This book gives enough background on the women being profiled that you can understand their importance to how we think today even if you haven’t read much about them before. Some very interesting accounts of women who were ahead of their times.

A wise and fascinating look at phenomenal women writers. As sharp as the talented women it discusses.

Sharp by Michelle Dean is a good primer on a number of influential women, including Dorothy Parker, Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt and more. The reader gets just a taste of each woman's background, means of influence and some of the hoopla surrounding each woman - in some cases that's enough to feel knowledgeable and in some cases, it's enough to encourage further reading. This is a good book to pick up and put down at leisure but a bit flat as a read from start to finish.

Enormously enjoyable and informative group biography of women who never shrank from voicing their opinions at a time when women were rarely encouraged to do so. From Hannah Arendt to Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West to Susan Sontag, the book covers a lot of ground and is an excellent introduction to these always interesting and often controversial women. Highly recommended.

My review of this is in todays’s San Francisco chronicle: ‪‘Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion,’ by @Michelledean Dean https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/Sharp-The-Women-Who-Made-an-Art-of-Having-an-12938817.php?utm_campaign=email-premium&utm_source=CMS%20Sharing%20Button&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twitter-premium&utm_source=CMS%20Sharing%20Button&utm_medium=social

https://ofbooksandbikes.com/2018/05/21/sharp-by-michelle-dean/

Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion seems like the perfect book for me — I like reading about women’s history, women writers, literary history, and criticism, and I’m a fan of many of the writers she discusses. Her ten main subjects are Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm. Dean’s writing is lively and interesting, and she manages to be satisfyingly thorough in a relatively short book by focusing on the women’s writing careers rather than telling their whole biography, although you do get a sense of the shape of their lives. She points out connections among the women — similarities among their lives and the ways they knew each other — and although I found these less compelling than I expected, it didn’t matter because their stories as individuals were enough......

A great compilation of admirable and witty women! Each of the book's chapters focus on one of 10 sharp women (listed above) and the chapters build on one another through the women's relationships to each other--almost a "six degrees of separation" type of setup. I felt like I got 10 mini-biographies in one with this book. Author Michelle Dean takes care to focus on both the support these women did and did not receive from society, their male and female peers, and the public. She also dispelled some myths while also providing new information about each woman. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a non-fiction read divided into easily digestible chapters. This would make a great gift for the sharp female graduates on your list.

A fascinating portrait of influential women--and how their paths crossed. Lots of insight into both the times and the creative process.

(2.5 stars) “People have trouble with women who aren’t ‘nice,’ … who have the courage to sometimes be wrong in public.” In compiling 10 mini-biographies of twentieth-century women writers and cultural critics who weren’t afraid to be unpopular, Dean (herself a literary critic) celebrates their feminist achievements and insists “even now … we still need more women like this.” Her subjects include Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and Renata Adler. She draws on the women’s correspondence and published works as well as biographies to craft concise portraits of their personal and professional lives.

You’ll get the most out of this book if a) you know nothing about these women and experience this as a taster session; or b) you’re already interested in at least a few of them and are keen to learn more. I found the Dorothy Parker and Hannah Arendt chapters most interesting because, though I was familiar with their names, I knew very little about their lives or works. Parker’s writing was pulled from a slush pile in 1914 and she soon replaced P.G. Wodehouse as Vanity Fair’s drama critic. Her famous zingers masked her sadness over her dead parents and addict husband. “This was her gift,” Dean writes: “to shave complex emotions down to a witticism that hints at bitterness without wearing it on the surface.”

Unfortunately, such perceptive lines are few and far between, and the book as a whole lacks a thesis. Chance meetings between figures sometimes provide transitions, but the short linking chapters are oddly disruptive. In one, by arguing that Zora Neale Hurston would have done a better job covering a lynching than Rebecca West, Dean only draws attention to the homogeneity of her subjects: all white and middle-class; mostly Jewish New Yorkers. I knew too much about Sontag and Didion to find their chapters interesting, but enjoyed reading more about Ephron. I’ll keep the book to refer back to when I finally get around to reading Mary McCarthy. It has a terrific premise, but I found myself asking what the point was.

Bustle...
'Sharp' By Michelle Dean Celebrates The Women Who Created A Professional Model Of Dissent
By SADIE TROMBETTA

Ask any female politician, celebrity, writer, CEO — hell, ask any woman who has ever sat through a work meeting or a family dinner — and she can probably list of dozens of labels she's been given just for speaking up. Women with opinions are chastised for being catty or cruel, criticized for seeming difficult or rude, called out for being nasty or biting, and few people understand that better than the subjects at the heart of Michelle Dean's Sharp, a new book that celebrates the women who created a professional model of dissent.


Out now from Grove Press, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion explores the lives of 10 remarkable women whose criticism, fiction, poetry, and log-form journalism shaped 20th century cultural and intellectual thought. A well-researched and highly readable book that combines biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp celebrates pioneering writers who managed to make their voices heard, despite the culture of sexism and misogyny that actively worked to keep them silent.

The 10 women Dean include in her book — Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm — come from different backgrounds, fall into different political parties, and form vastly different artistic opinions, but each one share one critical thing: sharpness. “I gathered the women in this book under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp,” explains Dean in the book's introduction, but that characterization refers to more than their acute intelligence and brilliant writing. It also captures just how scared and intimidated these women's male counterparts, and the male and female audiences who read their work, felt about their influence. "Sharpness, after all," Dean writes, "cuts."

Not only were they brilliant and intrepid writers and critics, but the subjects in Sharp were, by the estimation of their male subjects and counterparts, wounding, unkind, and even, at times, menacing. From the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s to the Partisan Review of the 1930s to The New Yorker in the 1980s, the intellectual culture throughout the 20th century was a boys' club, but with their pointed pens and sharp tongues, these women forced their way in, pushed past a culture of sexism and misogyny, and became the defining voices of American cultural and intellectual history.

Sharp: The Women Who Made Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean, $20.40, Amazon

What makes these women remarkable isn't just their talent, but their perseverance and their ruthlessness. In a male-dominated field that rarely rewarded, let alone made room for, women's voices, writers like Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, and Nora Ephron became the filters through which so many readers saw American culture through. They were, as Dean puts it, "participating in the great arguments of the twentieth century," and their opinions of art and music, war and workers' rights, feminism and film shaped the world around them.

The subjects of Dean's book aren't just sharp, though. They are also loud, they were tough, and they knew how to wield their pens like swords and cut down. Whether it was through their criticism, journalism, or fiction, these women made a career out of dissenting from their male counterparts. They dismissed the status quo and insisted on having their voices heard, as Dean puts it, “in a world that was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything.”

Although they were paid for their opinions and for what was in their minds, more often than not, their work was judged in terms of their gender, sexuality, marital status, and appearance. Whether they were producing novels, nonfiction reporting, or critical reviews, each woman’s writing was inevitably filtered through a lens of sexism and misogyny, one that lead them to being labeled as harsh, nasty, and even malicious.

Mary McCarthy frequently and quite unapologetically parodied her fellow intellectuals, and as a result, was labeled as catty, even cruel. Dorothy Parker, who reveled the chance to disagree with her male counterparts in her theater reviews, struggled to be taken seriously by readers and critics alike. Film critic Pauline Kael was often called rude and impolite for her no-holds-barred criticism, accusations male critics rarely had to deal with. Even Janet Malcolm faced harsh backlash after publishing an unpopular opinion about the practice of journalism. Writers, including her own colleagues, blamed her for tarnishing the pristine reputation of their noble profession. When male thinkers and critics hold an unpopular viewpoint, they’re labeled as brave and revolutionary. When women like the subjects of Sharp do it, they’re difficult and cruel. That didn’t stop them from writing, though, and it still doesn’t stop us from reading about them, flawed as they are against the backdrop of the 21st century women’s movement.

They may have been groundbreaking in their day, but many of the writers in Sharp would bristle at the idea of being called feminist icons today. For that reasons, modern day feminist intellectuals and writers see them as problematic. "I ran into quite a lot of people who wanted to cut these women out of history precisely because they took advantage of their talents, and did so without turning those talents to the explicit support of feminism," Dean writes. "It is viewed as an unforgivable lapse.” But despite this unforgivable lapse, as Dean puts it, the progress these women made on behalf of women’s equality is undeniable. "These women openly defied gendered expectations before any organized feminist movement managed to make gains for women on the whole," writes Dean. "Through their exceptional talent, they were granted a kind of intellectual equality to men no other women had hope of."

How were women like Rebecca West and Hannah Arendt able to break into the boys’ club and make a seat for themselves at the table? Their talent propelled them, but luck, connections, and privilege played a major role. The truth is, the 10 major writers featured in Dean's book share more than just sharpness: they also share a particular privilege granted to them because of their race and class. It's worth noting that every subject in Sharp is white, an issue Dean raises in her book's introduction. In a better world, Dean says, “a black writer like Zora Neale Hurston would have been more widely recognized as part of this cohort, but racism kept her writings at the margin of it.” So too does Sharp. While there is a brief section of the book devoted to Hurston and her writing, little attention is paid to other 20th century women writers who were not white, cisgender, and middle class. If anything, this flaw in the book only further demonstrates the utter lack of diversity in America’s artistic and intellectual culture, not just in the people who are creating it, but also in the people who are criticizing it.

"What I really want to read next is a book about the diverse young critics — black, brown, queer, disabled — who are publishing now," Kate Tuttle writes in her review of Sharp for the Los Angeles Times, and I couldn't agree more. It’s crucial that, within the realm of arts and literature, we not only demand more diverse books from more diverse creators, but that we also insist on more diverse reviewers and critics. When the people responsible for choosing what becomes popular and what doesn’t all look the same, so too do the works they celebrate.

In that way, Sharp shows readers why the 10 women writers were so important throughout the 20th century: their voices not only helped shape the world of art, culture, politics, and beyond, but they helped shaped women’s progress and the fight for equality, too. Whether they identified as feminists or rejected the label altogether, as many of them did, these influential writers and thinkers, as Dean writes, “cleared a path for other women to follow,” and that is certainly something worth celebrating.

A great overview of groundbreaking women through their opinions and quarrels. Some are more well-known than others, and the intersections of their lives and careers is surprising.

Conflicted is how I feel about this book. I enjoyed reading about Dorothy Parker; I had a hard time with the other writers. Perhaps it is because the author went to the pettiness and the criticism of each of the females authors had with each other. She threw in a good measure included the criticism of the women by men who were also critics as well. I guess a book about women writers who were critics would be full of criticisms, but it felt like just a diatribe of complaining that had a textbook feel. The book could have been edited down and would have felt less bogged down. It felt like a textbook, but a textbook that a professor would only make you read a section or selected pages.

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for making this advanced reader copy available to me. When I saw the write up of this book in Kirkus Reviews, I was excited to read it. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my expectations based on that review. I quit reading after only a few chapters because I found the book to be dry and rather boring or stodgy. I plan to go back and read some more, I’m wondering if the chapters with the more current subjects (e.g, Nora Ephron) will be more interesting. My own version of “it’s not you, it’s me”? I just think that justice wasn’t done to the stories of these amazing trail-blazing women through this scholarly feeling approach.

All the women are well-known enough in the literary world and most have entire biographies written about them already. Michelle Dean gives us more than straight profiles of them, however. It is particularly interesting to understand both who/what influenced these women and who/what they influenced in turn. Also of note are the interconnecting threads that connect a number of them to each other. It's easy to quibble with which women were selected and why. But the more interesting question is, really, what do we learn from the lives and works of these women that informs how we write today? And, if we were to draw a straight line from each of these women, to whom would they lead us in the present-day set of "sharp" women writers?

[I will post the link to the full review when it is published.]

I love the women selected for this book's examination, and I admire the writing that reveals each woman considered.

This is an examination of women who are known not just for writing, but for writing their own reactions to the world around them. That's an amazing accomplishment and these are amazing women. Michelle Dean shows them in all their glory: hypocritical, mean, vain, loyal, vulnerable, and acknowledged. What a gift to us all.

Easy to read and with enough historical context to keep it all straight, this is a perfect introduction to each of these women.

I am a sucker for a collection about powerful women and this one did not disappoint. More than just offering brief biographies of these women and how they were feminists in their own times, Dean manages to link the women's lives and offer a picture of true sisterhood.

I would have liked to see a bit more intersectionality, but that may just be me.

Sharp is a book that looks briefly at the lives of women who, despite having no power, made a living giving their written opinions on various aspects of American culture and subsequently affecting it in a profound way.

WHO WOULD ENJOY READING IT?
Budding writers will take a lot of hope from how these women (Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, etc) grew and metamorphosised their art into something powerful and valuable.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT
This book is not just a biography but a piece of literary criticism. I was heartened to see how some of these women wrote and how their writing philosophy changed with time.

MEMORABLE PASSAGE

"As her star rose, Sontag was determined to move away from criticism and essay writing. She started a third novel instead. She took up film, after receiving an offer from Sweden to make art films on a minuscule budget there. And she dropped abstract criticism in favor of writing directly about current events. In 1967, the Partisan Review hosted the written symposium 'What’s Happening in America.' Sontag’s response to the questionnaire was a screed against the state of the country she’d never quite felt she belonged to, anyway; in insulting it she drew on metaphors straight from her California childhood:"

.......

Sharp by Michelle Dean is available to buy on all major online bookstores. Many thanks to Grove Atlantic (Grove Press) for review copy.

Literary biographies of some well-known feminist -writers, from just after World War I to the late years of that century. It traces the influences of one writer on another, pointing out how each was answering earlier writers, both male and female.