Search results for ""Author Victoria Smith""

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO PRIZE 2023'A book that could not be more necessary' Observer'Eloquent, clever and devastating' The Times'Deftly illustrates how ageist misogyny remains an acceptable prejudice' GuardianWhat is about women in middle-age and beyond that seems to enrage - almost everyone?In the last few years, as identity politics has taken hold, middle-aged women have found themselves talked and written about as morally inferior beings, the face of bigotry, entitlement and selfishness, to be ignored, pitied or abused.Hags asks the question why these women are treated with such active disdain. Each chapter takes a different theme - care work, beauty, violence, political organization, sex - and explores it in relation to middle-aged women's beliefs, bodies and choices. Victoria Smith traces the attitudes she describes back to the same anxieties about older women that drove Early Modern witch hunts, and explores the very specific reasons why this type of misogyny is so powerful today. The demonisation of hags has never felt more now.Victoria Smith has decided in this book that she will be the Karen so nobody else has to be, and she ends on a positive note, exploring potential solutions which can benefit all women, hags and hags-in-waiting.

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'Rich, complex and witty' ROSE GEORGE, SPECTATOR'Devastating and clever' BEL MOONEY, DAILY MAIL'Could not be more necessary' RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVERWhat is about women in their forties and beyond that seems to enrage - almost everyone? In the last few years, as identity politics have taken hold, middle-aged women have found themselves talked and written about as morally inferior beings: the face of bigotry, entitlement and selfishness, to be ignored, pitied or abused. In Hags, Victoria Smith asks why these women are treated with such active disdain. Each chapter takes a different theme - care work, beauty, violence, political organization, sex - and explores it in relation to middle-aged women's beliefs, bodies, histories and choices. Smith traces the attitudes she describes through history, and explores the very specific reasons why this type of misogyny is so very now. The result is a book that is absorbing, insightful, witty and bang on time.

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This extraordinary volume collects the poems of forty-four of America’s most talented African American wordsmiths, including Pulitzer Prize– winning poets Rita Dove, Natasha Tretheway, Yusef Komunyakaa and Tracy K. Smith, as well as the work of other luminaries such as Elizabeth Alexander, Ishmael Reed, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. Accompanying each poem is a photograph of the poet along with a first-person biography and the book also includes personal essays on race from Harry Belafonte, Amiri Baraka and Reverend R. William Barber II, architect of the Moral Mondays movement. Images and iconic political posters of the Black Lives Matter movement, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party accompany the work. Taken together, this remarkable book gives voice to the current conversation about race in America while also providing historical and cultural context. It serves as an excellent introduction to African American poetry and is a must-have for every reader committed to social justice and racial harmony.

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