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The Portable Feminist Reader
edited by Roxane Gay
$25

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-- THIS TITLE WILL SHIP ON OR SOON AFTER ITS RELEASE DATE: MARCH 25, 2025 --

A dynamic and strikingly relevant look at a feminist canon as expansive rather than definitive

A Penguin Classic


For Roxane Gay, a feminist canon is subjective and always evolving. A feminist canon represents a long history of feminist scholarship, embraces skepticism, and invites robust discussion and debate. Selected writings by ancient, historic, and more recent feminist voices include Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Anna Julia Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Eileen Myles, Mona Eltahawy, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, The Guerrilla Girls, and many more. With an introduction, headnotes, and an inspired list of multimedia recommendations, Roxane Gay presents multicultural perspectives, ecofeminism, feminism and disability, feminist labor, gender perspectives, and Black feminism. Through the Portable Feminist Reader, readers explore the state of American feminism, its successes and failures, and what feminism looks like in practice, as a complex, contradictory, personal and political, and ever-growing legacy of feminist thought.

BIO

Roxane Gay‘s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.

REVIEWS

“This book makes feminism urgent, perhaps more than ever before. (…) Worth picking up for Gay’s introspective yet inclusive introduction alone, this new collection provides accessible entry points into feminism and offers even advanced scholars new ways of viewing the complex, intersectional histories of feminist thought, literature, and action.” -- Starred Library Journal

“[An] excellent, expansive collection. (…) Readers will be engrossed by this dynamic and engaging collection.” -- Booklist

“With its capacious perspective, the collection speaks to a range of feminist concerns, past, present, and future. (…) A timely, spirited collection.” -- Kirkus Review

[P]  Penguin Classics  /  March 25, 2025

1.09" H x 7.75" L x 5.06" W (1.02 lbs) 672 pages