Women authors Archives

Women authors

The Witchcraft We Need

by Elena Ferrante,Translated by Ann Goldstein,

Adapted from the essay “Histories, I,” included in the collection In the Margins, which will be published this month by Europa. Translated from the Italian. Anyone with literary ambitions knows…

These Precious Days

by Ann Patchett,

Tell me how the story ends

“If Only I Could Begin Again!”

by Vivian Gornick,

The mystery of a writer’s métier

Trash, Rock, Destroy

by Lauren Elkin,

Is Virginie Despentes the French writer America needs?

Higher Yearning

by Flannery O’Connor,

From a journal that Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) kept during her second year at Georgia State College for Women. The journal entries were published in Issue 94 of Image Journal. Regina…

A Dream Preferred

by Anaïs Nin,

By Anaïs Nin (1903–77), from diary entries written in March 1947 in New York City. Trapeze, an unexpurgated section of Nin’s diaries spanning from 1947 to 1955, was published this…

Fighting Dirty

by Anne Garréta, Emma Ramadan,

By Anne Garréta, from Not One Day, which was published this month by Deep Vellum. Garréta is a French novelist and a member of the Oulipo. Not One Day chronicles…

Ex Post

by Annie Dillard,

The life of a woman of letters

The Mother of All Questions

by Rebecca Solnit,

I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of people was…

Ways of Being Silent

by Tillie Olsen,

from the archive 50 years ago in Harper’s Magazine Literary history and the present are dark with silences: the years-long silences of acknowledged greats; the ceasing to publish after one…

Bad Romance

by Jesse Barron,

One genre and a billion happy endings