The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle - Couverture souple

Shechtman, Anna

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0063275481 ISBN 13 : 9780063275485

Editeur : HarperOne, 2025

Synopsis

"A surprising and ambitious investigation of language and the varied ways women resist the paradoxes of patriarchy both on and off the page."—New York Times

Combining the soul-baring confessional of Brain on Fire and the addictive storytelling of The Queen’s Gambit, a renowned puzzle creator’s compulsively readable memoir and history of the crossword puzzle as an unexpected site of women’s work and feminist protest.

The indisputable “queen of crosswords,” Anna Shechtman published her first New York Times puzzle at age nineteen, and later, helped to spearhead the The New Yorker’s popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse.

In this fascinating work—part memoir, part cultural analysis—she excavates the hidden history of the crossword and the overlooked women who have been central to its creation and evolution, from the “Crossword Craze” of the 1920s to the role of digital technology today. As she tells the story of her own experience in the CrossWorld, she analyzes the roles assigned to women in American culture, the boxes they’ve been allowed to fill, and the ways that they’ve used puzzles to negotiate the constraints and play of desire under patriarchy.

The result is an unforgettable and engrossing work of art, a loving and revealing homage to one of our most treasured, entertaining, and ultimately political pastimes.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Anna Shechtman is a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University and an assistant professor in the Department of Literatures in English. In addition to her bimonthly crosswords for The New Yorker, she has written for a number of outlets, including Artforum, the New Inquiry, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Slate, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: HarperOne
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0063275481
• ISBN 13: 9780063275485
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible