Ra Reads

What are you reading now? Do you have new work coming out? Here below is whats at the top of our book pile. Awesome books! Awesome writers!

Anna Burns, Milkman — winner of the 2018 Man Booker prize. New York Times interview with the author.

Madeline Miller, Circe — Wow, wow, wow. Madeline Miller martials great style to conjure the life of the so-called witch, Circe. Famous for turning unwanted visitors into pigs, as imagined by Miller, Circe was a scapegoated lesser sister of a large clan of deities.

Mary Beard, Women and Power:

London Review of Books sponsored talk by Mary Beard This talk opens with a discussion of the classic by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland.

 Professor Beard continues, discussing how ancient Greek political philosophy excluded women from power. 

At about minute 30 in the talk she vividly presents the dominant story of Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus. This is the myth that is re-imagined in Reborn Athena.

Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought — Alienation was the centerpiece of so many classics of the nineteenth century, chief among them Karl Marx, but also including the long tradition of Romanticism and Existential writers. Ekman reclaims alienation as a major theme, arguing that certain types of alienation of self from the body cross a line and are invariably harmful.

Anna Senghers, Transit — Migration and refugees dominate our 2019 politics. Senghers’ novel, Transit, is a brilliant first person narrative of dislocation and search for refuge in southern France during World War II.

Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts — This is an expert’s memoire on surviving childhood abuse and the long road of healing. The book comes with a trigger alert: do not read the first seven chapters if you are not prepared for heartbreaking scenes from Trujillo’s childhood. The story of healing includes the qualitative experience of trauma, dissociation, and dissociative identity disorder, as well as how-to guides on recognizing individuals in distress and helping them find support and safety.

Kate Manne, Down Girl : Kate Manne has accomplished the impossible. She has written an engaging and serious book on feminist theory that is also very popular. Read this book and you’ll see the world around you in a different way.

Jessica R. Piley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI — wait, you don’t believe that women’s sexuality is heavily policed? Not just criticized and controlled by family and cohorts, but actually the subject of major policing innovations? Then Piley’s book will open your eyes.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness — Le Guin’s writing is a miracle. The Left Hand of Darkness creates a world of snow and ice, where sexuality is transitory, and men have babies. Huge numbers of fans agree that this book changed everything.

Patricia Lockwood, PriestDaddy: Who knew about the rule that if a clergy man is married and then decides to become a Catholic priest, that this new priest can keep his wife? This obscure rule of ordination sets the stage for Patricia Lockwood’s deeply hilarious memoire. Her father, the Catholic priest, does not like wearing pants, but loves playing rock on his electric guitars. Lockwood is a poet of everyday wonder who gifts us with an art of laughter.

Annie Proulx, Heart Songs

Virginia Wolf, Three Guineas

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment– read for the perspectives on female enslavement and also for Roskolnikov’s dissociation as he walks around St. Petersburg.

Anne Carson, If Not, Winter; Fragments of Sappho — “an astonishing new translation” Boston Review 

“Eros shook my mind

like a mountain wind

falling on oak trees“

— fragment 47

Kate McPhelim Cleary, Like a Gallant Lady — written at the dawn of the 20th Century, set in rural Nebraska and bustling Chicago, this is a classic American novel.