And the French will translate it, too...

I am thrilled to announce that my book, Why Woman Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, has just been acquired for its tenth translation (and its eleventh foreign edition). On the one had, this is really amazing news because it is the first time that any of my books have been able to reach such a wide non-English-speaking audience. On the other hand, I am a little sad that it is my least academic book with the silliest title (which I really didn’t want). I suppose that this isn’t surprising (those people in marketing know how to produce attractive clickbait), but if I had guessed that this book was going to be read beyond the intended American audience, I certainly would have done a few things differently.

For the record, the entire book was written between December 2017 and March 2018, and I was basically building on the original New York Times Op-Ed and on the content of my class, Sex and Socialism, some version of which I have been teaching since 2003. I meant it to be an introduction to socialist feminist ideas for younger American women, and did not intend it to be some sort of global manifesto. This was my eighth book, and the previous seven had only ever found a limited academic audience, so I had no way of imagining that this one would find its way out into the wider world. This was my naiveté, I suppose, and the least I can hope is that readers will find their way to my more serious academic work if they are interested in learning more about the topics I discuss. So far, the Polish publisher is the only one that has changed the title. I’m crossing my fingers that the French will, too.

Just the book I needed

I ordered this gem through interlibrary loan and discovered many fascinating facts about sex and love in the Soviet Union. The author, Vladimir Shlapentokh, was a prominent sociologist before he emigrated to the United States in 1978. This was his first book published in his adopted country in which he argues that the Soviet citizen had become hedonistic in the extreme.

IMG_4422.JPG