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Sharp and thought-provoking, this memoir-meets-cultural criticism
upends the romanticism of the Great Plains and the patriarchy at
the core of its ideals. For many Americans, Kansas represents a
vision of Midwestern life that is good and wholesome and evokes the
American ideals of god, home, and country. But for those like Jessa
Crispin who have grown up in Kansas, the realities are much
harsher. She argues that the Midwestern values we cling to cover up
a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans,
women, and the economically disadvantaged. Blending personal
narrative with social commentary, Crispin meditates on why the
American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in our country's
mythic self-image. Ranging from The Wizard of Oz to race, from
chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots
to Utopian communities, My Three Dads opens on a comic scene in a
Kansas rent house the author shares with a (masculine) ghost. This
prompts Crispin to think about her intellectual fathers, her
spiritual fathers, and her literal fathers. She is curious to
understand what she has learned from them and what she needs to
unlearn about how a person should be in a family, as a citizen, and
as a child of god-ideals, Crispin argues, that have been
established and reproduced in service to hierarchy, oppression, and
wealth. Written in Crispin's well-honed voice-smart, assured,
comfortable with darkness-My Three Dads offers a kind of bleak
redemption, the insight that no matter where you go, no matter how
far from home you roam, the place you came from is always with you,
"like it or not."
When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life
to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and
no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she's still on the
road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of
being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor
complete surrender. The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that
journey-but it's also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin
travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of
places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their
origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James
struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on
and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting
revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky
starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves
biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into
a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place,
personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such
an attractive, even intoxicating proposition. Personal and profane,
funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the
nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to
brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a
bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?
Are women able to achieve anything they set their minds to? In How
to Suppress Women's Writing, award-winning novelist and scholar
Joanna Russ lays bare the subtle-and not so subtle-strategies that
society uses to ignore, condemn, or belittle women who produce
literature. As relevant today as when it was first published in
1983, this book has motivated generations of readers with its
powerful feminist critique. "What is it going to take to break
apart these rigidities? Russ's book is a formidable attempt. It is
angry without being self-righteous, it is thorough without being
exhausting, and it is serious without being devoid of a sense of
humor. But it was published over thirty years ago, in 1983, and
there's not an enormous difference between the world she describes
and the world we inhabit." -Jessa Crispin, from the foreword "A
book of the most profound and original clarity. Like all
clear-sighted people who look and see what has been much mystified
and much lied about, Russ is quite excitingly subversive. The study
of literature should never be the same again." -Marge Piercy
"Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion
and high wit." -Adrienne Rich
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