Joanna Russ Popular Books

Joanna Russ Biography & Facts

Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011) was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed". Background Joanna Russ was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Evarett I. and Bertha (née Zinner) Russ, both teachers. Her family was Jewish. She began creating works of fiction at a very early age. Over the following years she filled countless notebooks with stories, poems, comics and illustrations, often hand-binding the material with thread. As a senior at William Howard Taft High School, Russ was selected as one of the top ten Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners. She graduated from Cornell University, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov, in 1957, and received her MFA from the Yale Drama School in 1960. She was briefly married to Albert Amateau. Russ taught at Queensborough Community College from 1966 to 1967, at Cornell from 1967 to 1972, SUNY Binghamton, from 1972 to 1975, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1975 to 1977. In 1977 she started teaching at the University of Washington. She became a full professor in 1984 and retired in 1991. Russ was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1974-1975. Science fiction and other writing Russ came to be noticed in the science fiction world in the late 1960s, in particular for her award-nominated novel Picnic on Paradise. At the time, SF was a field dominated by male authors, writing for a predominantly male audience, but women were starting to enter the field in larger numbers. Russ was one of the most outspoken female authors to challenge male dominance of the field, and is generally regarded as one of the leading feminist science fiction scholars and writers. She was also one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously. Over the course of her life, she published over fifty short stories. Russ was associated with the American New Wave of science fiction. Along with her work as a writer of prose fiction, Russ was also a playwright, essayist, and author of nonfiction works, generally literary criticism and feminist theory, including the essay collection Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts; How to Suppress Women's Writing; and the book-length study of modern feminism, What Are We Fighting For?. Her essays and articles have been published in Women's Studies Quarterly, Signs, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and College English. Russ was a self-described socialist feminist, expressing particular admiration for the work and theories of Clara Fraser and her Freedom Socialist Party. Both fiction and nonfiction, for Russ, were modes of engaging theory with the real world; in particular, The Female Man can be read as a theoretical or narrative text. The short story, "When It Changed", which became a part of the novel, explores the constraints of gender and asks if gender is necessary in a society. Russ's writing is characterized by anger interspersed with humor and irony. James Tiptree Jr, in a letter to her, wrote, "Do you imagine that anyone with half a functional neuron can read your work and not have his fingers smoked by the bitter, multi-layered anger in it? It smells and smoulders like a volcano buried so long and deadly it is just beginning to wonder if it can explode." In a letter to Susan Koppelman, Russ asks of a young feminist critic "where is her anger?" and adds "I think from now on, I will not trust anyone who isn't angry." For nearly 15 years she was an influential (if intermittent) review columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Though by then she was no longer an active member of science fiction fandom, she was interviewed by phone during Wiscon (the feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin) in 2006 by her friend and member of the same cohort, Samuel R. Delany. Her first SF story was "Nor Custom Stale" in F&SF (1959). Notable short works include Hugo winner and Nebula Award finalist "Souls" (1982), Nebula Award and Tiptree Award winner "When It Changed" (1972), Nebula Award finalists "The Second Inquisition" (1970), "Poor Man, Beggar Man" (1971), "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand" (1979), and "The Mystery of the Young Gentlemen" (1982). Her fiction has been nominated for nine Nebula and three Hugo Awards, and her genre-related scholarly work was recognized with a Pilgrim Award in 1988. Her story "The Autobiography of My Mother" was one of the 1977 O. Henry Prize stories. She wrote several contributions to feminist thinking about pornography and sexuality including "Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love" (1985), "Pornography and the Doubleness of Sex for Women", and "Being Against Pornography", which can be found in her archival pieces located in the University of Oregon's Special Collections. These essays include very detailed descriptions of her views on pornography and how influential it was to feminist thought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Specifically, in "Being Against Pornography", she calls pornography a feminist issue. Her issues with pornography range from feminist issues, to women's sexuality in general and how porn prevents women from freely expressing their sexual selves, like men can. Russ believed that anti-pornography activists were not addressing how women experienced pornography created by men, a topic that she addressed in "Being Against Pornography". Reputation and legacy Her work is widely taught in courses on science fiction and feminism throughout the English speaking world. Russ is the subject of Farah Mendlesohn's book On Joanna Russ and Jeanne Cortiel's Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction. Russ and her work are prominently featured in Sarah LeFanu's In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988). She was named to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013. Gwyneth Jones wrote a 2019 book about Joanna Russ that was part of the University of Illinois Press series called Modern Masters of Science Fiction. In a 2004 essay about the connections between Russ's work and D. W. Griffith's film Intolerance, Samuel R. Delany describes her as being "one of the finest - and most necessary - writers of American fiction" since she published her first professional short story in 1959. Her papers are part of the University of Oregon's Special Collections and University Archives. Critical writings The late 1960s and 1970s marked the beginnings of feminist SF scholarship—a field of inquiry that was all but created single-handedly by Russ, who contributed many essays o.... Discover the Joanna Russ popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Joanna Russ books.

Best Seller Joanna Russ Books of 2024

  • Skein Island synopsis, comments

    Skein Island

    Aliya Whiteley

    From the author of The Loosening Skin and The Beauty, Aliya Whiteley, Skein Island is a powerful and disturbing look at the roles we play, and how they form and divide us. Thi...

  • Mendlesohn, Farah, Ed. On Joanna Russ synopsis, comments

    Mendlesohn, Farah, Ed. On Joanna Russ

    Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

    Mendlesohn, Farah, ed. On Joanna Russ. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2009. 285 pp. Paper. ISBN 9780819569028. $29.95. Farah Mendlesohn's edited volume on the radical feminist sf autho...

  • Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s synopsis, comments

    Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s

    Tatiana Teslenko

    This book presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided secondwave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Tes...

  • On Joanna Russ synopsis, comments

    On Joanna Russ

    Farah Mendlesohn

    This critical anthology presents a multifaceted look at one of the most original and influential voices in both science fiction and feminism.Best known for her groundbreaking femin...

  • Modern Classic Short Novels Of Science Fiction synopsis, comments

    Modern Classic Short Novels Of Science Fiction

    Gardner Dozois

    The novella is, in the words of Gardner Dozois, "a perfect length for a science fiction story: long enough to enable you to flesh out the details of a strange alien world or a biza...

  • The Silver Wind synopsis, comments

    The Silver Wind

    Nina Allan

    Named as one of '50 Writers You Should Read Now' by The Guardian. From the awardwinning author of The Rift, Nina Allan, The Silver Wind is a remarkable narrative exploring the natu...

  • Cthulhu 2000 synopsis, comments

    Cthulhu 2000

    Jim Turner, Harlan Ellison, Thomas Ligotti, Poppy Z. Brite & F. Paul Wilson

    A host of horror and fantasy’s top authors captures the spirit of supreme supernatural storyteller H. P. Lovecraft with eighteen chilling contemporary tales that would have made th...

  • Joanna Russ synopsis, comments

    Joanna Russ

    Dame Gwyneth Jones

    Experimental, strange, and unabashedly feminist, Joanna Russ’s groundbreaking science fiction grew out of a belief that the genre was ideal for expressing radical thought. Her essa...

  • Alba synopsis, comments

    Alba

    Octavia E. Butler

    Lilith Iyapo, una dona afroamericana a la trentena, es desperta desorientada. Recorda la pèrdua del seu marit i el seu fill, i una guerra fratricida i global que ha arrasat la vida...