About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lauren Elkin
Rave The New Yorker Erudite, provocative, and relentlessly eclectic ... Don’t mistake Art Monsters for an in-depth history of a particular artistic movement ... Elkin seeks to reappropriate some of the space-grabbing, boundary-transgressing, in-your-face assertiveness, and destructive power, of men ... I wished at times that Elkin would stop and linger in more depth on the works of artists who are her main subject.
Susan Taubes
Rave The New York Times Book Review The process by which a young girl becomes a woman is often fraught with perils both immediate and nameless. Filter that through the nouveau roman, add a hefty dose of the gothic and a touch of surrealism, throw in a moribund Mitteleuropean backdrop and the looming banalities of midcentury American girlhood, and you might arrive at something resembling Susan Taubes’s novella, Lament for Julia ... An illuminating introduction by Francesca Wade ... To read Taubes is to enter a singular imagination, caught between worlds Old and New, and wandering amid the ruins of belief and belonging that are common to both ... This book is more parody than memoir, reveling in the inevitable divisions and conflicts of selfhood ... Tantalizing.
Vigdis Hjorth, trans. by Charlotte Barslund
Rave 4Columns Hjorth’s brief, diaristic chapters convey the flavor of psychological rumination, gradually building in intensity as Johanna grapples with the increasing desperation inspired by her eighty-five-year-old mother’s radio silence ... confirms Hjorth’s place as an unparalleled chronicler of the fault lines in intimate relationships.
Joan Dejean
Positive The New York Times Book Review Working with a chaotic and often confusing historical record, DeJean traces the constellation of forces — including avarice, corruption and misogyny — that permitted the rapid roundup of another 96 or so female prisoners to be transported in the dank hold of La Mutine. The horrific conditions of the women’s journey, and the will to survive that must have sustained them when they were set down, largely without resources, in a barren, swampy, inhospitable land, are evoked in vivid detail ... Perhaps it’s inevitable that a group portrait of some 130 women, all of them with complex back stories, many with multiple marriages, and seemingly half of them named Marie, is stymied by problems of pacing, repetition and narrative structure. For me, keeping the women’s identities straight as they reappeared over the course of DeJean’s nearly 400 pages proved challenging ... Did any of them dream of a life beyond the harsh confines of frontier hearth and home? DeJean offers us tantalizing glimpses of such aspirations ... I longed to hear Baron’s and other women’s voices, to find them taking on more flesh and character, but perhaps that would take a novelist’s skill ... hugely ambitious, sometimes unwieldy.
Simone De Beauvoir, Tr. Sandra Smith
Positive The New York Times Book Review Fluidly translated by Sandra Smith ... Beauvoir the novelist allows us to feel the suffocating weight of an entire society ... Most disturbing are the ways in which Andrée, who remains fervently devout and unsparingly devoted to her mother, internalizes the destructive impulses of a culture that consumes and constrains her ... Simone, at least, would not be sacrificed on the altar of convention and domesticity. Inseparable makes the terms of this commitment on her part crushingly clear.