It’s time for American Jews to go beyond Palestinian-Israel author and journalist Sayed Kashua and find the variety and depth of Arab women writers.
In 1880, a Jewish Viennese woman known as Anna O was labeled ‘hysterical’ by Freud’s colleague. How would she have described herself if she’d been able to trust — and record — her own perceptions?
It’s no surprise to voracious readers of female-authored fiction that the magical realism genre has flourished by the pens of the fairer sex. Readers with some enthusiasm for the genre may associate it with women of color in particular. For example, there’s Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, following in the Latin American tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Alice Walker and Toni Morrison incorporating folklore into African-American fiction.