Regina Marler

Teacher’s Pet

Jane DeLynn’s autobiographical novel In Thrall recounts a same-sex affair between a teenager and her closeted English teacher in the early 1960s, a time when exposure could be more traumatic than exploitation.

Avant-Garde Égalité

Gabriële Buffet-Picabia tended to minimize her part in the development of modern art, but a new book positions her as a central figure. 

From Riches to Rags to Renown

Like so many of the adventures recounted in their anthologies of fairy tales, the Grimm brothers’ journey to lasting fame might never have begun had they not suffered a striking reversal of fortune in childhood.

The Cuttlefish’s Play

Richard Powers’s Playground does for oceans what his 2018 novel The Overstory did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human.

Culpability and the Culture

In Francine Prose’s memoir 1974, she recounts a brief, intense relationship with one of the men behind the leak of the Pentagon Papers.

Unfrozen

In Ramona Ausubel’s latest novel, The Last Animal, the main characters move between poles of loss and recovery as climate grief blends into personal grief.

‘Joan Doesn’t Give a Damn’

The San Francisco painter Joan Brown snubbed success at every turn.

Behind the Mask

After rejecting the gendered fixations of the Surrealist movement, Meret Oppenheim embraced an androgynous art of the unconscious.

The Snoop

“The easiest part of writing criticism is the immersive reading in and around the subject. The hardest part is the opening paragraph.”

Uncommon Women

In Andrea Barrett’s stories, female characters with at least one foot in the sciences have to pick sides and contend with radical changes.

The Bucolic Heroic

Catherine Hewitt’s Art Is a Tyrant is a full depiction of the nineteenth-century painter Rosa Bonheur’s unconventional life.

The Emergency Everywhere

In Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea and Maxim Loskutoff’s Ruthie Fear, young women navigate danger from men and from themselves, against a backdrop of relentless climate catastrophe.

Carson McCullers: A Connoisseur of Yearning

Al & Georgia & Beck & Paul

Two recent books examine the lives of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe and their astonishingly productive marriage.

Shock Artistry

Abbott’s Absence

‘Every Time I Look at It I Feel Ill’

Pictures of the Jazz Age

A glittering roster sat for portraits by Berenice Abbott, including Jean Cocteau, Djuna Barnes, and André Gide

In the Cauldron at Midnight

The life and work of the Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington