Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Seven novels featuring ambitious women

Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.

[The Page 69 Test: The Angel of LossesMy Book, The Movie: The Angel of LossesThe Page 69 Test: Saturnalia]

At Lit Hub Feldman tagged "seven books featuring driven women characters in a society that doesn’t want them to succeed," including:
Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

The Other Black Girl
is another novel with a spiraling, unreliable narrator. Instead of negotiating academia and the stage, Nella is on the bottom rung of corporate publishing, and the only Black woman in the office. When a new Black editorial assistant arrives, solidarity quickly turns to competition. This novel turns class and racial politics, and the mental and social trap of being “the only one,” into a thriller. In white corporate America, can you succeed without selling your soul—or destroying someone else’s? The genre twists may be heightened, but the pain and danger are absolutely authentic.
Read about the other entries on the list.

The Other Black Girl is among Caitlin Barasch’s seven novels set in the literary world and Ashley Winstead's seven titles that explore collective guilt & individual complicity.

--Marshal Zeringue