These crisp mini-portraits of some of 20th-century America's most brilliant women writers - like Joan Didion, Dorothy Parker and Nora Ephron - are so inspiring
Carina Axelsson A fascinating analysis of brilliant female writers. By the end you'll want to read something by all of them
Evening Standard
Michelle Dean's Sharp, a portrait of 10 female writers ... Read moreand thinkers, is a bracing tribute to the life of the iconoclastic mind: a reminder, in our age of flashy hot takes, of the matchless power of sustained and elegant argument
Pankaj Mishra
Guardian
This is a great and worthy project: a primer for those for whom these names are new; a sustaining reminder for those already familiar with them. You put it down feeling steadier, more determined
Rachel Cooke
Observer
This is such a great idea for a book, and Michelle Dean carries it off, showing us the complexities of her fascinating, extraordinary subjects, in print and out in the world. Dean writes with vigor, depth, knowledge and absorption, and as a result Sharp is a real achievement
Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion Michelle Dean has delivered an exquisite examination - both rigorous and compassionate - of what it has meant to be a woman with a public voice and the power to use it critically. This book is ferociously good
Rebecca Traister, New York Times-bestselling author of All the Single Ladies [A] stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers
Publishers Weekly
I have to recommend Michelle Dean's Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, a delicious cultural history that comes out in April. It brings together some of the most influential social critics of the 20th century, including Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, and shows how these glamorous iconoclasts forged their singular careers. Dean makes the convincing argument that women's voices
if not necessarily feminist ones
did far more to define the last century's intellectual life than we realize
Michelle Goldberg
New York Times
There can't be enough cultural histories which make the point that a woman intellectual must represent her own mind, and not the collective mind of all her 'sisters.' Sharp is a brisk, entertaining, well-researched reminder that it's impossible to write - or think - without making life very messy for oneself, but to do so is an achievement well worth the pains
Sheila Heti, author of How Should A Person Be? Show Less