Namara Smith
In 2007, Suzy Hansen was a reporter at the New York Observer. Hansen was twenty-nine; she had grown up in a small town in New Jersey and moved to New York City after college. When she first arrived, New York seemed like the center of the world, but in the years after September 11 it began to feel increasingly provincial, both feverish and inward-looking. The liberal journalists she knew were “extremely arrogant,” convinced of their moral superiority to the Bush-era Republicans but strangely indifferent to the wars being fought in their names in Iraq and Afghanistan. Caught up in a 
The socialist Rosa Luxemburg met her lover and lifelong collaborator Leo Jogiches at a student-radical club in 1890. Luxemburg was nineteen. Jogiches, a few years older than her, was known for his severity and single-minded devotion to the cause. She was drawn to his zeal, and within a year they were a couple, but not a happy one. He resented her success, refused to be seen with her, and tried to control where she went and what she did. When he found out she was seeing someone else, he threatened her with a gun. Luxemburg’s letters to him, written over 
Before she published My Brilliant Friend, the first volume of her much-celebrated Neapolitan series, in 2011, Elena Ferrante was known for three short, violent novels about women on the outer boundary of sanity. Although their stories are unrelated, the books form a thematic trilogy. Each is narrated by a woman who embodies a different aspect of female experience—in Troubling Love, a daughter; in Days of Abandonment, a wife; in The Lost Daughter, a mother—and each is concerned with how these domestic roles constrict the lives of their protagonists. Ferrante is often asked about the classical influences in her work, and Lydia Millet’s new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, begins with an unwanted pregnancy. Its heroine, Anna, is a virtuous, long-suffering suburban wife. Her sole mistake in life was in her choice of husband; despite herself, she fell in love with a charismatic but predatory businessman who was less attracted to her than to her small family inheritance. Nevertheless, when she gets pregnant by mistake, Anna wants to keep the baby. (“It had been an accident, technically more his fault than mine, but who’s haggling? And once it happened I felt I needed to accept it—I wanted to.”) Her husband, Ned, 
In August 2016, a widely circulated photograph showed armed police officers standing over a woman on a crowded beach in Nice as she awkwardly removed the top layer of her burkini. The confrontation was the latest stage in France’s decades-long struggle over certain forms of religious expression in public. Building on a 2004 law prohibiting head scarves in public schools, several towns in the South of France had banned “beach attire that ostentatiously displays a religious affiliation” in response to the 2016 Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice. Around the same time, a woman in Cannes was charged with defying