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Articles by Kaelie Giffel
A Very Cold Winter - Fausta Cialente
Tr. from the Italian by Julia Nelsen [Transit Books; 2026] As I watch the crumbling of US politics and the increasingly vitriolic and revanchist gender politics that are a unique part of class warfare here, I am reminded of fascist Italy: the creepy gaze of an ineffective head of state (Mussolini, obviously) and his regime’s expectations of women. War, and its constitutive masculinism, threatens everyone’s dreams, chances, and sense of selves.
The Woman Dies - Aoko Matsuda
Tr. from the Japanese by Polly Barton [Europa Editions; 2025] I’ve become a cynical reader, one who knows what’s gonna happen in a book, who is going to narrate it (and why), and which literary moves will be made. This injury is partially from being a reviewer and partially from surviving a doctorate. Grumpily, I assumed many things about Aoko Matsuda’s The Woman Dies, even as I was excited for a new Polly Barton translation.
A Perfect Day to Be Alone - Nanae Aoyama
[Other Press; 2025] Tr. from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood In The Politics of Experience, his influential critique of alienation, R.D. Laing writes that we must “begin by admitting and even accepting our violence rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it and therewith we have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.” Alienation is a fundamental split between people and also within ourselves, in which our individual self vanishes under the demands...
Feminism in Revolt: Carla Lonzi - ed. Luisa Lorenza Corna and Jamila M. H. Mascat
[Seagull Press; 2024] Tr. from the Italian by Luisa Lorenza Corna, Matthew Hyland, and Cristina Viti I arrived a little late for feminism: after consciousness raising groups had disappeared as feminism’s preferred form, after the academy took up feminism as a set of arguments to be constantly fine-tuned rather than a way to fight and live and love, after feminism had apparently gone up in a brilliant flash of success. There you have it, folks, all over, nothing to see here.
A #MeToo Novel That Must Be Read #WithYou
It was the bottlecap that did it. I couldn’t get it back on the bottle. I slammed the disobedient piece of plastic down on the counter. Other small fires that evening clued me in. I was snappish with my partner. My body and mouth felt heavy. Phrases with spiky meanings got stuck in my head. Something was wrong. Most novels I read have no effect on me. (Apologies to their authors; getting a doctorate will do that to you). Some novels, though, still manage to qualify as an event.
A Hole at the Bottom of the Book
Only after we are certain that we have finished a piece of writing can we know precisely what we have failed to say. Among other things, this failure points us to where we must begin writing again. This idea emerges with progressive clarity from Annie Ernaux’s latest book, The Young Man, published in France in May 2022 and in September from Seven Stories Press in Alison Strayer’s translation, Ernaux’s first English-language release since she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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