Women’s voices in literature are as varied and nourishing as a perfectly curated “girl dinner” plate: sometimes indulgent, sometimes sharp, always satisfying. From bite-sized short stories to rich, thought-provoking essays, this collection celebrates women writers who serve up brilliance in every genre. Whether you’re craving stories of resilience, humor, identity or rebellion, these books are here to nourish your mind and soul this Women’s History Month. Dig in!
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About by edited by Michele Filgate
As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in acknowledging how what we couldn’t say for so long is a way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most importantly, with ourselves.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity by Sable Yong
The beauty industry has a single mandate: be hot. In the same week that you might be encouraged to try curtain bangs, contouring, bleached eyebrows, laser facials, buccal fat removal, fillers and “non-invasive” facelifts, you’re simultaneously absorbing mantras about self-care, body positivity, empowerment and loving yourself just as you are. Digging deep into our most pervasive and questionable beauty trends and conventions, Die Hot with a Vengeance offers an incisive yet wry dissection of one of our most enduring cultural addictions. Irreverent, side-splittingly funny and astute, the book is as amusing as it is insightful, an instant classic for beauty-readers and aspirant hotties alike.
She’s Always Hungry: Stories by Eliza Clark
A woman welcomes a parasite into her body. A teenager longs for perfect skin. A scientist tends to fragile alien flora. A young man takes the night into his own hands. Unsettling, revelatory and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.
The Goodbye Process by Mary Jones
In her stunning debut short story collection, The Goodbye Process, Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and sometimes surreal ways we say goodbye. The stories, which range from tender and heartbreaking to unsettling and darkly funny, will push you out of your comfort zone and ignite intense emotions surrounding love and loss. A woman camps out on the porch of an ex-lover who has barricaded himself inside the house; a preteen girl caught shoplifting finds herself in grave danger; a Los Angeles real estate agent falls for a woman who helps him detach from years of dramatic plastic surgery; a man hires a professional mourner to ensure his wife’s funeral is a success. Again and again, Jones’s characters find themselves facing the ends of things: relationships, health and innocence.
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
Powerful stories of dislocation, longing and desire depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is groping for human connection. (Or, more simply put, the angst of people-who-wear-black.)
Roar by Cecelia Ahern
In this singular and imaginative story collection, Cecelia Ahern explores the endless ways in which women blaze through adversity with wit, resourcefulness and compassion. Ahern takes the familiar aspects of women’s lives — the routines, the embarrassments, the desires — and elevates these moments to the outlandish and hilarious with her astute blend of magical realism and social insight.
The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison
These pages give us Morrison’s searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work and that of others. An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Difficult Women tells of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and, grown now, must negotiate the elder sister’s marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind.
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
Three equally visionary novellas surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a sci-fi future in which everyone must choose their own gender — the vengeful consequence of a rogue trio of charismatic trans women who destroy civilization as we know it. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last novella, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns horrific when a young crossdresser must choose between a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood. Radical, witty and gripping, these four narratives coalesce to form a portrait of identity-in-crisis that unsettles and delights.
English (US) · 