Elaine Blair

Far from the Seventies

Two memoirs by women remembering their youthful relationships with older men complicate the definition and implications of “consent.”

Toward a New Realism

Rachel Cusk’s latest experiment with the novel seems too influenced by a style of abstraction she deployed more successfully in her Outline trilogy.

Stop Infantilizing Moderates!

Democrats need a stronger message for the uncommitted voter.

Satire in a Skittish Time

In Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, a canceled writer never quite makes the case against the imperatives of cultural sensitivity.

Uninhibited Questions

In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton argues that after decades of exhaustive debate there is still something lacking in the discourse on pornography.

The Limits of Language

In the newsroom and in Hollywood, a new vernacular is emerging to describe sexual assault.

Questioning Desire

Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is rare in its ability to speak to a plural audience—queer and straight, multiracial and multigendered—with the assumption that we have some common interests in sex and dating even if we have varied experiences of them.

Quick Words, Long View

Like many of her narrators, Lydia Davis is a taxonomist of daily life.

Hemingway’s Consolations

It’s preposterous to think of Hemingway, with his best sellers and personal celebrity, as a writer’s writer. But is it possible that this might be the best description of his status today?

Janet Malcolm’s Subtle Comedy

Though famed, even feared, as a writer for the gimlet eye she brought to bear on her subjects, she sometimes turned that ironic gaze on herself.

Averted Intimacies

Bette Howland’s work—full of companionable narrators and dry intelligence—is part of a recent wave of reissues that tests the reach of the literary canon.

Designing Women

Making space for women to behave badly in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ and ‘The Favourite.’

As Bad as It Gets

Making Order of the Breakdown

Elena Ferrante’s ‘The Lying Life of Adults’

Learning to Fight

Ben Lerner’s ‘The Topeka School’

A Woman’s Work

With Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex,’ the modern feminist polemic was born.

Fighting for Her Life

‘Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin’

The Mind–Body Problem

Men’s Lib

John Burnside’s ‘On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist’

Fathers & Daughters

The unnerving comedy of Louis C.K.