Jessa Crispin

  • Jessa Crispin Can’t Do It Alone in Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto

    Jessa Crispin Can’t Do It Alone in Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto

    Crispin’s writing strikes a tone that at times parallels neoconservative—even alt-right—pundits: commentary peppered with political injunctions, not criticism.

  • This Week in Essays

    For Lidia Yuknavitch, the personal is unavoidably political in this piece for Electric Literature. At Catapult, David Frey writes with moving realness on what it is like to watch a parent age and transition into assisted living. Jenessa Abrams looks at the nuances of…

  • The Read Along: Jessa Crispin

    The Read Along: Jessa Crispin

    Jessa Crispin on reading abroad, watching ships chug through the Bosporus, and watching Outlander.

  • Publishing’s Culture of Positive

    Recently, Jessa Crispin shocked the literary world by announcing she would be closing Bookslut, the literary blog she started fourteen years ago. Since then she has stirred some controversy, calling the Paris Review “boring as fuck” (the Paris Review took…

  • Bookslut Bids Farewell

    Well the only reason Bookslut was interesting was because it didn’t make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it. It used to…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Jessa Crispin

    The Rumpus Interview with Jessa Crispin

    Jessa Crispin talks about The Dead Ladies Project and The Creative Tarot, founding Bookslut, why she has an antagonistic relationship with the publishing industry, and her estrangement from modern feminism.

  • Cards of Literature, Future and Past

    Over at the New Yorker, Peter Bebergal considers the presence of the tarot in literature in light of Jessa Crispin’s newly published book, The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life.

  • Female Friendships and Online Literary Sexism

    Female Friendships and Online Literary Sexism

    As an essayist who often writes from personal experience and who’s working on a memoir, I believe deeply it is a feminist act for women to tell their stories.

  • The Shocking Power of Claude Cahun

    Jessa Crispin discusses discovering the darkly fascinating self portraits of gender-bending surrealist photographer Claude Cahun and the mystery in her life, in an excerpt from The Dead Ladies Project: The Cahun version of Acker had the shaved head, but angled…

  • Travel Writer’s Burden

    In a thoughtful essay for Boston Review, Jessa Crispin reflects on the gender dynamics of travel writing, and the genre’s penchant for a colonial mentality that persists in today’s narratives: Any travel writer who deviates from gender-defined roles risks being…

  • Feminism Today

    At the Los Angeles Review of Books, editor and founder of Bookslut.com Jessa Crispin writes on feminism in its contemporary incarnation by way of two recent critiques of 50 Shades of Grey. She draws a distinction between feminism (a discourse) and…

  • How To Give a F$@#

    Some days everything goes wrong. Like today, when I called the NYTBR the NYTRB on Twitter, or when I linked to the wrong thing on the book blog roundup, or when I almost ran over a San Francisco marathon runner…