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
Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen
Written by Cheryl
By Marilyn Chin (W.W. Norton, $13.95)
Marilyn Chin turns Chinese fables on their head with her updated, saucy, vitriolic rendering of the adventures of two twin Asian-American sisters--Mei-Ling and Moonie--who rebel against the classical prescriptives of their cleaver-wielding grandmother. Alternately hilarious and shocking, these tales will rock your world.
If I Were Another
Written by Dustin
By Mahmoud Darwish (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00)
After Mahmoud Darwish's recent death a number of books of his poetry and letters were issued by small presses. They are all worthwhile, I think, but I have no problem telling you that this book eclipses the rest. Darwish's voice can sound so stilted in some translations, so flavorless in others. In Joudah--himself a remarkable poet--he has his perfect translator: those rhythms become baroque hints of a classical Arabic idiom beside tense modernist lacunae. There is the exile here, yes, but the aging genius, too.
Out of Sheer Rage
Written by Sam
By Geoff Dyer (Picador, $15.00)
Page per page, sentence by sentence, this is by far the funniest book I've read in a great while. It is a book about not writing a book, specifically about not writing a "sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence." Dyer is exuberant in his indecisions, his distractions and worries. He turns hemming and hawing into art forms, and procrastination into, well, a book. One can only be thankful that this is the one that got written.
Marilyn Chin turns Chinese fables on their head with her updated, saucy, vitriolic rendering of the adventures of two twin Asian-American sisters--Mei-Ling and Moonie--who rebel against the classical prescriptives of their cleaver-wielding grandmother. Alternately hilarious and shocking, these tales will rock your world.
After Mahmoud Darwish's recent death a number of books of his poetry and letters were issued by small presses. They are all worthwhile, I think, but I have no problem telling you that this book eclipses the rest. Darwish's voice can sound so stilted in some translations, so flavorless in others. In Joudah--himself a remarkable poet--he has his perfect translator: those rhythms become baroque hints of a classical Arabic idiom beside tense modernist lacunae. There is the exile here, yes, but the aging genius, too.
Page per page, sentence by sentence, this is by far the funniest book I've read in a great while. It is a book about not writing a book, specifically about not writing a "sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence." Dyer is exuberant in his indecisions, his distractions and worries. He turns hemming and hawing into art forms, and procrastination into, well, a book. One can only be thankful that this is the one that got written.