74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives

in Books, Gender | March 13th, 2015

virginia woolf list

Pub­lic domain image orig­i­nal­ly tak­en by George Charles Beres­ford.

When Open Cul­ture recent­ly pub­lished Jorge Luis Borges’ self-com­piled list of 74 ‘great works of lit­er­a­ture’, com­mis­sioned by Argen­tine pub­lish­er Hys­pamer­i­ca, I, along with many oth­ers, saw one glar­ing issue in the oth­er­wise fan­tas­ti­cal­ly diverse list: it includ­ed no works by female writ­ers.

Whether inten­tion­al or not, the fact that women are exclud­ed from Borges’ note­wor­thies (and in 1985, no less) means that a vast num­ber of his­tor­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant books and writ­ings have been over­looked. While this ought not to dis­cred­it the works list­ed in any way, after wit­ness­ing the immense pop­u­lar­i­ty of Borges’ list I cer­tain­ly felt that for his selec­tion to be rel­e­vant today it need­ed to be accom­pa­nied by a list of works which had been over­looked due to the gen­der of their respec­tive authors.

I decid­ed to put a sug­ges­tion to a group of inter­na­tion­al women writ­ers, artists and cura­tors, and we com­piled our own list of 74 ‘great works of lit­er­a­ture’ — one just as var­ied, loose and sub­stan­tial as that of Borges, but made up sole­ly of writ­ers iden­ti­fy­ing as women or non-gen­der-bina­ry. Over two days we amassed many sug­ges­tions, which I’ve now curat­ed to form the list below. It’s not intend­ed to inval­i­date the orig­i­nal, but rather to serve as an accom­pa­ni­ment to high­light and encour­age a dia­logue on gen­der imbal­ances in cre­ative and intel­lec­tu­al realms, as well as to pro­vide a bal­ance by active­ly ‘equal­is­ing’ that of Jorge Luis Borges.

  1. Agatha Christie — The Mouse­trap
  2. Alber­tine Sar­razin — L’As­tra­gale
  3. Alice Walk­er — The Col­or Pur­ple
  4. Anaïs Nin — Lit­tle Birds
  5. Angela Carter — Nights at the Cir­cus
  6. Angela Davis — Are Pris­ons Obse­lete?
  7. Ani­ta Desai — Clear Light of Day
  8. Anne Car­son — Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Red
  9. Anne Frank — The Diary of a Young Girl
  10. Anne Sex­ton — Live or Die
  11. Arund­hati Roy — The God of Small Things
  12. Banana Yoshi­mo­to — Kitchen
  13. bell hooks — Ain’t I a Woman?
  14. Beryl Bain­bridge — Mas­ter Georgie
  15. Beryl Markham — West with the Night
  16. Buchi Emecheta — The Joys of Moth­er­hood
  17. Car­son McCullers — The Heart is a Lone­ly Hunter
  18. Char­lotte Bronte — Jane Eyre
  19. Char­lotte Roche — Feucht­ge­bi­ete
  20. Chris Kraus — I Love Dick
  21. Colette — Chéri
  22. Daphne du Mau­ri­er — Rebec­ca
  23. Doris Less­ing — The Gold­en Note­book
  24. Edith Whar­ton — Age of Inno­cence
  25. Eileen Myles — Infer­no
  26. Elfriede Jelinek — Women as Lovers
  27. Emi­ly Bronte — Wuther­ing Heights
  28. Flan­nery O’Con­nor — Com­plete Sto­ries
  29. Françoise Sagan — Bon­jour Tristesse
  30. George Eliot — Silas Marn­er
  31. Gertrude Stein — The Mak­ing of Amer­i­cans
  32. Gwen­dolyn Brooks — To Dis­em­bark
  33. Han­nah Arendt — The Human Con­di­tion
  34. Harp­er Lee — To Kill a Mock­ing­bird
  35. Hillary Man­tel — Wolf Hall
  36. Iris Mur­doch — The Sea, The Sea
  37. James Tip­tree Jr. — Her Smoke Rose Up For­ev­er
  38. Jean Rhys — Wide Sar­gas­so Sea
  39. Jhumpa Lahiri — Inter­preter of Mal­adies
  40. Joan Did­ion — Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem
  41. Joyce Car­ol Oats — A Blood­smoore Romance
  42. Jung Chang — Wild Swans
  43. Kate Zam­breno — Hero­ines
  44. Kathy Ack­er — Blood and Guts in High School
  45. Leono­ra Car­ring­ton — The Hear­ing Trum­pet
  46. Leslie Fein­berg — Stone Butch Blues
  47. Lor­rie Moore — Who Will Run the Frog Hos­pi­tal?
  48. Louise Erdrich — The Beet Queen
  49. Mar­garet Atwood — The Hand­maid­’s Tale
  50. Mar­guerite Duras — Le ravisse­ment de Lol V. Stein
  51. Mary Shel­ley — Franken­stein
  52. Mary Woll­stonecraft — A Vin­di­ca­tion of the Rights of Women
  53. Maya Angelou — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  54. Michelle Cliff — Abeng
  55. Miran­da July — No One Belongs Here More Than You
  56. Monique Wit­tig — Les Guéril­lères
  57. Murasa­ki Shik­ibu — Gen­ji Mono­gatari
  58. Muriel Spark — The Dri­ver’s Seat
  59. Octavia But­ler — Kin­dred
  60. Rachel Car­son — Silent Spring
  61. Rox­ane Gay — An Untamed State
  62. Sap­pho — Frag­ments
  63. Sara Strids­berg — Dar­ling Riv­er
  64. Sei Shō­nagon — The Pil­low Book
  65. Simone Weil — Grav­i­ty and Grace
  66. Sylvia Plath — The Bell Jar
  67. There­sa Hak Kyung Cha — Dic­tée
  68. Toni Mor­ri­son — Beloved
  69. Tove Jans­son — Mumintroll series
  70. Tsit­si Dan­garem­b­ga — Ner­vous Con­di­tions
  71. Ursu­la K Le Guin — The Left Hand of Dark­ness
  72. Vir­ginia Woolf — The Waves
  73. Willa Cather — The Song of the Lark
  74. Zadie Smith — On Beau­ty

Lulu Nunn is a Lon­don-based artist, writer, cura­tor and edi­tor of HOAX, an inter­na­tion­al jour­nal pub­lish­ing cre­ative work incor­po­rat­ing text. You can fol­low her at @lulu_nunn and HOAX at @hoaxpublication.

 

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Simone de Beauvoir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intellectual and a Feminist (1960)

in Gender, Philosophy, Radio | November 7th, 2014

Studs_Terkel_Simone_de_Beauvoir

Before Ira Glass, before Ter­ry Gross, before any num­ber of NPR per­son­al­i­ties and inter­net pod­cast­ers who these days bring us inter­view after fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with the great minds of our time, there was Studs Terkel. In addi­tion to his almost super­hu­man achieve­ments as an oral his­to­ri­an, film and TV actor, and Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author, Terkel pio­neered the radio inter­view with his Chica­go radio show, which ran for over four decades. “With no writ­ten ques­tions,” an NPR eulo­gy tells us, Terkel would “pick up a riff and impro­vise.” In 1960, he brought his jazz-like impro­vi­sa­tion­al style to Paris, to the apart­ment of exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­pher and nov­el­ist Simone de Beau­voir.

You can hear their con­ver­sa­tion, which spans near­ly half-an-hour, just below. De Beau­voir talks about her mid­dle-class upbring­ing, stu­dent days at the Sor­bonne, and devel­op­ment as a teacher and writer. She nar­rates her life his­to­ry in part because the first book of her three-vol­ume auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Mem­oirs of a Duti­ful Daugh­ter, had just been pub­lished, and the sec­ond, The Prime of Life, was near com­ple­tion. Already well-known for her philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal work with her part­ner Jean-Paul Sartre and fel­low exis­ten­tial­ists Mau­rice Mer­leau-Pon­ty and Albert Camus, and her ground­break­ing fem­i­nist study The Sec­ond Sex, de Beau­voir was enter­ing a lat­er phase in her career, a very reflec­tive one. Suit­ably, Terkel opens the inter­view by observ­ing that “lis­ten­ers would very much like to know how you got this way.”


“This way” refers to de Beauvoir’s fierce com­mit­ments to phi­los­o­phy, and to fem­i­nism. Terkel com­pares her to tran­scen­den­tal­ist and fem­i­nist pio­neer Mar­garet Fuller, “of Boston, a cen­tu­ry ago,” who “too trav­eled to var­i­ous parts of the world and saw what she want­ed to see, what she intend­ed to see, the truth.” Accord­ing­ly, their con­ver­sa­tion turns from per­son­al rem­i­nisces to de Beauvoir’s belief that the writer must be “involved,” or—as she clar­i­fies, “committed”—ethically, philo­soph­i­cal­ly, and polit­i­cal­ly. What this means for her is “not ignor­ing the rest of the world.” As she puts it, “there is no pos­si­ble neu­tral­i­ty… you have to com­mit your­self… and not to just be picked by peo­ple, pre­tend­ing you are picked by nobody.” She goes on, in a vein rem­i­nis­cent of Howard Zinn’s remark that one “can’t be neu­tral on a mov­ing train”:

You are always picked one way or anoth­er way. You always help this one or this oth­er: the poor against the wealthy or the wealthy against the poor—you have no choice. And if you pre­tend just to stay and do noth­ing, even stay­ing and doing noth­ing means some­thing and it goes to one of the camp or the oth­er.

Intrigued, Terkel asks “I’m doing noth­ing, this too is a mat­ter of choice, you say?” De Beau­voir explains: “there is only one thing: is to begin to speak your­self, your own way. You have to say ‘I am against it,’ ‘I am for it’ because if you say noth­ing, your silence is used by the one you are for or against.” It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view first because de Beau­voir is such an engag­ing speak­er and sec­ond­ly because Terkel is such an excel­lent lis­ten­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Philosophy’s Pow­er Cou­ple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir, Fea­tured in 1967 TV Inter­view

Pho­tos of Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beau­voir Hang­ing with Che Gue­vara in Cuba (1960)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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