Posts Tagged review

By Juliana Britto Schwartz • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Daisy Hernandez’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed

As soon as I finished the last page of A Cup of Water Under My Bed, I pulled out my phone and searched the words “card reader” into Yelp. Then I tried “mãe de santa,” then “candomblé” then “santería,” but none of the terms really summed up the kind of guidance I had brushed up against through my mother, my cousins, my aunts. In her book, Daisy Hernandez reminds us that often, we do not know how to name or thank the women who shape our journey. The women her parents sought out for spiritual support were referred to as simply “las mujeres que saben,” in her house, the “women who know.”

I eventually found a woman named Yolanda ...

As soon as I finished the last page of A Cup of Water Under My Bed, I pulled out my phone and searched the words “card reader” into Yelp. Then I tried “mãe de ...
By Sam Huber • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Land of Love and Drowning

If I were to derive a formula for character development from Land of Love and Drowning, I’d return to watch Eeona rework a central myth in sleep: “She dreamed about a school of women walking out of the ocean. Then she dreamed it again. And again. Until in the dream she was finally one of the women.” Decide what your freest self looks like; conjure it into being; inhabit it as long as it holds. The next morning she wakes, makes her way to sea, and nearly drowns. Abandon and repeat as needed.

The adjectives so far affixed by reviewers to Tiphanie Yanique’s debut novel hold, and bear repeating: “epic,” “ambitious,” and “lush” all recur deservedly. Land follows ...

If I were to derive a formula for character development from Land of Love and Drowning, I’d return to watch Eeona rework a central myth in sleep: “She dreamed about a school of women ...
By Sam Huber • 9 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: The Essential Ellen Willis

I owe so much, as a writer and feminist, to Ellen Willis. And given how much of her work has remained uncollected or gone out of print, I suspect that we collectively owe her much more than has yet been accounted for. This month’s publication of The Essential Ellen Willis will, I hope, urge the accounting. Edited by her daughter, journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz, this sprawling book surveys four decades of the cultural critic’s writing, beginning with the emergence of radical feminism in the late 1960s and continuing to the near present. (Willis died in 2006.)  [Ed note: this was at a time when “radical feminism” was more broadly defined and did not mean anti-sex worker and ...

I owe so much, as a writer and feminist, to Ellen Willis. And given how much of her work has remained uncollected or gone out of print, I suspect that we collectively owe her much more ...
By Sam Huber • 10 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: October

An exemplary homecoming: Mercia and her partner Craig venture to a river to watch salmon fight their way upstream after a summer at sea. The regularity of this cycle—birth, exile, return, year after year, generation after generation—does not diminish its drama. The scale of the salmon’s struggle impresses itself upon Mercia. “Clever, yes, but how repellent, Mercia thought, the endless repetition, not only the biological imperative to reproduce, but the need to return to origins…. Did they remember the reverse journey, the carefree, dizzying tumble downstream through the rapids?”

This is no casual question for Mercia, given her own ambivalent engagement in the hard work of remembering. Though born and raised in rural South Africa under apartheid, she has lived ...

An exemplary homecoming: Mercia and her partner Craig venture to a river to watch salmon fight their way upstream after a summer at sea. The regularity of this cycle—birth, exile, return, year after year, generation after ...
By Sam Huber • 10 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing

At conferences, colloquia, open meetings, we’ve seen them: older, intent, perhaps a bit disappointed, perhaps exhausted from years of movement work of which we are not aware because we do not ask, but often eager, often a bit giddy, it seems, to be there, as if granted unexpected permission.  These, our feminist forebears, perhaps even expressing their gratitude for the intergenerational dialog that’s happened this evening—hear the implied finally. Or maybe they have been our teachers, our editors, or even (lucky us) our employers; too rarely are they our peers, our collaborators, our friends.

Wherever we meet them, as young feminists we don’t often do a good enough job of thanking them, of appreciating their work openly and earnestly without ...

At conferences, colloquia, open meetings, we’ve seen them: older, intent, perhaps a bit disappointed, perhaps exhausted from years of movement work of which we are not aware because we do not ask, but often eager, often ...