While [Martin] Duberman ferrets out the private side of Andrea Dworkin, [in Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary,] with aplomb, the public Dworkin, “huge and hollering,” as Ariel Levy once put it, is ever-present too. The events of her political career, often inseparable from her private hurts, are examined: …
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LEAVING Isn’t the Hardest Thing is a memoir that hasn’t got a tidy chronology or a crystal-clear resolution, and its language is often coarse. Yet Lauren Hough’s vivid, darkly humorous essays paint a fresh and powerful picture of two intertwined struggles.
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IN CONFESS, Rob Halford discloses the trials he faced behind the scenes while fronting the heavy metal band Judas Priest. This memoir is that of a man who was torn between being a pioneer in the macho genre of heavy metal—which indeed fashioned a whole new style of masculinity—and his self-discovery as a gay man with all the (mis-)adventures that came with it, which had to be kept under the radar.
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[O]ne can hope that future biographers will build on [Troy R.] Saxby’s exploration of the human side of Pauli Murray, so that she can take her place in the pantheon of LGBT thinkers and activists.
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Reviews of Funeral Diva, Let’s Get Back to the Party, If I Had Two Wings: Stories, and Kink: Stories.
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BLACK BOY Out of Time is a thought-provoking memoir on what it means to be Black and gay. Journalist Hari Ziyad connects the political and intellectual to the personal in recounting their family’s story.
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Plain Bad Heroines is a Gothic horror novel, but it’s also concerned with the power of stories and who gets to tell them. The Story of Mary MacLane really was an early 20th-century sensation, and its frank discussion of traditionally unspoken desires disrupts Libbie and Alex’ discreet life at Brookhants.
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[Sarah] Schulman states at the outset that her primary purpose in writing Let the Record Show “is not nostalgia, but rather to help contemporary and future activists learn from the past to assist organizing in the present” and to show “that people from all walks of life, working together, can change the world.”
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JUST STANDING IN LINE at a grocery store will tell you nearly everything you need to know about the beauty industry in America: the models on the magazines are exquisitely beautiful, their makeup flawless, their weight well below that of the average American woman. And until recently, all of the models you would see were heterosexual, cisgender women—that is, until Gabrielle Korn, director of fashion and culture at Refinery29 and former editor of Nylon, began working in the industry.
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WINNER of the U.K.’s Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award in America, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain is perhaps the bleakest great novel to appear in a long time. It is the bleakest, most shocking, and most harrowing account of a childhood I’ve ever read, …
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