Madeleine Schwartz

It’​s hard not to read the title of Mieko Kawakami’s first novel, Breasts and Eggs, as some kind of provocation. I keep seeing them in front of me – a perverted breakfast, breasts over easy, with a side of ketchup. What are they doing there, those breasts and eggs?

Does​ Sophie Mackintosh believe we would be better off in a world without men? When her first novel, The Water Cure, came out several months after the height of the #MeToo movement, a number of reviews focused on the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ made real. On a remote island, or what they think is a remote island, three sisters – Grace, Lia and Sky – have been helping...

Only one​ of Kathleen Collins’s stories was published before she died of breast cancer at the age of 46 in 1988. Only one of her screenplays was made into a film. That film, Losing Ground, was completed but not given a full release in her lifetime. The world did not, and still does not, leave doors open for black women artists. ‘I wouldn’t blame you for being a...

Véra Nabokov​, Nora Joyce, Ann Malamud, Vivien Eliot – the list of literary victim-wives is long, but none commands as much attention as Zelda Fitzgerald. Recent years have treated her husband unkindly, or maybe truthfully, exposing more drinking and more affairs, but decades after Zelda’s death in a North Carolina asylum, her cult is teeming with new acolytes. Christina...

‘She​ was famous for being neglected,’ Lorna Sage once said of Christina Stead. In 1955, Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the New Republic, described trying to obtain Stead’s address from her last American publisher. Only a few years before the New Yorker had called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia...

‘I don’t think​ I like reality very much,’ Shirley Jackson used to say in her lectures on writing. It was an idea she returned to often. ‘Just being a writer of fiction gives you an absolutely unassailable protection against reality; nothing is ever seen clearly or starkly, but always through a thin veil of words.’ By the time she gave such talks in the...