I’m fascinated by angry, feral, primal women. In my book, ten stories feature these women, the ones doing the things we’re not supposed to do, thinking and feeling and saying the things we’re not supposed to. I think we’re beyond powerful when we embrace our anger, nourish and cultivate it, channel it. So I write about these women in the hopes that I’ll get a bit of their strength. The books in this list have inspired me as a writer and thrilled me as a reader.
Dig Me Out is ten deeply absorbing stories about the women who won’t smile: angry, aching women, and women returning to base instincts, primal fears, and mythic power. Across past, present, and future, around the midwest and the world, these women demand we witness as they work to break through, to defy, to become. It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be safe, but it will be real.
Spanning genres, continents, and eras, Dig Me Out takes on misogyny and homophobia, societal and climatological violence, and the specter of our technologized future — all with a punk rock literary twist.
This book is a knockout, one that pushed me to see through our dangerous diet culture (and got me all fired up). After years of being judged and mocked as a fat woman, Plum is fixated on weight-loss surgeryas the way to live a better life. But when she catches a young woman following her, Plum discovers an entire underground community of women living lives out of bounds, and a guerrilla group terrorizing predatory men. The story is propulsive and exciting, and it’s all fueled by righteous anger. The women Plum meet are full of rage at our broken world but also infused with beautiful compassion. Both can be true; both are often true. The book has stuck with me for years, and I often return to it as a template for writing a killer story that centers and celebrates angry women.
Dietland will be adapted into AMC's 10-episode straight-to-series starring multiple-Emmy winner Julianna Margulies and Joy Nash.
Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse.
But when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself involved with an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called "Jennifer" begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women. As Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot, the consequences of…
This story collection grabbed me right away from the title and stole my heart with some of the most exciting and visceral characters that I’ve read. In “West of the Known,” my favorite story, a young girl escapes violence to become an outlaw; in “The Diplomat’s Daughter,” a woman renames and reworks herself into a feared force of nature. I’ll be honest that reading this book inspired me and scared me; I wanted to write as powerfully and truthfully about anger and violence in women as Chanelle did. So when I asked her to read an early copy of my book, and she came back with lovely praise, I just about lost my mind.
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT FICTION*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING*
Named a Best Book of 2017 by The San Francisco Chronicle
Named one of Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017
A stunningly original debut collection about lives across history marked by violence and longing.
A brother and sister turn outlaw in a wild and brutal landscape. The daughter of a diplomat disappears and resurfaces across the world as a deadly woman of many names. A young Philadelphia boy struggles with the contradictions of privilege, violence, and…
The name of this book alone tells us what we need to know. And the timing was inspired; it came out during 2018, where women’s anger was making headlines. This book takes a step back, examining the political history of women’s anger in the last century. I particularly loved the analysis of how women’s anger is belittled and defused compared to men’s anger, how our anger is perceived differently based on race and class, and how it’s often turned inward and towards other women. It’s a complicated and infuriating book. But also one that reminds us that our fury is powerful – or else the world wouldn’t try so hard to bury it.
Journalist Rebecca Traister's New York Times bestselling exploration of the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement is "a hopeful, maddening compendium of righteous feminine anger, and the good it can do when wielded efficiently-and collectively" (Vanity Fair).
Long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women's March, and before the #MeToo movement, women's anger was not only politically catalytic-but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates its crucial role in women's slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it…
In the early 1990s, a group of women-centric punk bands and their young fans created a radical feminist movement, one that is still deeply inspiring. This book of Riot Grrrl is a fascinating look at the interplay between music and revolt, as well as an enraging analysis of how media took young women’s anger and turned it poisonous. I have long been obsessed with Riot Grrrl; although I was of the age to participate at the time, I lacked information and access. So I look back now at my Gen X peers and celebrate the music and rage that created this holy thing. And in my book, some of my stories are based on these songs and the spirit of these girls.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Senate didn't believe Anita Hill, Rush Limbaugh compared feminists to Nazis, and a study found that girls tended to start hating themselves during adolescence. It was a hard time to be a young woman, to be growing up on promises of equal rights that didn't square with reality. Sexual assault rates reached record highs; harassment was rife in the schools; and, boys still would be boys, and girls still had to watch what they wore and where they walked. It was enough to make a girl want to scream. Riot Grrrl roared into…
A mother of a toddler thinks she’s turning into a dog. Sign. Me. Up. I love a weird and wild story, and this was everything I could ask for. And this mom has the perfect right to explore and embrace her animal side. She’s given up her dream job to be a full-time mom, she’s lonely and exhausted, and she’s overwhelmed and deeply sad. But when she taps into the anger beneath all of that, the rage at our culture that treats mothers with schizophrenic disdain, she becomes something otherworldly, deeply primal, and very powerful. The book is beautiful and hilarious and upsetting in all the right ways, and shows how our anger may actually make us into the people we want to be.
In this blazingly smart and voracious debut novel, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. • "A must-read for anyone who can’t get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural that Yellowjackets exemplifies." —Vulture
One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...
An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only…
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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