Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion - Hardcover

Dean, Michelle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802125093 ISBN 13: 9780802125095

Publisher: Black Cat, 2018

Synopsis

The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work.

These ten womenDorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolmare united by what Dean calls sharpness, the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment.

Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.

About this title

About the Author

Michelle Dean is a journalist, critic, and the recipient of the National Book Critics Circles 2016 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. A contributing editor at the New Republic, she has written for the New Yorker, Nation, New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York Magazine, Elle, Harpers, and BuzzFeed. She lives in Los Angeles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Cat
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802125093
• ISBN 13: 9780802125095
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384