Maggie Cooper is a graduate of Yale College, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Inch, and elsewhere, and her chapbook of short fiction, The Theme Park of Women's Bodies, is published in September 2024 from Bull City Press. She lives with her spouse in the Boston area and also works as a literary agent.
At Electric Lit Cooper tagged seven books that carve "out space for the pleasures, rewards, and even the radical possibilities of creating space for marginalized genders—on the page and in the world beyond our bookshelves." One title on the list:
The Farm by Joanne RamosRead about the other entries on the list.
Not unlike Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, Joanne Ramos’s The Farm uses an institutional setting to dig into the complications and injustices of modern motherhood. The novel is centered on a commercial surrogacy outfit called Golden Acres, where women are paid big bucks to gestate under intense surveillance; the main character, Jane, is an immigrant from the Philippines who hopes carrying the child of a super wealthy client will be her ticket to financial security. The novel toes the line of realism and dystopia, offering a character-driven critique of the all-too-recognizable ways the economy of motherhood rests on the exploitation of low-income and BIPOC women.
The Farm is among Sara Flannery Murphy's nine books that explore the weirder side of reproduction.
--Marshal Zeringue