The Antiheroine: Female Narration & the Dissolution of Ration Part 2
Explore the antiheroine's raw, fractured voice in our curated list: female narration dissolves reason. From The Help to Kathy Acker's Portrait of an Eye and Jeanette Winterson, these six fictions redefine the unconventional woman. Uncover complex protagonists who challenge patriarchal logic in this essential reading guide.
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Portrait of an Eye
by Kathy Acker
The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula; I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac; The Adult Life of Toulouse-Lautrec by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
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Florida
by Christine Schutt
Placed in the care of relatives at a young age, Alice Fivey struggles to adapt within numerous homes and eventually finds refuge in books, a childhood that leads her to discover her own promise as a writer. A first novel. By the author of Nightwork. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.
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The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
The #1 New York Times bestselling novel and basis for the Academy Award-winning film—a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who’s always taken orders quietly, but lately she’s unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless. White socialite Skeeter just graduated college. She’s full of ambition, but without a husband, she’s considered a failure. Together, these seemingly different women join together to write a tell-all book about work as a black maid in the South, that could forever alter their destinies and the life of a small town...
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Difficult Daughters
by Manju Kapur
The reformist fervour Virmati's family lives by is shattered when she falls in love with a married professor. Ironically, she only met him because earlier generations had fought to unlock the echelons of higher education for the women of the Punjab.
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Written on the Body
by Jeanette Winterson
The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. “At once a love story and a philosophical meditation.” —New York Times Book Review.
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Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill
A finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, here is an evocative novel about female friendship in the glittering 1980s. One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.