Isak

Book Review: Drifting House by Krys Lee

My review of Krys Lee's startling collection of stories, Drifting House, appears today in The Daily Beast. With a whole marching band's worth of international fanfare, this book that spans three countries will be published next Tuesday. Here is an excerpt from my take:

It is only coincidence that Drifting House debuts in the immediate wake of the death of Kim Jong-il. North Korea is transitioning to the rule of Kim Jong-un, and national mourning appears to be in part coerced. With Lee’s uncommon vantage on life in both Koreas and in the West, Drifting House offers a rare look at how damaging politics takes a personal turn, undermining even what we are able to call home.

[...]

This is a dark book. The greatest strength of these nine stories is Lee’s ability to locate them in the strange and brutal dimensions of lives distorted by dictatorship, exile, expatriation, and even hunger. Her stories also slide through the quiet violence of divorce, loneliness, parenthood, and erotic attraction. Ingrained sexism suffocates the ability of many characters to move through their cities and their homes as whole people. Korean veterans who fought for the American army in Vietnam are found neglected and amputated. Unemployment and withheld pensions unsteady South Korea after the 1997 financial crisis. Within the first four pages of “The Salaryman,” the title character learns that his job “no longer exists”. He retreats to Yeoido Park, where other men in suits sit on benches and read newspapers. They will spend each day here, and each day go home to tell their family that, yes, work was fine, “until there’s no money left in the bank account.” Later, the salaryman is among the depleted poor who congregate in Seoul Station, left to beg and ferociously defend what is thrown his way. “The green bills separate you from who you were the day before, and you want to live because you are a human being and you deserve it.”

Stay tuned for an Isak Interview with Lee coming soon!

Pan-African Journal Tilts Ideas of Journalism, Art

The Financial Times has a write-up of Chimurenga Chronicle, the South African-based journal founded by a Cameroonian named Ntone Edjabe. Writer Simon Kupar betrays head-slapping condescension in his review, but his enthusiasm is significant all the same:

I read it and was staggered. I’d always thought the zenith of journalism was The New Yorker, but in parts, Chimurenga is better.

It’s also more surprising: I love well-off media types from New York or London, but by now we do tend to know how they think. By contrast, reading Chimurenga you keep thinking, “Who knew?” Who knew that (as one article recounts) Bloemfontein has a literary scene of authors and critics writing for no money, guided by a Nigerian immigrant, and headquartered in an Afrikaans literature museum? Chimurenga changes your view of Africa, and of journalism.

What is particularly interesting is Kupar's conversation with Edjabe about the unexpected challenge in curating a journal of Africans writing about Africa:

Often, African writers and journalists take their lead from depictions of Africa by white foreigners. Edjabe says, “Whatever was considered an important book had to be validated first by the Guardian.”

Yet Chimurenga isn’t particularly anti-colonial. That time has passed. Edjabe says, “You are not writing about the white man. That’s not the person you grew up with. This is not the person I have a beef with. The guy I have a beef with is the shebeen owner.”

Alas, there is no mention of Kwani?, the journal out of Kenya that casts its net equally wide, risking not only literature, but tough narrative and visual journalism: see, for example, 24Nairobi, or Kenya Burning, the book on the post-election violence. Or the twin journals delving into the "epochal first 200 days of 2008" and exploring ethnicity in a travel piece set in Uganda. This is especially weird because Billy Kahora, the editorial director of Kwani, gets a shout-out in the Financial Times article for writing in Chimurenga about "the decaying Nairobi neighbourhood that ... turns into a metaphor for modern Kenya." And Kwani collaborates in the physicial publishing of Chimurenga, along with Nigeria's Cassava Republic Press. But there does happen to be a nice overlap: Kwani is launching Chimurenga in Nairobi this April, with an accompanying exhibition. Allies on the new frontier. Enough stories for all of us to tell.

Perhaps Chimurenga is art, or else it’s just as good. Like the new French magazine XXI, Edjabe has found something that print does better than the internet: long-form journalism. It makes you almost proud to be a journalist.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 1/29/2012

-- Yes. Penguin is publishing a gorgeous new edition of the Kama Sutra (pictured above), by Vatsyayana and translated by A.N.D. Haksar. Classic Penguin excerpts Book Five: "Why Women Get Turned Off." My favorite: "The elephant woman's concern: He is a hare type and his sexual impulse may be dull." Update: More from the artist, Malika Favre. She's incredible!

-- Adam Gopnik writes a thoughtful and nuanced essay in The New Yorker on "the caging of America," and the mystery of how social norms change.

-- A multimedia investigation from Dart Society Reports looks into solitary confinement and mass isolation. See also this story of performing Shakespeare in a Kentucky prison. I've begun facilitating a theater workshop at a men's prison in Macomb County, and I'm fascinated by what a different practice it is to use scripted material from a man who wrote centuries ago. (The workshop I'm part of is improv-based: we create our own scenes and stories, and we play a lot of games.) See also the famed This American Life episode, "Act V," on performing Hamlet in the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center.

-- Jessa Crispin writes about Erin Siegal's startling cross-border investigation into "finding Fernanda" and the horrific side of international adoption.

-- "Dismal Science at the Wall Street Journal." It seems the estimable newspaper is urging political candidates to ignore climate change, drawing from poor science to justify this.

-- Relatedly: I've begun to show my active support for the National Center for Science Education, which has gotten a lot of press lately for bringing on climate science alongside its existing campaign to support the teaching of evolution. The NCSE challenges the habit of false balance in the classroom, and public policy that compels teachers to deny the existence of climate change and evolution. Likewise, I'm on board with the Union for Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit that explores and advocates environmental solutions based on good science. Consider joining me in supporting their good work.

-- Oprah's website picks out favorite graphic novels for winter reading, including a graphic biography on Richard Feynman that I'd never heard of and would love to get my hands on.

-- "Nigerian authors, both home and abroad, need international fame to sell back home."

-- Fast Company: "Amazon's Plagiarism Problem."

-- Detroit poet Naomi Long Madgett wins the highest honor from the Kresge Foundation. She is the city's poet laureate.

-- Have I told you lately how much I adore the writing of Angela Carter, the woman who wields words like knives? Twenty years later, the story is not just written by her, but about her. The Guardian features a collection of the strange and lovely postcards she sent.

-- Two artists are looking to celebrate the life and work of Isthmus Zapotec artists and poets by creating a short-subject documentary film and a five-chapbook set of indigenous Mexican poetry -- all before the Zapotec language dies out.

-- Hari Kanzu writes of the madness at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, and why he read Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses aloud.

-- "They will say we are not here." On the anniversary of the murder of David Kato, the legendary gay rights activist in Uganda, The New York Times features the filmmakers who are trying to tell his story.

-- "Project Unbreakable" uses photography in startling and significant ways.

-- You can watch the adaptation of Jessica Valenti's book The Purity Myth into documentary here.

-- The wealth of podcasts from the National Endowment for the Arts includes, for example, the wisdom of storytellers like Azar Nafisi, Isabel Wilkerson, Anna Deveare Smith, translator Natasha Wimmer, and Jennifer Egan.

-- Rebecca Kosick, my friend from high school, has a poem published in The Awl, which begins: "Once in the dark cold and water-table bliss ..."

-- The National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists last week. Fiction nominees include Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot (my review, in part, and an audio excerpt)

-- "Are Women People?" A hilarious 1915 satire -- "a book of rhymes for suffrage times" -- is revived.

-- Roxane Gay on "the anger of the male novelist" in Salon. Elsewhere, Gay ticks of the lessons she's learned from starting a micropress.

-- The first American publisher of Roberto Bolaño talks Bolaño with The New Yorker. The magazine publishes the Chilean author's story "Labrynth" in the current issue.

-- Günter Grass' eulogy of fellow novelist and friend Christa Wolf speaks of "what remains." It has been translated from German for The New York Review of Books.

-- On poetry, in The Boston Review: "How description fosters connection."

-- Lynne Tillman 'reconsiders the genius of Gertrude Stein' in The New York Times.

-- "Inch by Inch." The Los Angeles Review of Books looks at the art of the newspaper column.

-- "Raymond Roussel and the upside of crazy." The Poetry Foundation revisits the French author of Impressions of Africa and New Impressions of Africa, both re-released last year in new translations. Three Percent does cartwheels.

-- The Guggenheim has put 65 modern art books online. An amazing resource.

GOOD Magazine Goes Bad

 

All right, I've seen this passed around over the last couple weeks, and my tongue can't sit still: GOOD Magazine published an article earlier this month last January (what's up with the weird revival of this piece in multiple circles of my life?!) about Detroit called "Forget Urban Farms. We Need a Wal-Mart." First of all, if any fact-checkers had done their job, the article's thesis would've been nullified at the outset: writer Richard C. Longworth perpetuates the myth that there are no food markets in Detroit. Indeed, part of the reason that urban farming has flourished here is because of the need for more diverse sources of fresh foods in the city. But the fact that there are few supermarket chains in the city does not equate into there being no markets at all. Longworth's intrepid reporting must have overlooked Honeybee La Colmena, the 43-acre Eastern Market, University Foods, Goodwells Natural Foods, Peaches & Greens, Mike's Fresh Market, Spartan Stores, La Fiesta, the Aldi over on Gratiot. For whatever it's worth, there is also a new Whole Foods opening soon in Midtown, which Longworth also neglects to mention.

Shame. Because whether Longworth overlooked the existing local, homegrown markets that distribute fresh foods across the city, or if he just wrote this article based on what he heard someone once say about Detroit, his thesis about our city being a "food desert" in desperate need of a Wal-Mart is undercut at the outset. Alas, he uses the myth to argue that Detroit should invite Wal-Mart into the city rent-free "but only if it committed to staying for, say, 10 years and to running nutrition classes for local residents." Setting aside unethical business and labor practices at Wal-Mart, it's tremendous that Longworth thinks those of us living in Detroit need Wal-Mart to teach us how to eat. Wal-Mart! Its slogan is "Save money. Live better." How does that qualify it to teach nutrition for local residents? Maybe if Longworth weren't so snide about "raising your own rutabagas in vacant lots" and realized that the city that has organically (ahem) developed one of the largest network of urban farms in the world -- presenting a significant and substantial alternative to traditional food systems -- might already know a thing or two about healthful food. Urban farmers should be teaching Wal-Mart, not the other way around. Independent food markets should be celebrated and supported, not erased. 

Look, I live here. I'm all about more sources of healthful, local produce in Detroit, or anywhere. But by mistaking the lack of big-box chain supermarkets with a lack of *any* kind of market or food distribution perpetuates a sloppy, annoying, and pervasive myth about Detroit. It's incredibly irritating that GOOD Magazine's "reporting" on behalf of Detroit ignores homegrown markets and wishes a damn Wal-Mart to come and feed us.

Before I get myself even more worked up, check out the excellent and much more thorough response to GOOD from James Griffioen, the author of the marvelous Sweet Juniper blog. His post got picked up everywhere from BoingBoing to The Atlantic. He writes, in part:

Richard C. Longworth (senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former Distinguished Visiting Scholar at DePaul University) writes in Good Magazine: “This seems incredible—a city of nearly 1 million people without a supermarket—but it’s true. No A&P. No Meijer’s. Not even a Wal-Mart. Any Detroiters who want fresh store-bought fruits and vegetables or wrapped meats have to get in their car and drive to the suburbs. That is, if they have a car.”

I’m tired of being nice about this. That is such utter and total bullshit.

I know the traditional media is suffering. Reporters are overworked and underpaid. Scholars like Mr. Longworth, too, might not have the research assistants they once enjoyed, but I would certainly expect anyone who makes an unequivocal statement like Detroit “is a city of nearly 1 million people without a supermarket” to at least have done a 4-second google search to confirm it (six seconds, I guess, if google isn’t your homepage). In four seconds, here’s what I found:

 

Each of those orange dots is a supermarket, not a liquor or discount store. ...

 

About the Image: Tomatoes I grew in my plot at the North Cass Community Garden.

Poem: "Elegy in Joy"

Elegy in Joy (excerpt)
By Muriel Rukeyser

We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.

The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.

 

 

"Elegy in Joy" appears in Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems, an anthology of nature poems published by New Directions. Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) has my vote for one of the most underrated poets of her century. A New York City native, she attended Vassar College and Columbia University. She is remembered as an especially socially engaged poet, heavily influenced by witnessing the Scottsboro trial and working at the defense clinic that handled its appeals. Not counting her 'collected' and 'selected,' she published at least eighteen books of poetry, as well as seven works of prose, four plays, and four anthologies of her letters. She also translated the poetry of Octavio Paz. Of Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich writes that she "was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair."

I'm Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf: 5 Things to Do On the Author's 130th Birthday

Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, and our world is better for it. Here is what you can do today to celebrate the brave and brilliant writer from Britain:

1. Read "How Should One Read a Book?", an essay Woolf included in The Common Reader, Second Series in 1926.
2. Engage with the incomparable A Room of Her Own Foundation, which supports women writers and artists with, for example, writing retreats, the Gift of Freedom award, the Orlando Prize, the To The Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize. Consider applying for one of the programs, donating your support, following the AROHO blog, or shopping the AROHO store to help support the organization's mission of realizing Woolf' simple but radical words: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.”
3. Listen to a rare recording of Woolf speaking, part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937 of the author's talk on "Craftsmanship."
4. Pick up a copy of Hermione Lee's celebrated biography, Virginia Woolf, which, appropriately, breaks out of the chronological cage of the form. (Yes, I just mentioned Lee and her biography of Edith Wharton yesterday ... this woman has taste).
5. Juxtapose your reading: dig into a collection of Woolf's lesser-known essay-writing about fiction alongside that novel of hers that you've been putting off: The Waves, perhaps, or Jacob's Room. Or one of her lesser-known novels: The Years, anyone?

 

Related:

• Speaking: Virginia Woolf (2011)
• Virginia Woolf: Not as Dumb as You Thought
• Book Review: Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas
• Video Review: Four Books
• Speaking: Virginia Woolf (2010)

10 Years Wonderful: Melville House

The great independent publisher Melville House is celebrating the first decade of its extraordinary life. What I love about Melville is its broad reach: it publishes journalism, fiction, translations, science fiction, poetry, philosophy, graphic novels, an international crime series, and history, all without sacrificing an inch in literary quality and fine taste. Melville makes a point of elevating the work of overlooked artists, both living and historical, and has discovered its fair share of significant emerging authors. As well: it makes brilliant use of design for both its books and website. Among the reads you can thank Melville for are:

• Debt: The First 5,000 Years - David Graeber
• The Lake - Banana Yoshimoto, tr. Michael Emmerich (my review)
• The Art of the Novella series, including Fanfarlo by Charles Baudelaire and The Lifted Veil by George Eliot
• The Collected Stories - Heinrich Boll, tr. Leila Vennewitz and Breon Mitchell
• Is Journalism Worth Dying For? Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya, tr. Arch Tait
• After Midnight - Irmgard Keun, tr. Anthea Bell
• Nairobi Heat - Mukoma wa Ngugi
• A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial - H.L. Mencken
• The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits - Lewis Carroll
• The Castle in Transylvania - Jules Verne, tr. Charlotte Mandell

The couple that founded the Brooklyn-based Melville House -- one of whom is Dennis Loy Johnson, who has long written the Moby Lives blog -- are profiled here. Neither of them had any background in publishing before they launched head-first into this venture, though they each brought a wealth of passionate literary training to the table. This year, the publisher releases its 200th book: The Fallback Plan, a first novel by Leigh Stein.

Love and the Occupation

Make a point of discovering the new album "Love and the Occupation" by Jacob Corvidae, an artist living in Detroit. It is available to you for free, one track at a time. Two songs have been released so far, and it is the kind of many-textured music that gets more and more interesting the more you listen to it. This is thoughtful music that incites your attention -- more than that: your active engagement. With origins rooting back before the Occupy Movement was founded, this album finds resonance in both the personal and political. What occupies our time? Our attention? Our hearts? "Love and the Occupation" has a sort of clandestine fire about it. Go find the heat.

Find out more about Jacob Corvidae and "Love and the Occupation" here, and follow the album as it opens up to us here.

Edith's Birthday

 

After being a skeptic of Edith Wharton, probably holding a distorted impression of her writing based on her old-fashioned name and stuffy era, I fell madly in love. (It was an experience I began to exuberantly chronicle here, here, and here). I care for The House of Mirth best, but The Age of Innocence had me rapt as well. Her New York Stories sit on my bookshelf like a pile of gold. Wharton writes with rare wisdom and wit. She writes about class like no one else can; with ease, she both satirizes social pretensions, while keeping her sharp eye on the very desperate stakes of money (and, relatedly, for her time in particular, marriage).

Today is the author's 150th birthday. Edith was born into the well-off Jones family in New York City -- the very family that the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses' is said to have come from. She married, wrote fiercely and frequently, established herself as a designer and decorator with her famed home at The Mount, and traveled. When she divorced shortly after Ethan Frome was published in 1911, she moved to France to live out the rest of her life. During World War I, she immersed herself in relief efforts, which in part inspired her editing of The Book of the Homeless, an eclectic collection of poems, essays, pictures, and (rumor has it; I haven't seen a copy), erotica. Contributos included Joseph Conrad, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Santayana, Igor Stravinsky, and W.B. Yeats; Theodore Roosevelt wrote the introduction. For her relief work, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor and other decorations.

In 1921, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, her novel of desire. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer. Edith Wharton died in 1937 after a stroke, and she is buried in France. Altogether, she wrote forty books in forty years, including novels, short stories, poetry, anthologies, and nonfiction on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel.

In The New York Times, Wharton is viewed through the legacy of strategic cross-Atlantic courtships. A photo essay walks us through Wharton's life in Old New York. The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, is kicking off a year-long celebration of Wharton and her writing. The Telegraph pays tribute to Wharton as a "genius on sex, love, and class." Hermione Lee's biography of Edith Wharton was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and remains on my must-read list.

I like the idea of feeling grateful for Wharton on the occasion of her birthday by spending a bit of time with her own words. While best served as part of the whole novel, here are a few excerpts that had me reaching for my pen and little not-so-blank book while I was reading Wharton.

From The Age of Innocence:

But when he had gone the brief round of her, he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of facetious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and lon-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

---

It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of himself for finding it singularly childish. No doubt she simply echoed what was said for her; but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday, and he wondered at what age "nice" women began to speak for themselves.

---

Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no  need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

On the subject of "Hearth-Fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversations always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Wimsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiousities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.

 

Image Credit: Joe Sheriffius

Un-Worldly Literature

I swear, Tim Parks' blogging for the New York Review of Books is getting more and more brilliant. Most recently, he questions the reading of world literature that, in emerging from a wide swath of geography and chronology, is tends to be unhooked from an understanding of the particular context of each book.

Or rather, the only relevant context is the human race, planet Earth, post 5000 BCE, circa. The stress will be on the essential and universal rather than the local and accidental; the subtext, as David Shields insists in a recent polemic on contemporary fiction in Little Star (excerpted here), that “Every man contains within himself the entire human condition.”

But does he? Or she?

Parks particularly positions this idea into the work of writers. He teaches in Italy, and his writing students have an exchange program with writers in England. Many that he tutors are learning literary translation, which makes this question of disembodied world literature particularly interesting. According to Parks, as young writers struggle to find their voices, "a style that might imbue what they write with a sense of necessity and urgency," he is reminded of the purpose that literary canons once served.

One of the functions of a canon or a national tradition has been to provide a familiar group of texts, stretching from past to present, constitutive of one’s own community and within which a writer could establish his position, signalling his similarity and difference from authors around and before him. Nuance is more telling than absolute novelty; the more the similarities, the more what difference there is will count. Hence, it might be more useful for a young English writer to be building up a knowledge of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell, Barbara Pym, along with the writers they drew on and the later generation they inspired, than to be mixing Chinua Achebe with Primo Levi. This is not of course a reflection on the stature of these writers—it’s simply an observation that many of my students have read so disparately that they have little awareness of a body of texts tackling their own culture and within which they can place their writing.

I rather hope Parks does a part-two on this essay, but shifts from the vantage of writers on world literature and looks at the experience of the pure reader.

39 Years Roe: Read Up

 

 

 

 

Thirty-nine years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, which upheld abortion rights on the basis of privacy and the limits of government. Hardly a matter of history, the decision reverbs throughout all our lives, certainly in the more-than-you-think number of people who obtain abortions, but also in present-day politics.

We saw a great number of our leaders this year step outside their priorities of jobs and the economy to champion the defunding of Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics. (My post: "... For This Important Message.") The Guttmacher Institute, which created the above video, also crunched the numbers: in all fifty states, legislators introduced a breathtaking 1,100 reproductive rights provisions in 2011, the highest number ever. Most of them restrict abortion, though -- and this is telling -- a great number of them limit contraception and education. Last year, North Dakota joined 37 states that legally mandate abstinence-only education in schools. Montana eliminated the family planning line item in the state budget. New Hampshire and Texas cut family planning funding by 57% and 66%, respectively. Arizona now prohibits the use of public funds to train abortion providers at state universities. It also prohibited residents from seeking a tax deduction for donations to orgs that provide, promote or makes referrals for abortion. (This measure is currently enjoined by U.S. District Court.)

Five states enacted provisions last year that require women seeking an abortion to obtain counseling that includes misinformation about the procedure; that makes for a total of 16 states that "require that women be given misleading information prior to having an abortion." Tennessee, which already had a fetal homicide statute, expanded it to apply to injury to a fetus throughout pregnancy, not just after viability -- which puts women who experience miscarriages under criminal suspicion. Also, Indiana and Kansas adopted provisions that require women to be told that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception before she can have an abortion. It is now mandated that a woman in North Dakota be told that abortion causes breast cancer. A new requirement in North Carolina mandates that women be told that having an abortion can impair their future fertility.

The litany goes on and on. Our legislators are busy!

Look, I've made dramatic shifts in my own thinking about abortion in my life. I get that reasonable people can have different experiences and opinions about Roe v. Wade. That's actually why I appreciate the morality behind "choice" -- as in a democracy, there is room for people to disagree. (Exhale is a wonderful organization that honors this diversity under a "pro-voice" ideal.) At the same time, I believe that given the prominence of reproductive rights in contemporary politics -- and its affect on real people's lives -- educating ourselves about the scope of what is unfolding is crucial.

One of my favorite ways to educate myself is to read up.

So here goes: some of the most engaging, interesting, and nuanced writing on reproductive rights, particularly as they intersect with politics. I may add to this throughout the day, and I encourage you to make your own suggestions to me (including reads you believe I may disagree with!). Take an afternoon, or ten, and dive in. See what you think.

Articles/Radio:

• "Birthright." Jill Lepore, The New Yorker. See also Lepore's interview on NPR's "Fresh Air": "How Birth Control and Abortion Became Politicized".
• "Teaching Good Sex." Laurie Abraham, The New York Times
• "Nursing Grudges: Why Do We Only Protest the Moral Convictions of Some Health Workers?" Dahlia Lithwick, Slate.
• The incomparable Scarleteen: an exhaustive site on "sex ed for the real world"
• "The Next Front in the Abortion Wars: Birth Control." Irin Carmon, Salon.
• "Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern." Martin Luther King, Jr., 1965.
• Gorgeous art posters on reproductive rights that take a "people's history" slant
• "Lucky Girl." Bridget Potter, Guernica.
• "Listening Beyond Life and Choice." Frances Kissling featured on PRI's "On Being" with Krista Tippett. Kissling is the former head of Catholics for Choice.

Supreme Court Decisions:

• Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which established the constitutional right to privacy. It struck down a Connecticut state law that prohibited birth control even for married couples.
• Roe v. Wade (1971), which was decided simultaneously with Doe v. Bolton to uphold the right to privacy under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• "Interview: Sarah Weddington." TIME interviews the 26-year-old lawyer who argued in the Roe. v. Wade case before the Supreme Court. Martha Burk also interviews Weddington for the PRX show "Equal Time with Martha Burk."

Books:

• The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World - Michelle Goldberg. See also my interview with Goldberg here.
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty - Dorothy Roberts
• In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution - Susan Brownmiller
• S.E.X: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College - Heather Corinna
• Our Bodies, Ourselves - Boston Women's Health Book Collective

 

Related:

• 37 Years of Roe v. Wade: Winter, Discontent
• 36 Years of Roe v. Wade: In Thanks
• Say You Want Revolution