You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There
Taylor’s stories usually take place around the home and centre on domestic issues, but I think that classifying her work as ‘domestic drama’ confers a feeling of banality that is quite unfair.
S. Hargrave
S. Hargrave is a Canadian writer and the book reviewer at Old Paper & Cats. Hargrave has a love of rare, antiquarian, and classic literature, works in translation, and cats.
Rattlebone
Rattlebone follows Irene Wilson, a young Black girl growing up in a Black neighbourhood in Kansas City during the 1950s. It’s not often I come across a narrative that is very distinctly and unmistakably character-driven, but this one definitely is.
Lover Man
What I admired most about Anderson’s writing was his ability to take a subject that seems so simple — like two children playing the dozens and going fishing — and turn it on its head. He layers meaning on top of meaning on top of meaning until every narrative is rich and strays far from just the subject at hand into a complex tapestry of politics, tension, and the injustices of the world at large.
Ain’t I a Woman?
A modern reader will perhaps be struck by the religious bent of her speeches and arguments that hinge on some outdated ideas, but it’s important to realize that Truth was an essential starting point for the fight for equality for women and for suffrage. She was the beginning of the evolution of what that fight became and how it continued.
Women of the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance is a literary moment that is vital to study but it can be hard to determine where to start. The movement is lush and complex with many different facets that aren’t limited to literature alone.
HERmione
This novel was an examination of identity as Gart struggles to determine who she is and whether she is at risk of losing whatever grasp she has on herself in the face of Lowndes’ domineering presence.
The Virgin Suicides
While I tend to avoid male writers writing female characters, in this case, Eugenides makes it work by accepting his limitations. He is writing from a perspective of knowing women, but never truly knowing them or being able to empathize fully with the unknown things that women experience and go through.
Notes of a Crocodile
Academia provides a concrete backdrop for a constantly shifting narrative in which the narrator is struggling to come to terms with herself and asserting that self in a society that treats her like an aberration because of her sexuality.
BUtterfield 8
The body of a young woman named Starr Faithfull was found dead on a Long Island beach on the morning of June 8th, 1931. Speculations concerning how and why she met her end inflamed the imagination of the general public and Faithfull became a tabloid sensation posthumously.
Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket
I have mixed feelings when it comes to collections like this that include newer work, mostly because I find that usually there is not enough work included to be able to follow a writer’s evolution across time.