21 Provocative Books By Women Every Bookshelf Needs
No pressure, Emma Watson.
When actress Emma Watson announced recently that she was
launching a feminist book club called Our
Shared Shelf, many were skeptical. Any new
book club, like a new restaurant, has a high chance of failure, and Watson
hardly seemed the expert.
Now that the club has moved into its second book, The Color Purple by
Alice Walker, there's cause for optimism. Watson seems to be prioritizing
diversity and intersectionality in her selections, while leaning toward fairly
mainstream classics of the feminist canon (so far, at least).
As Slate's Katy Waldman notes, the book club's online discussion
threads are energetic and thoughtful, if mostly rather rooted in the
question of feminism itself. "A real 'feminist book club,' one
profoundly animated by feminism’s ideals, doesn’t have to talk about feminism
all the time," she realizes.
Many of the books that have most fostered my, and my female
friends', nascent feminism talk about gender and oppression obliquely,
rather than in diatribes or manifestos. An essay that captures the tension
between what we find ourselves wanting and what our ideals demand, or a novel
that reveals a woman as something deeper than an object of desire or ridicule
to a man -- these are the works that insinuate themselves into our minds,
expanding our consciousness and starting conversations between us.
While long-time feminist writers have looked askance at the
celebrity activism of Watson, her book club seems to show that she's determined
to learn and to encourage others to learn. And hey, there can never be too much
of something good, so let's add to the shelf. Here are 21 books by women, about
women, that are bound to make readers think about the world through a new lens:
Graywolf
The
Argonauts is a
hybrid memoir-essay by Maggie Nelson that digs deep into our entrenched
expectations of motherhood, gender, and human relationships, and asks us to
look at these issues from a new angle.
HarperCollins
Alexandra
Kleeman's debut is impossible to put down, or stop talking about, as she weaves
questions of intimate female friendships and unhealthy body image into a
bizarre, alternate-universe thriller.
Penguin
If you
haven't yet read popular poet Patricia Lockwood's poem "Rape Joke,"
don't wait another second; this mind-warping, culturally questioning collection
is a conversation-sparker even for those who're intimidated by the poetry form.
Graywolf
Leslie
Jamison's acclaimed essay collection may be deeply personal, but it also offers
food for thought on more universal issues, like how we talk about women's
pain.
Farrar,
Straus and Giroux
Asali
Solomon's recent novel Disgruntled is a classic coming-of-age story, but also offers readers
insights into what challenges come with growing up as a black woman in America,
and how parents' ideologies can help and, unintentionally, hurt the children
they're trying to protect.
Picador
Why is
it so hard for people to say they just don't want kids? Sixteen writers
honestly and eloquently explain the societal pressures and gendered
expectations, and why they decided to flout them, in this thought-provoking
collection.
Penguin
This
unsettling crime novel by Ottessa Moshfegh centers on a young, self-loathing
young woman and her troubled relationship with her own physicality.
Knopf
Americanah would
be a delightful read if nothing more, but it's also a thoughtful parsing
of cultural differences, race, and the seemingly small factors that can define
our career and relationship choices.
Mariner
Books
Mrs.
Dalloway may be
Virginia Woolf's novel about a society woman throwing a party, but, of course,
it's also about submerged sexuality, the demands of marriage and motherhood,
and the unlauded arts performed by women of Woolf's time.
Picador
Helen
Oyeyemi uses her gift for weaving powerful truths into fantastical fairy tales
in this parable about the fraught dynamic between the male writer and the
female muse.
Knopf
Mia
Alvar's lovely stories of the Filipino diaspora highlight the gulfs
found between socioeconomic classes all over the world and the weight of
family ties.
Simon
Mary
Gaitskill's debut collection Bad Behavior has become a modern classic, in large part for not pulling any
punches in depicting isolated, self-destructive, and desperate characters. (But
also because her writing is lethally precise.)
Harper
Perennial
Okay,
this is almost too easy to include, but it definitely gets the
feminist-conversation juices flowing.
Harper
A
gritty, unflinching novel centered on a young girl captured by a war
photographer being blown forward in an Eastern European bomb blast, The
Small Backs of Children hones in on the uncomfortable places where sex
and violence meet, and the moments of grossness and cruelty and suffering
that are usually too painful to depict in fiction.
Vintage
The
Bluest Eye was
Toni Morrison's first novel, and the first to explore the themes of black
femininity and its particular traumas, which she has gone on to
heartwrenchingly lay bare the rest of her work.
Farrar,
Straus and Giroux
Nobody
Is Ever Missing isn't
the first novel in which a woman gets to be the unmoored protagonist in search
of meaning, but it's still a genre that takes more kindly to men. Catherine
Lacey's novel poignantly, in dazzling prose, tells the story of a woman who
wants a divorce from her husband, from her life, and from everything, even, in
a way, herself.
Norton
This
odd, heavily stylized novel juxtaposes two women -- one so beautiful she
disguises herself as a plain woman to discern suitors with pure intentions, the
other so ugly she composes music that will seduce men for her -- to tease out
the many ways in which women are influenced by society's value for physical
beauty.
Europa
This is
a four-fer! The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante are the literary world's
current obsession, and they're packed with the stuff of feminist discussion:
ambitious women thwarted by societal circumstances, a strong but fraught female
friendship, and romantic relationships that prove less egalitarian than
anticipated.
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