"[...what Alice + Freda Forever] reveals—through Coe's sympathetic curation and commentary—is just how stifling late adolescence was for these women, caught in limbo between the leniency of childhood and the looming obligations of marriage and motherhood." Read More
"Ah, to be in Moscow in 1997, where the men are rich and virile, the women stiletto-clad sylphs, and the economic landscape infinitely fertile. With a fresh divorce and MBA in hand, the heroine of Vica Miller's Inga's Zigzags returns after a decade in New York to make her fortune in the capitalist playground Russia has become." Read More
"I think punk is perceived as a very aggressive, male thing, and that isn’t the whole story. First of all, the music is so uplifting, political and angry, I don’t know why all feminists don’t listen to it. Women in our culture have so much to be angry about, so why aren’t we embracing our anger more?"
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Amanda, the narrator of Lorrie Sprecher’s Pissing in a River, is a sort of human radio. The station format? Mostly...
Anatomy of a Girl Gang rotates among the first-person perspectives of its five teenage protagonists, members of the title gang, who form and disband with a bang over the course of a couple of seasons in Vancouver. Read More
"In Nochita, you've got a bunch of queens living in a single room in the Tenderloin. You've got a nerdy entrepreneur with brand-new black jeans and his pinball machine in his office. You've got fancy diners being accosted by nude revelers. It was the late nineties for sure. Now I think people save their nudity for Burning Man." Read More
The fragmented episodes of the picaresque plot are tied together by an underlying emotional narrative: that of Nochita trying to balance her mother's values with the need for self-preservation, feeling out the difference between softening and disintegration. Read More
This collection establishes Milks as a writer who can do just about anything but who will, one expects, keep doing the bidding of her macabre but humane imagination. Read More
