Posted inBooks, Quotes

Improbable Seductions: The Unsparing Eye of Mary McCarthy

For those interested in origin stories, posthumous literary gossip, and New York City in the 1930s, look no further than Mary McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs (1992) – a candid and lively account of McCarthy’s early writing career and the intellectual and political scenes that fueled it. McCarthy’s observations are sharp and often quite searing; she spares no […]

Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes

‘Too Strong for That’: Margo Jefferson on Depression as Taboo in Affluent Black America

But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female […]

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