Why am I passionate about this?

I write about contemporary art, and much of the work I’ve been drawn to was made by women and by artists in other sidelined communities. Early on, I also focused on marginalized disciplines: artists’ books, performance, and art that responded directly to the vacant sites that abounded in New York City when I started out in the late 1970s. It was an enormously exciting time, but also a tough one. Violence was very hard to avoid. I didn’t focus on that at the time, but ultimately, I realized I needed to look more directly at trouble, and how artists respond to it.  


I wrote

Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s

By Nancy Princenthal,

Book cover of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s

What is my book about?

During the famously violent 1970s, the incidence of sexual assault spun out of control, with surprisingly little attention. The women’s…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Shadow Knows

Nancy Princenthal Why did I love this book?

A first-person novel published in 1974, this wry, low-key thriller, quietly shattering, slaloms through marriage and infidelity, prosperity and poverty, motherhood and neglect. I first came across The Shadow Knows shortly after it was published, turned the pages at speed, and in my head argued furiously with the protagonist all the way through. Re-reading it forty years later, I was still aghast, and just as mesmerized. I think it’s safe to say the narrator’s response to sexual violence—like much else in this book—would be impossible to publish in the present; it is as revelatory about our moment as about the one in which it was written and set. 

By Diane Johnson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Shadow Knows as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A series of violent happenings add to a young woman's conviction that she is going to be murdered


Book cover of Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

Nancy Princenthal Why did I love this book?

I didn’t read Last Days of Hot Slit in time to include it in my own book about sexual violence. In truth, I could have (barely; it was published just before I finished). But I felt comfortable with my aversion to Dworkin, a crusader against assault who had found common cause with conservative activists. And Dworkin was a self-defeating font of vituperation, wasn’t she? Well, no. She was in fact altogether brilliant. Fateman’s wonderfully lucid, deeply researched introduction and the careful selection she and Scholder made of Dworkin’s surprisingly wide-ranging work, demonstrate the force and courage not just of this radical feminist’s writing, but also of her character. She was dauntless.

By Andrea Dworkin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Last Days at Hot Slit as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Selections from the work of radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin, famous for her antipornography stance and role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s.

Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery…


Book cover of Memories of the Future

Nancy Princenthal Why did I love this book?

An audaciously experimental novelist, Siri Hustvedt is also a highly respected scholar of neuroscience who is not afraid to bring the philosophy of mind into her fiction. In Memories of the Future, she adroitly employs some revisionist art history as well. And there is a breathtakingly vivid evocation of the sensory lag that occurs with trauma. But what grabbed me first and unrelentingly in this novel is its evocation of a time and place—New York in the 1970s (the then scruffy Upper West Side, to be exact)—and of the social and sexual perplexities it produced for young women. The protagonist negotiates independence and loneliness, courage—and memory—both true and false, and men safe and otherwise. I wish I’d known her then

By Siri Hustvedt,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Memories of the Future as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A provocative, wildly funny, intellectually rigorous and engrossing novel, punctuated by Siri Hustvedt's own illustrations - a tour de force by one of America's most acclaimed and beloved writers.

Fresh from Minnesota and hungry for all New York has to offer, twenty-three-year-old S.H. embarks on a year that proves both exhilarating and frightening - from bruising encounters with men to the increasingly ominous monologues of the woman next door.

Forty years on, those pivotal months come back to vibrant life when S.H. discovers the notebook in which she recorded her adventures alongside drafts of a novel. Measuring what she remembers…


Book cover of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

Nancy Princenthal Why did I love this book?

I’d heard a great deal of praise of Hartman’s book from artists and other colleagues, which stoked my curiosity about its hybrid form—a blend of archival research and fictional narrative. It’s a tricky combination that Hartman manages with unerring aplomb, making it seem not only viable but essential for understanding a world lost to history. Her portraits of Black women living under fairly desperate conditions in New York and Philadelphia in the first decades of the twentieth century—of the personal and practical choices they made—are precise, vivid, rousing, And I do understand why artists love Hartman: she understands that not all truths can be told within the limits of conventional nonfiction. 

By Saidiya V. Hartman,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading…


Book cover of The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

Nancy Princenthal Why did I love this book?

Srinivasan is clearly an amazing teacher, deeply attentive to her students, and extraordinarily honest and open herself. It is evident her honesty is reciprocated. Much of this book is based on reports from the classroom, and as a longtime educator myself, I was awed by her ability to engage in remarkably fruitful discussions about irresolvable questions of desire and consent. Writing with grace and precision, she explores a terrain in which gender, race, class, and sex overlap, with emphasis on how that terrain looks to people new at navigating it.  

By Amia Srinivasan,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Right to Sex as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Laser-cut writing and a stunning intellect. If only every writer made this much beautiful sense.”
—Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer—no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. In stripping the new politics of sex and power down to its fundamental and sometimes clashing principles, The Right to Sex is a bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing: Srinivasan is daring, compassionate, and in relentless search of a new frame.”
—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion

Thrilling, sharp, and…


Explore my book 😀

Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s

By Nancy Princenthal,

Book cover of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s

What is my book about?

During the famously violent 1970s, the incidence of sexual assault spun out of control, with surprisingly little attention. The women’s movement of the time was great at challenging injustice in the workplace and at home, but initially tiptoed around rape. It was artists who first spoke out, quietly at first, soon with bullhorns. Yoko Ono was the moment’s magnetic if ambivalent herald; Nancy Spero its lacerating poet; Suzanne Lacy its fearless activist. Today sexual assault is routinely in the headlines, but confusion still abounds over whom it most affects, how best to confront it—and even how to define it. Along with illuminating these issues, Unspeakable Acts heeds younger artists who have looked at how rape is inseparably entwined with issues of race and class.  

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The Yamanaka Factors

By Jed Henson,

Book cover of The Yamanaka Factors

Jed Henson Author Of All In

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Reader Dad Outdoorsman Space cowboy Curious

Jed's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

Fall 2028. Mickey Cooper, an elderly homeless man, receives an incredible proposition from a rogue pharmaceutical company: “Be our secret guinea pig for our new drug, and we’ll pay you life-changing money, which you’ll be able to enjoy because if (cough) when the treatment works, two months from now your body will be youthened to twenty-three years old.”

When his treatment proves more difficult than expected, and corporate espionage turns deadly, Mickey finds himself flanked by internal corruption and powerful external enemies, including Chinese operatives desperate to reverse their country’s aging demographics and amoral U.S. government officials who fear the…

The Yamanaka Factors

By Jed Henson,

What is this book about?

Fall 2028. Mickey Cooper, an elderly homeless man, receives an incredible proposition from a rogue pharmaceutical company: “Be our secret guinea pig for our new drug and we’ll pay you life-changing money, which you’ll be able to enjoy because if (cough) when the treatment works, two months from now your body will be youthened to twenty-three years old.”

When his treatment proves more difficult than expected and corporate espionage turns deadly, Mickey finds himself flanked by internal corruption and powerful external enemies, including Chinese operatives desperate to reverse their country’s aging demographics and amoral U.S. government officials who fear the…


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