of 1856, Mary Ann Evans, a successful English essayist and editor, wrote a scathing essay in The Westminster Review entitled “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” criticizing the majority of novels written by and for women for …

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“Sometimes Women Do Like Women”: On Nancy K. Miller’s “My Brilliant Friends”

My review in the Los Angeles Review of Books MY BEST FRIEND died not long ago after a 15-month illness that was relentless in its attack on her body and soul. She and I first met in the eighth grade, and we were soon closer than sisters or lovers. Indeed, we were often mistaken for …

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ESSENTIAL FEMINISM: My October column at Bookslut

How did I miss out on the legendary Ellen Willis? I'm embarrassed to admit that before reading this stunning, provocative, erudite, fun, challenging, witty, dire, brave, and above all incisive collection of her journalism and essays, I was unaware of one of the great feminist writers on the politics and culture of our times. Intelligently …

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WHAT IS LOST: JANE FRANKLIN AND THE GREAT MAN SYNDROME: My October Column at Bookslut

"I know the most Insignificant creature on Earth may be made some Use of in the Scale of Beings, may Touch some Spring, or Verge to some wheel unpercived by us." --Jane Franklin, In a Letter to her Brother, 1786 "One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives." --Benjamin Franklin, …

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THAT DAMNED MOB OF SCRIBBLING WOMEN: My July Column at Bookslut

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 …

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UNDERSTANDING THE OTHER: ELIF SHAFAK’S HONOR: My January “bombshell” column at Bookslut:

On the front and back covers of the Turkish edition of Elif Shafak's novel İskender (to be published in the U.S. as Honor), the author appears in two different poses dressed as her male protagonist İskender, a handsome, savvy-looking youth with slick hair and a five o'clock shadow wearing a stylish suit. In Shafak's story, …

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