Author of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music
with Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile
and Denise Oswald, editor and director of Soft Skull Press
The early nineties was the time of the riot grrl. Girls across the country put down gender roles and classic feminist critiques, and picked up instruments, zines, and revolutionary politics. For years the best bands were almost exclusively girl bands.
Author Marisa Meltzer is the coauthor of How Sassy Changed My Life (Faber, 2007). Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Elle, and Teen Vogue. She lives in Brooklyn. She'll be here with the legendary Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile and editor Denise Oswald to talk about the book, the music and the movement.
News of Note
Staff Picks
Bird by Bird
Written by Adjua
By Anne Lamott (Penguin, $15.00)
Thanks, Anne Lamott. Thanks for being so funny and so human and making an guide for new writers that leaves them with the sense that anyone can do this--that the road through writing is circuitous and imperfect and fun and very difficult but also very manageable if you look at it just right and that it is above all beloved and peopled with a wide range of kinds of writers who cherish and applaud its complexity. Thanks for being for honest and generous and open about all this. Really nice of you. Cheers.
Eating Animals
Written by Sam
By Jonathan Safran Foer (Little, Brown and Company, $25.99)
Coming from Foer, I expected Eating Animals to be perhaps too fey, too sentimental. But, no! Brimming with scenes and statistics, the book is clear-eyed, at once fierce and warmhearted. It is, undoubtedly, an important book.
Summertime
Written by Dustin
By J.M. Coetzee (Viking, $25.95)
Coetzee has been working since Elizabeth Costello or earlier to Trollope the contemporary novel so hard it'll knock the jade right out of our eyes. If anything was lacking from those efforts it was exactly what Coetzee finds here: the bravery, the damned gall, to place his fictional self at the center of the thing and wound it, himself, over and over again as he cuts away at the corpus of the book and the form. It's too good, this book, too ambitious to be bloodless.
Thanks, Anne Lamott. Thanks for being so funny and so human and making an guide for new writers that leaves them with the sense that anyone can do this--that the road through writing is circuitous and imperfect and fun and very difficult but also very manageable if you look at it just right and that it is above all beloved and peopled with a wide range of kinds of writers who cherish and applaud its complexity. Thanks for being for honest and generous and open about all this. Really nice of you. Cheers.
Coming from Foer, I expected Eating Animals to be perhaps too fey, too sentimental. But, no! Brimming with scenes and statistics, the book is clear-eyed, at once fierce and warmhearted. It is, undoubtedly, an important book.
Coetzee has been working since Elizabeth Costello or earlier to Trollope the contemporary novel so hard it'll knock the jade right out of our eyes. If anything was lacking from those efforts it was exactly what Coetzee finds here: the bravery, the damned gall, to place his fictional self at the center of the thing and wound it, himself, over and over again as he cuts away at the corpus of the book and the form. It's too good, this book, too ambitious to be bloodless.