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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD In 1960, Harvard’s sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, a “messy experiment” in women’s education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships—poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen—quickly formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves “the Equivalents.” Drawing from notebooks, letters, recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie Doherty weaves a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and activism, love and heartbreak, and shows how the institute spoke to the condition of women on the cusp of liberation. “Rich and powerful. . . . A love story about art and female friendship.” —Harper’s Magazine “Reads like a novel, and an intense one at that. . . . The Equivalents is an observant, thoughtful and energetic account.” —Margaret Atwood, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitic...
Over the past few years, in essays published in n+1, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere, Ari M. Brostoff has grappled with the intellectual upheavals and political contradictions that surfaced during the Trump era. After the breaking point of the 2016 election, Brostoff writes, "the world came back into hideous focus" and they began to feel, for the first time, "like a long-term inhabitant of the present." Missing Time collects five remarkable essays and a new introduction that trace the return of the 20th century's political and cultural repressed in personal and collective terms. In prose that is simultaneously sharp and soulful, mournful and ecstatic, Brostoff offers lucid considerations of the reemergent millennial left, the enigmas of the X-Files, the complexities of Philip Roth's (anti-)Zionism, and other novelties, atavisms, and atavisms newly reborn as novelties. From the communist ardor of the Bronx circa 1940 to the '90s haze of the San Fernando Valley to a Brooklyn apartment building's tenants' association in the midst of a global pandemic, Missing Time collapses past and present into a revelatory encounter with very recent history.
'If you're a fan of Sally Rooney's work, then you can't go wrong by picking up a copy of Topics Of Conversation ... She's a fresh voice, and one that it's certainly worth listening to.' Vogue 'Miranda Popkey's debut explores the paradox of longing to assert control and longing to lose it ... She depicts what it feels like to exist, actually live, at that intersection, which can so often bring about paralysis.' New Yorker What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us? From the coast of the Adriatic to the salt spray of Santa Barbara, the narrator of Topics of Conversation maps out her life through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation. The novel unfurls through a series of conversations - in private with friends, late at night at parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, cynicism, envy and intimacy. Sizzling with enigmatic desire, Miranda Popkey's debut novel is a seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourselves and of the things we reveal only to strangers.
Lee Konstantinou examines irony in American literary and political life, showing how it migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the 1980s mainstream. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately become a target of recent writers who have moved beyond its limitations with a practice of “postirony.”
New York Times Notable Book: A “beautifully written” memoir by the daughter of the brilliant, troubled poet (Detroit Free Press). This is an honest, unsparing account of the anguish and fierce love that bound a difficult mother and the daughter she left behind. Linda Sexton was twenty–one when her mother killed herself, and now she looks back, remembers, and tries to come to terms with her mother’s life. Growing up with Anne Sexton was a wild mixture of suicidal depression and manic happiness, inappropriate behavior and midnight trips to the psychiatric ward. Anne taught Linda how to write, how to see, how to imagine—and only Linda could have written a book that captures so vividly...
Heartwarming and nostalgic new Saga series from the author of Mother’s Day on Coronation Street.
"From Cat Marnell, 'New York's enfant terrible' (The Telegraph), a ... memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs"--
A Times book of the year A Guardian book of the year ‘Magnificent’The Times ‘Dazzling’ New Statesman ‘It filled me with hope’ Zadie Smith
The popular image of a midcentury adwoman is of a feisty girl beating men at their own game, a female Horatio Alger protagonist battling her way through the sexist workplace. But before the fictional rise of Peggy Olson or the real-life stories of Patricia Tierney and Jane Maas came Jean Wade Rindlaub: a female power broker who used her considerable success in the workplace to encourage other women—to stick to their kitchens. The Angel in the Marketplace is the story of one of America’s most accomplished advertising executives. It is also the story of how advertisers like Rindlaub sold a postwar American dream of capitalism and a Christian corporate order. Rindlaub was responsible for aw...