Essays about place and memory and imagination and language, all-around pleasing, from the descriptions of New York, of Minnesota, of Norway to stories of word and wordplay. I suspect I would have enjoyed the longer essays on Henry James and Charles Dickens more if I’d read either of the works that are discussed the most in them (The Bostonians<\/i>, Our Mutual Friend<\/i>), but even without being familiar with the work, I enjoyed Hustvedt’s explorations of it. The title essay, meanwhile, with its talk about the messiness of “legislating desire,” sometimes struck me as stating the obvious — except that maybe it’s less obvious than it seems to me, because I’m young and queer and the idea that there can be (and is ) sex-positive feminism, and also kink-friendly feminism, is something I take for granted. While I understand Hustvedt’s claim that “American feminism has always had a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth,” it’s not something that resonates with my personal experience with feminist thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Essays about place and memory and imagination and language, all-around pleasing, from the descriptions of New York, of Minnesota, of Norway to stories of word and wordplay. I suspect I would have enjoyed the longer essays on Henry James and Charles Dickens more if I’d read either of the works that are discussed the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}