I am a French novelist, the author of fifteen novels, many of which are memoirs, so I am considered a specialist of "autofiction" in France, of fiction written about oneself. But I also love writing about others, as you can see in my novel on David Hockney. Beauvoir, Sarraute and Ernaux were my models, Laurens and Appanah are my colleagues. Three of the books I picked would be called memoirs in the States, and the other two novels. In France, they are in the same category. All these women write beautifully about childhood and womanhood. I love their writing because it is both intimate and universal, full of emotion, but in a very sober and precise style.
In A Girl’s StoryAnnieErnaux – the author of many memoirs about her parents, her lower-class background, and her sexual life – revisits the summer when she was 18 and a summer camp counselor. For the first time away from home, she was so eager for love that she ended up pursuing a man who dumped and humiliated her. Ernaux has a unique way to find lost time again. She scrutinizes the past with such a precise scalpel that it allows us to identify with the lost young girl and to share her confusion and shame.
'I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow. I have never managed to do so.' In A Girl's Story, her latest book, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, spent working as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and…
Masuda Hajimu (family name Masuda) is a historian at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in the modern history of East Asia, the history of American foreign relations, and the social and global history of the Cold War, with particular attention toward ordinary people and their violence, as well as the recurrent rise of grassroots conservatism in the modern world. His most recent publications include: The Early Cold War: Studies of Cold War America in the 21st Century in A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations; “The Social Experience of War and Occupation” in The Cambridge History of Japan (coming in 2022), among others. He has served as a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2017-18); Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2020); and Visiting Scholar at Waseda University (2020).
I like this book because it forces us to rethink what the Cold War really was. The book identifies key figures in anti-communist crusades in post-World War II Detroit: workers, white homeowners, city officials, Catholics, and manufacturing executives, and argues that the core elements of their “anticommunism” were not fears of Soviet incursion, but sociocultural tensions at home that derived from drastic changes in wartime and postwar Detroit, which observed a sudden influx of African Americans, Southern whites, and immigrants.
Thus, the book argues that Cold War Detroit’s “anticommunism” was not a new development in the postwar era, but a continuation of what had previously been labeled anti-unionism, white-supremacism, anti-secular Catholicism, and anti-New deal sentiments, all of which can be characterized as expressions of ongoing “anti-modernist” tensions within American society. Such a reexamination of Cold War anti-communism is significant because it could open up new territory for rethinking what anticommunism…
Detroit's Cold War locates the roots of American conservatism in a city that was a nexus of labor and industry in postwar America. Drawing on meticulous archival research focusing on Detroit, Colleen Doody shows how conflict over business values and opposition to labor, anticommunism, racial animosity, and religion led to the development of a conservative ethos in the aftermath of World War II. Using Detroit--with its large population of African-American and Catholic immigrant workers, strong union presence, and starkly segregated urban landscape--as a case study, Doody articulates a nuanced understanding of anticommunism during the Red Scare. Looking beyond national politics,…
I fell in love with Victorian literature after reading Jane Eyre when I was thirteen years old. Since then, I’ve worked my way through Victorian book after Victorian book, and my own novel, The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, is a love letter to Victorian fiction.One of my key interests within Victorian literature has always been its exploration of gender and gender roles. There are so many fantastic Victorian proto-feminist novels, and while some are still remembered and read, many more have been largely forgotten. These are just a few of my favourite proto-feminist Victorian novels, all of which are very underrated and very much worth a read!
Published in 1848, The Half Sisters is the story of two sisters, Alice and Bianca, who grow up without knowing of the other’s existence.
Alice is middle-class, legitimate, and respectable, and goes on to have the life Victorian women were meant to have – namely, marriage. She is also bored and unhappy. Meanwhile, her sister Bianca, who is working-class, illegitimate, and definitively not respectable, chooses a different path.
Keen to make a career for herself, she becomes an actress, and throughout the novel passionately defends women’s right to work. The novel is engaging and accessible, though often forgotten now, and I love how it fantastically examines the different options open – and, indeed, closed – to women in the Victorian period.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank…
I love to read and write about complex characters and particularly the “unlikeable” female character. Many readers connect with my characters because they are flawed—they don’t always think or do what we want them to, or what we think they should do, which is often (frustratingly) the case with the real-life people we love and care about. Real, complex people exist in real, complex relationships, including friendships that don’t always serve them—or that do serve them, but in unconventional or superficially unclear ways. I think that reading about contradictory, inconsistent, and confused characters in relationships helps us to be kinder and more empathetic people—and, quite possibly, better friends.
If you’ve ever had a significantly eccentric or doctrinaire friend, you know that there are risks and rewards. I love the way this novel acknowledges the jagged edges of certain friendships, which can be deep friendships all the same.
The novel begins at Barnard College when George, who grew up poor in upstate New York, meets Ann, her righteous and intense roommate. Ann is doing her best to renounce her privileged background, and although George finds her flagrant acts of idealism strange and embarrassing at first, the two women develop a strong bond.
Told in first-person, we get George’s very unfiltered take on Ann: all the ugly thoughts and frustrations, as well as her deep admiration. That George is not always a cheerleader for Ann is not disloyalty; it’s a normal response to a very challenging person, and that’s refreshing.
It is Columbia University, 1968. Ann Drayton and Georgette George meet as roommates on the first night. Ann is rich and radical; Georgette, the narrator of "The Last Of Her Kind", is leery and introverted, a child of the very poverty and strife her new friend finds so noble. The two are drawn together intensely by their differences; two years later, after a violent fight, they part ways. When, in 1976, Ann is convicted of killing a New York cop, Georgette comes back to their shared history in search of an explanation. She finds a riddle of a life, shaped…
I found I could not
turn away from Jones’s unsparing look at the life and times of Lucy Parsons,
even though I’ve long been familiar with this period of American history.
Parsons was an anarchist agitator who worked and lived across the color line in
gilded-age America. But she was also a reckless if savvy provocateur whose
actions did lasting harm to many. Jones follows Parsons’s life from the slave
south to Reconstruction-era Texas to the industrializing North.
Relentlessly
researched and brilliantly told, the story is at once illuminating and deeply
disturbing.
From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived
Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions-she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity…
Like most people, I read lots of different kinds of books, but I am often drawn to novels with unusual themes, structure, or all those things. As a comedy writer, I have always loved surreal writing – the Goon Shows on the radio, or the plays of NF Simpson – and this applies to my taste in literature as well. The unreal, the slightly detuned, anything that suggests this world is not entirely what it seems, or if it is what it seems, then it is an idiot.
Probably my favourite book, this is BS Johnson’s most fun novel. It’s about a man who decides the world is in debt to him, and sets out to redress the balance, often murderously. Johnson doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as grind it up for pudding. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is very dark, very funny, and a small masterpiece.
Christie Malry is a simple person. Born into a family without money, he realised early along in the game that the best way to come by money was to place himself next to it. So he took a job as a very junior bank clerk in a very stuffy bank. It was at the bank that Christie discovered the principles of double-entry book keeping, from which he evolved his Great Idea. For every offence Christy henceforth received at the hands of a society with which he was clearly out of step, a debit must be noted; after which, society would…
As a reader, I want to be thrown into the heady world of revolution, to learn how everyday people made history, to see what they saw and feel what they felt. And I want a book that challenges mainstream narratives of the past. Radical history does this through gripping storytelling and revealing hidden histories of power. As a writer that tries to shine a light on lesser-known aspects of New Zealand’s past, these five books are both my ‘how-to’ and inspiration. I love to share the stories of people who are often left out of history but nonetheless made it. And being an archivist means questions of power and memory are always lurking.
Durruti is a massive 800-page biography of a Spanish anarchist that carried “the future in is heart and a gun in each pocket” and, at the same time, portrays the twists and turns of the Spanish Revolution and the millions of people who made it. A model of how to place a radical, working-class life within a broader context, Durrutiis also a blow-by-blow account of a revolution and its battles, trials, and upheavals. I shamelessly tried to re-create such a gripping biography when writing my own book. Who would have thought an 800-page brick could be such a page-turner?
Brian Conaghan has written seven Young Adult novels. When Mr. Dog Bites, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. The Bombs That Brought Us Together, won the 2016 Costa Children’s Book Award. We Come Apart - a collaboration with Sarah Crossan - won the United Kingdom Literary Award. His novel, The Weight of a Thousand Feathers, won the 2018 An Post YA Irish Book of the Year. The M Word was shortlisted for the An Post YA and Teen Book of the Year. Cardboard Cowboys, to date, has been nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Brian lives and works in the Scottish town of Coatbridge.
A day in the life of two inseparable friends in an impoverished Scottish town where everything seems challenging. They learn what friendship truly means in the face of certain dangers. Dillon’s award-winning debut depicts the vitality and intensity of boyhood friendship, as well as painting a vivid picture of contemporary working-class Scotland.
A story of boyhood friendship and irrepressible vitality told with the speed of trains and the understanding of the awkwardness, significance and fragility of that time. This is a day in the life of two boys as told by one of them.
I attended school for fourteen years, experiencing a wide range of different school types, from an experimental child-centred school in Washington DC to a Steiner school in rural Wiltshire to an all-girls’ comprehensive school in Bath. I hated school and my teachers and peers frequently hated me. In revenge, I became a historian of childhood and education in modern Britain so I could try and work out why school was so bad, and why children and teenagers are not listened to in British society. I did my PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and am now an Academic Track Fellow in History at Newcastle University.
Plenty of sociologists have gone into schools and tried to work out what kids think, but few have written about the experience as clearly, directly, and thoughtfully as Corrigan.
Corrigan did research with teenage working-class boys who attended two different schools in Sunderland in the early 1970s. He found, in short, that these boys did not like school; they especially did not like the fact that they were forced to go. This made Corrigan question why we make young people attend institutions that they hate, and which they do not benefit from.
Despite recent ‘progressive’ reforms in education, nothing had changed: ‘they didn’t like [school] when it was all maths and exams; they now didn’t seem to like it when it was all civics and projects’.
When I started college in 1974 as a young radical feminist I had zero interest in history—it was all wars and men. But in a course about the Russian Revolution I learned the most thrilling thing: historians don’t simply relay facts, they argue with one another. I fell in love, and I never looked back. I am especially fascinated by what societies label “unthinkable,” and how that shapes, contains, and controls radical ideas. I've always been intrigued by what is "out of the question" and then poke at it, see what lies underneath, and try to figure out why things remain, or are kept, invisible.
On one level, this is a book about housework in the pre-Civil War northern United States. Much more profoundly, it shatters ideas about unpaid labor in early industrial capitalism. It completely changed my—and many readers’—ideas of what constitutes “work,” what it means to contribute to a household economy, and how ideas about wages (and, especially, work done by men outside the home) obscured early capitalists’ dependence on women’s unwaged work. After reading this, you’ll never refer to “women who worked” and “women who didn’t” again. It should be essential reading not only for women’s historians, but for anyone interested in ideologies of labor, capitalism, and the history of work.
[Full disclosure: I met Jeanne Boydston on my second day of graduate school and we collaborated closely on our dissertations (later books). She was my best friend and best teacher until her much-too-early death in 2008.]
Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial "goodwife," valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer." This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic…
