Here are 100 books that Intercourse fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a writer and avid reader of “domestic horror”: stories about the uncomfortable, inhospitable spaces that women inhabit in everyday life. In the past, I worked as a crime victim’s advocate for a national nonprofit. I became a writer because I believe in the power of expression and truth as healing agents. I am passionate about the issues of trauma and taboo, mental illness and motherhood, and the institutional power structures that constrict us all. My short stories, poetry, and essays have been published in many journals and literary magazines, including Witness, Ninth Letter, Identity Theory, Epiphany, Literary Mama, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere.
Sylvia Plath is having a moment, and it’s about time. In recent years, I’ve seen an outpouring of Plath-inspired literature and scholarship, so much of which I’ve devoured and would love to include on this list. But let’s start at the source: the inimitable, the iconic, the patron saint of pissed-off women everywhere.
This is Plath at her most intense and raw. The restored version reinstates her original selection and arrangement before it was infamously edited by Ted Hughes. It’s a work of art and a piece of history.
Ariel, first published in 1965, contains many of Sylvia Plath's best-known poems, written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before her death in 1963. Including poems such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Edge', 'Daddy' and 'Paralytic', it was the first of four collections to be published by Faber & Faber. Ariel is the volume on which Sylvia Plath's reputation as one of the most original, daring and gifted poets of the twentieth century rests.
'Since she died my mother has been dissected, analysed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated. It comes down to this: her own words describe…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a writer and avid reader of “domestic horror”: stories about the uncomfortable, inhospitable spaces that women inhabit in everyday life. In the past, I worked as a crime victim’s advocate for a national nonprofit. I became a writer because I believe in the power of expression and truth as healing agents. I am passionate about the issues of trauma and taboo, mental illness and motherhood, and the institutional power structures that constrict us all. My short stories, poetry, and essays have been published in many journals and literary magazines, including Witness, Ninth Letter, Identity Theory, Epiphany, Literary Mama, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere.
The title says it all. In this short story collection, simply being a woman is a kind of emergency. These stories are slow burns, full of interiority and character development. The devastation is in the details: tiny moments that reveal deep-seated fears and barely acknowledged longings.
Each story is full of quiet revelations: there’s subtlety in the dangers these women face; in fact, it’s woven into the very fabric of their lives.
A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something's lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter's former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager.
In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life-as well as the guilt that stalks those…
I am a writer and avid reader of “domestic horror”: stories about the uncomfortable, inhospitable spaces that women inhabit in everyday life. In the past, I worked as a crime victim’s advocate for a national nonprofit. I became a writer because I believe in the power of expression and truth as healing agents. I am passionate about the issues of trauma and taboo, mental illness and motherhood, and the institutional power structures that constrict us all. My short stories, poetry, and essays have been published in many journals and literary magazines, including Witness, Ninth Letter, Identity Theory, Epiphany, Literary Mama, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere.
This unconventional novel (a mixture of poetry, essay, fiction, and letters) uses its unusual form to expound upon the messiness of childbirth and early motherhood.
This book chronicles a time and space that is difficult to pin down, giving it the feel of a wholly new art form. I was blown away by this unflinching depiction of the tensions between motherhood, marriage, and the creative life. It is one of the few books I've read that refuses to soften maternal ambivalence and anxiety for its readers, and I am grateful for it.
After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write.
My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms-fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters-to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature."Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn's book, you…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a writer and avid reader of “domestic horror”: stories about the uncomfortable, inhospitable spaces that women inhabit in everyday life. In the past, I worked as a crime victim’s advocate for a national nonprofit. I became a writer because I believe in the power of expression and truth as healing agents. I am passionate about the issues of trauma and taboo, mental illness and motherhood, and the institutional power structures that constrict us all. My short stories, poetry, and essays have been published in many journals and literary magazines, including Witness, Ninth Letter, Identity Theory, Epiphany, Literary Mama, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere.
The sordid history of women’s bodies and the institution of medicine is a focal point of dread for me. This is a terse study of the long history of misogyny in the medical field. It powerfully illustrates how women’s bodies have acted as sites for gender-based power struggles, along with the compounding overlay of class and race.
This book angered and inspired me, as the history it portrays is shockingly relevant to today’s discourse on reproductive rights. It’s scary as hell.
From prescribing the "rest cure" to diagnosing hysteria, the medical profession has consistently treated women as weak and pathological. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's concise history of the sexual politics of medical practices shows how this biomedical rationale was used to justify sex discrimination throughout the culture, and how its vestiges are evident in abortion policy and other reproductive rights struggles today.
Two weeks before qualifying for his 30-year pension benefits, my father lost his job. This corporate reduction in labor force introduced a debilitating shame to the displaced breadwinner and a new level of precarity to a family with 3 of 4 kids in college. It also shattered the myth that capitalism rewarded individual initiative and hard work. Understanding inequities and the manifold structural forces that can determine an individual’s life prospects became a focal point of my graduate studies and my four decades of university teaching. Using race, gender, and sexuality as analytical tools, my research enriched traditional approaches to political economy.
In my youth, the “Age of Discovery” launched by Columbus’s 1492 arrival in the “New World” and perpetuated by European imperialism through the mid-20th century, was characterized as a “civilizing mission.”
McClintock’s superb interdisciplinary scholarship provides a markedly different assessment of settler colonialism, a global order that legitimates white, male control of colonized women and men. Attained by violence, these stratified systems are sustained through capitalist economic relations secured by “voluntary” contract.
The book illuminates how the invention of race not only enabled European men to own and manage 85% of the earth’s surface by the end of the 19th century but also police the “dangerous classes,” the working class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gays and lesbians, criminals, and anti-imperialists within their own nations.
Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.
Over the past decade, I’ve become very concerned with the direction authoritarianism is taking human society. It’s a global problem that now infects America, leaving us with a partisan divide we may not be able to bridge. My recommended books helped me understand the situation and how one might speak out against this negative force effectively. Convinced that bombarding readers with facts alone is useless, I chose to provide a novel that is interesting and captivates readers. My goal is to entice readers to press on to the end regardless of their political persuasion, in hopes that along the way some thought will be devoted to the issues raised.
Doctor Konner gives an intriguing anthropologist’s view of animal development, tracing the introduction of genders, illustrating examples of male and female dominance, and describing the impact of evolution on human behavior. While he gives many fascinating examples of normal and abnormal sex and gender behavior in the animal world, what interested me most was his coverage of the shift from millions of years as hunter/gatherers to today’s complex male-dominated society, with its attendant aggression. One point made is that the very different male and female roles caused brain development variation which typically makes females more tuned to communication and cooperation. He suggests the salvation of human society ultimately requires a strong female role.
In Women After All, anthropologist Melvin Konner traces the arc of evolution to explain the relationships between women and men. Drawing on colourful examples from the natural world-the octopus, the black widow spider and coral reef fish, which can switch from male to female in a single reproductive career-he sheds light on our biologically different human identities and the poignant exceptions that challenge the male/female divide.
We meet hunter-gatherers in Botswana whose culture gave women a prominent place, inventing the working mother and respecting women's voices around the fire. History upset this balance as a dense world of war fostered…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I hold degrees in history and social science with a focus on women’s history at the turn of the century. I’ve studied the hysteria pandemic and its lasting results for over a decade. As someone who struggles with depression, anxiety, and the effects of psychological abuse, I find I know these women all too well. As a writer, I’ve been inspired by other classic gothic novels like Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. In addition to writing novels, I’m also a blogger and marketing consultant in southern California where I live with my blind dog, Mr. Magoo.
The Yellow Wallpaper inspired my book and brand. Gilman not only defined the madwoman of Gothic literature by writing one of the most haunting and empowering stories of the 19th century, but she also lived it. Her experience inspired her story and exposed the horror of hysteria treatments. This story inspired me because I could relate to Gilman and her main character. Though hysteria is no longer a recognized condition and women have gained many more rights, ideologies left over from the hysteria panic still creep in our culture and generational memory. Women are still called crazy. The assumption that women are emotionally unstable is still used to discredit, invalidate and control women. In an era where women couldn’t fight for their rights as we do, Gilman found her power by embracing madness, and so do I.
Best known for the 1892 title story of this collection, a harrowing tale of a woman's descent into madness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote more than 200 other short stories. Seven of her finest are reprinted here. Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "Turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naïve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish…
I’ve worked in journalism, politics, and public policy for 30-plus years and watched as the extreme voices gained the most traction on either side of a debate. On social media, these minority views often dominate the discussion. 48 States is a stand-alone novel highlighting the problems of extremist viewpoints in a civil society. I also have another book series that features a political consultant who discovers she's a witch and joins a secret society that uses magic to manipulate elections to protect humanity. Bottom line: if I can’t fix political discourse for a living, I can write science fiction novels that contemplate how to do it.
I just flat out love this writer. Set in a galaxy far, far away, Jesse Mihalik has created a space opera featuring a set of daring siblings with superhuman powers who must battle to survive the cutthroat culture connected to their social status and the machinations of their power-hungry father who is always looking for advantageous alliances, regardless of the consequences to his children. I enjoy that she creates these amazing heroines who are vulnerable but fierce at the same time and they all ultimately find partners who love strong women.
"Polaris Rising is space opera at its best, intense and addictive, a story of honor, courage, betrayal, and love. Jessie Mihalik is an author to watch."--Ilona Andrews, #1 New York Times bestselling author
A space princess on the run and a notorious outlaw soldier become unlikely allies in this imaginative, sexy space opera adventure-the first in an exciting science fiction trilogy.
In the far distant future, the universe is officially ruled by the Royal Consortium, but the High Councillors, the heads of the three High Houses, wield the true power. As the fifth of six children, Ada von Hasenberg has…
I am passionate about in-depth character development because it’s something I strive for in my own writing. Humans are very complex creatures who are capable of a full range of responses on any given day, moment, or set of circumstances. Offering readers an opportunity to consider what motivates characters to behave in the ways they do makes a story worth sinking your teeth into. I think making these kinds of considerations about characters who are not real also opens up our collective ability to exercise our empathy muscles in real life. These days, we need that more than ever.
I cannot say enough about this book. I’m a huge fan of anything written by Buck, but this is probably my favorite, primarily for the empowering feminist themes. I love how Buck allows the characters in this story to interact with one another in ways that are subtle but powerful.
This book invites readers to come along with the main character, Madame Wu, as she challenges a rigid set of societal expectations with a clarity that is as unapologetic as it is downright refreshing. Humans are complex creatures, capable of a full range of desires and thinking, and I love it when writers explore this deeply.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
As a child, I gobbled up Grimm’s fairytales, but I always wondered: Why do the princesses get such a terrible deal? This question gnawed at me. So, when I grew up and became an author, I wrote The Princess and the Prick to set the world right. Feminism can be such a terribly serious topic, but sexism is ridiculous! So, let's laugh at it! The books I've recommended are all short and brilliantly funny. They make fantastic gifts and will have everyone laughing at the patriarchy in no time. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Mansplaining is as old as the world, and we have the paintings to prove it! I loved discovering this great gift book in which the authors pair famous paintings with speech bubbles to drive home their point of modern-day sexism.
It has made me look at old paintings in a different way and wonder what the people in there are REALLY thinking.
Men to Avoid in Art and Life pairs classical fine art with modern captions that epitomize the spirit of mansplaining.
This hilarious book perfectly captures those relatable moments when a man explains to a woman a subject about which he knows considerably less than she does.
Situations include men sharing keen insight on the female anatomy, an eloquent defense of catcalling, or offering sage advice about horseback riding to the woman who owns the horse.
* These less qualified men of antiquity dish out mediocrity as if it's pure genius * For the women who have endured overbearing men over…
