Women's history month | Women writers | Fiction
Our critics chose 15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.
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| Corey Olsen |
In 2016, the feminist press Emily Books
held a panel in Brooklyn titled, a bit cheekily, “What Is Women’s
Writing?” There was no consensus, much laughter and a warm, rowdy vibe.
Eileen Myles read from a memoir in progress and Ariana Reines read a
poem, wearing a dress with a pattern of a city on fire. All of this felt
exactly right.
But even if it puts
your teeth on edge to see “women’s writing” cordoned off in quotes, you
can’t deny the particular power of today’s women writers — their
intensity of style and innovation. The books steering literature in new
directions — to new forms, new concerns — almost invariably have a woman
at the helm, an Elena Ferrante, a Rachel Cusk, a Zadie Smith.
For
Women’s History Month, The Times’s staff book critics — Dwight Garner,
Jennifer Szalai and myself, Parul Sehgal — sat down together to think
about these writers who are opening new realms to us, whose books
suggest and embody unexplored possibilities in form, feeling and
knowledge.
As we put together a
reading list, we introduced a few parameters, for sanity’s sake. We
confined ourselves to books written by women and published in the 21st
century. And we limited our focus to fiction, but not without some
grief. Memoir has emerged as a potent political and literary force in
recent years (see the terrain-shifting work of Maggie Nelson, for example). And poets like Claudia Rankine, Solmaz Sharif and Tracy K. Smith are some of the most distinctive voices working today.
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