Widely praised in hardcover,
Sharp
is the exhilarating story of ten exceptional women who used the power of their pens to carve out space for themselves in a world where men wrote the rules.
Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm are united by what Dean calls “sharpness,” the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit.
is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual
beau monde
of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the
Partisan Review
or the
New York Review of Books
. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment. Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history,
is a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.