What is desire? And what are its rules? In this collection, award-winning and emerging female writers share their innermost longings, in turn dismantling both personal and political constructs of what desire is or can be.
There’s an inherent pleasure in reading about desire. It is, after all, what gives narrative literature its stakes, keeping us hooked as we root our protagonists on. To proceed through Wanting is to be swept up, again and again, into moments of urgency, which makes it the only literary essay collection I’ve encountered that I could accurately describe as a page-turner. But beyond this delight, what sets Wanting apart is how uniformly artful these essays are: insightful and poetic, thought-provoking and stirring. They do what all great essays do, which is to push beyond surfaces and make space for complication.
If the desire for selfhood is the beating heart of this collection of personal essays, the anthology also pulses with the relationship between wanting and writing, demonstrating how desire propels the urge to create ... Empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it an anthology that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, yes, but also between wanting and voice.
