Win a copy of So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

This week, Cara Hoffman’s debut novel So Much Pretty comes out in paperback, and today, we are giving away copies of this remarkable book to five lucky Feministing readers.

I reviewed So Much Pretty last year:

… this is a book about how every one of us colludes in rape culture. It’s about how we close our eyes to it, or make excuses for it, even when it’s right there in front of us. And it’s a book about the different ways that people try to stop colluding and decide to do something, whether it’s through the career they choose, or the way they raise their children, or by writing about it honestly and openly.

That’s exactly what reporter Stacy Flynn does: she writes, in a brutally honest way, about violence against women. And it’s exactly what Hoffman has done here. She has drawn a detailed and unsettlingly realistic picture of a small community in which violence against women happens every day, in big, headline-making ways, and in small, barely perceptible ways. And she has imagined what it might look like if some women simply decided that they weren’t going to tolerate that violence for a moment longer.

To celebrate the paperback release, we’re giving away five copies of this breathtaking, gut-punching book to the first five commenters to answer this question:

What’s the best piece of contemporary woman-penned fiction you’ve read in the last year, and why? And no, you do not get extra credit for saying So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman.

If you aren’t lucky enough to win yourself a copy, I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy in some other fashion. Also, if you aren’t reading Hoffman’s blog, a mix of feminist news analysis and reflections on the writing process, you should be. And, look for her new book, out later this year.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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