For publishers of books by women and targeted at women, the prerogative now is not to fall into the 2010s trap of 'books for women'. Less than five years ago, publishing books in powdery shades of pink was an intentional reclamation of sexist stereotypes, even spawning books with titles like Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (And Other Lies). Yet the shade rapidly went from subversive to cliché. Ami Smithson, a design manager at Macmillan and the woman behind the bold green cover of Chollet’s In Defence Of Witches tells R29: "I wanted to avoid anything too light, clichéd, or anything considered too soft or feminine." She says that pink was among her initial drafts but green was a really conscious choice. "I wanted a modern green, a fresh green that was zappy." This particular shade did just that, while also making the black and white text more visible.
Yet while Christie is usually heralded as one of the 20th century’s cleverest writers, Heyer, despite being a wildly popular romance author, has somehow managed to fly just under the mainstream radar without the same level of popular and critical recognition. That speaks, perhaps, to how often she’s been lumped together with more tawdry writers simply because of her chosen genre. Heyer satisfied the many eager writers and readers who wanted a bit more emphasis on the heated passions that Austen tastefully avoided, and that left her open to critical dismissal.
Although my family left its banks in the 1970s, the river keeps luring me back. Each time I’m in Bangkok, I hop a ferry to the old amulet market at Maharaj Pier and slurp lod chong Singapore (bubble noodles in sweet coconut milk) in Ratchawong, where my family lived.
These days the riverside neighborhoods are a little timeworn, but my old stomping grounds are now being rediscovered and revived by artists and entrepreneurs. And, the Chao Phraya, always central to my story, is once again the center of Bangkok.
One of America’s most accomplished memoirists, Febos, now 41, decided to build on the pep talks she gave to her students in an essay, “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” which became the first chapter of her new book, “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.”
This original, lyrical collection weaves memory and teaching — about craft, about trauma and healing, about social justice — into an ode to personal writing that couldn’t come at a more critical time: amid a nationwide assault on precisely these types of stories.
In Defense of Witches celebrates women, offers a plethora of reasons to accept a variety of viewpoints, and shows how women are still expected to act certain ways or be ostracized. Despite all that, the element that overpowers all others is the celebration of feminist minds and their work, our modern witches. Yes, this book will make you angry at the staying power of misogyny, but it will also make you scream "Long live witches!" — and that makes it a must-read.
Krasnostein’s generous and compassionate book, “The Believer: Encounters With the Beginning, the End, and Our Place in the Middle,” recounts her experiences with followers of eccentric or, let’s say, science fiction beliefs as well as many Christians, all of whom are treated with respect. Her tour of humanity, spanning unlighted country roads in Australia to crumbling apartments in the South Bronx, shows that many human beings benefit from finding an ideology that encompasses not just their beliefs but their ways of living. I don’t know if Krasnostein is entertained, credulous or just tolerant of the ghost types, and that is one of her gifts.
This is the situation that science writer Florence Williams found herself thrust into as she tried to cope with the emotional and physical wreckage following her divorce from a man she had met and fallen in love with during their freshman year at Yale. They had married, parented two children and loved until she was at the cusp of 50, when he “decided to live on his own after three decades of togetherness,” leaving her feeling as if she’d “been axed in the heart.” “Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey” is a raw and exhaustively reported exploration of her suffering, the kind of reportage engaged in by Michael Pollan as he looked at his diet and his brain, or Ross Douthat when coping with his chronic Lyme disease; the kind when a journalist lands on a rich subject because he or she happens to be living it.