But what happens when a press does more than increase its roster of writers of colour? What happens when diversity is built into its very structure? Mémoire d’encrier suggests that the results can be transformative.
Maud Casey’s fourth novel, “City of Incurable Women,” is a haunted and haunting book, short, but densely packed with metaphor and meaning. Ghostly black-and-white photographs of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and women treated for hysteria there in the 19th century, accompanied by case study notes and “photographic service” cards recording the subjects’ symptoms, convey the impression that we are reading messages from the dead past. This is an illusion created by Casey’s skillful blend of fact and fiction. The case histories and service card texts are partly based on rough translations of primary sources, partly invented. Casey gives voices to women previously seen only through their doctors’ eyes by imagining their accounts of who they were “in the before” and what they became under medical supervision.
Western civilization loves its embattled mothers. It takes a special relish in idealizing motherhood, only to see the women capsize in their attempts to live up to impossible expectations. Is this a universal claim?
"Woman Running in the Mountains," a novel by Yūko Tsushima, suggests not. Certain forms of criticism that mothers seem automatically to accept in Western literature glide off this work like Teflon. Which is not to say that the novel paints a rosy portrait of motherhood. There is a surface placidity to the prose that belies its heavy themes of domestic violence, alcoholism, and economic and social precarity.
There is a minimalism to Julie Otsuka's work. The sentences in her slim books dive right into the details. About once a decade, readers are treated to a novel of Otsuka's well-honed words: "The Buddha in the Attic" in 2011 and "When the Emperor Was Divine" in 2002. So, I am thrilled that her latest book, "The Swimmers," is another artfully refined story, even when it delves into the most painful parts of life.
What is art criticism? Does anyone really care? Criticism is about creating discussion and fostering community; at least that’s what critics and those invested in criticism like to tell themselves. But after around ten years of working as an art critic, Carla Lonzi started to feel the opposite: that the role of the critic involved a ‘codified alienation towards the artistic fact’, that criticism was an accomplice to a class system, corralling art into a rarefied sphere in which creativity and life are seen as separate things. Self-Portrait – originally published in 1969 and translated here for the first time – is the Italian writer’s extended dissection of and farewell to criticism. Her only subsequent writing about art occurred in her diary; energy was instead poured into activism and feminist writings, and cofounding the influential collective Rivolta Femminile.
Home chefs, whether of Great British Bake Off caliber or not, can turn to an abundance of cookbooks to guide their kitchen projects. But the recipe manuals of today are not those of the past. In A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries, the historian Henry Notaker traces how recipe collections have evolved. In 15th- and 16th-century Western Europe, cookbooks were demonstrations of luxury, targeting an upper-class audience with access to rare and expensive goods. But over the centuries, as printing became easier, literacy rates increased, and food became more abundant, the genre democratized, becoming available to all sorts of people. By the 20th century, popular writers were primarily developing recipes for the European and American middle classes.