S. C. Cornell

Bloomsbury, October 2023, 192 pp. Some artists dedicate a whole career to the scrutiny of a particular feeling. Proust did nostalgia; Updike did extracurricular lust. The cartoonist Roz Chast does anxiety. Take, for example, “The Party, After You Left,” a single-panel cartoon of a group of people milling about on

MACMILLAN, MAY 2023, 208 PP. SUSAN ROSENBLATT WAS born in 1933 into a household that she would later describe as an utter cultural wasteland. Her family moved frequently, from New York to Arizona to California. Her father, a fur trader who worked in China, died of tuberculosis when she was

  FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, OCTOBER 2022, 419 PP. THE FRENCH, ELIZABETH Hardwick wrote, “have a nearly manic facility and energy” for the art of homage. The literary guest of the French table rushes off, perhaps leaves early, to transcribe the night’s witticisms. So copious is this national record keeping

  W. W. NORTON, APRIL 2022, 409 PP. SEXUAL ESSENTIALISM—the idea that men and women differ from each other in various innate and permanent ways—has rarely been a friend to feminists. Charles Darwin thought the rules of inheritance would prevent women from ever becoming the intellectual equals of men. E.

  PENGUIN PRESS, MAY 2022, 360 PP. In “The Seducer’s Diary,” a novella from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, a manipulative man stalks and courts a younger girl; soon enough, they are engaged. But the seducer takes his real pleasure in manipulation, not love, and he connives to have the girl break the

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 2021, 276 PP To what extent is sexual desire innate? It’s a tricky question for science to answer, given the difficulties of disentangling a sexually mature person from their social influences. (As the British neuroscientist Gina Rippon points out, gendered socialization physically changes the brain.)