It’s early January and freezing cold in New York when I meet Jenny Offill to talk about her new novel, Weather – an innocuous title for something that feels less innocuous every day. A couple of weeks earlier, the temperature was warm and spring-like. These fluctuations in the weather, and the warming trends they reveal, are increasingly unsettling reminders of the climate crisis, and they form the backbone of Offill’s latest novel, the follow-up to 2014’s bestselling Dept. of Speculation.

Author Jacqueline Woodson lives in a quintessential Brooklyn brownstone with her partner, two children, a cat and two huge, friendly dogs. A similar house is at the centre of her new novel, Red at the Bone, representing the struggle of a multigenerational black family to honour its past and stand firm against change.

A mudlark — a person who scavenges for treasure in the muck and rubbish of a riverbank — sounds like a character from a Shakespearean comedy, flitting between the extremes of filth and magic. In her quirky memoir of modern mudlarking, Lara Maik­lem travels from west to east along the Thames, from Teddington to Tilbury, reflecting on London’s long and layered history as revealed in the detritus thrown up by the water.

Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Originally begun by Emma Garman, it will now be written by Joanna Scutts. Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist, spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins. The heroine of her 1918 novel ’ calls the inescapability of a bourgeois upbringing life’s “blue serge lining”—a reference to the practical fabric that protected the inside of coats.

Most reactions to Watson’s “self-partnering” framed it as a slightly silly term for a personal choice. But it’s more than that. In her Vogue interview, Watson pointed to the “bloody influx of subliminal messaging” — in advertising, media, and society at large — telling women they are incomplete by themselves. This messaging is deliberate and well-entrenched: As much as we like to pretend otherwise, we haven’t yet fully exorcised the patriarchal ghosts that peg a woman’s existence to that of her father or husband. To overtly reject this — to, yes, “self-partner” — is, quietly, a radical act.

“People always believe the best story” wrote Zelda Fitzgerald in her novel Save Me the Waltz in 1932. For a long time, that story of the Fitzgeralds starred a brilliant, self-destructive golden boy tethered to a golden girl, whose glamour eventually dulled into madness. Then in 1970, Nancy Milford’s Zelda: A biography twisted the kaleidoscope and a new story tumbled into view, one in which a brilliant woman was overshadowed, plundered and abandoned by her husband.

In early 1915, a young woman in New York City began to plot a modest revolution. Not the kind that involved bomb-throwing, riots or assassinations, like the one that had sparked a world war the previous summer — hers was to be a social revolution, a stone heaved in a lake that would ripple out and change the world for women.

How do you disrupt the mythology of the American west, with its campfires and cowboys, and its spirit of masculine self-reliance? If you’re Téa Obreht, you add creatures – and people – who belong to the history but not to the myth. You add, say, camels.

Since the earliest days of television, homes on the small screen—from the suburban ranch with its white picket fence to the loft with its views of the city skyline—have shaped our reality and our desires.

At the entrance to the new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History looms a photograph that is oddly abstract and resolutely concrete, a row of conical towers forming part of the hulking Fort Peck Dam in Montana. The photograph covered the first issue of LIFE in 1936 and was captured by Margaret Bourke-White, the first and best known of the handful of female photojournalists on the magazine’s staff.

The description of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women makes it sound like literary fiction aimed firmly at female readers: a lyrical, intimate exploration of the emotional and sexual lives of ordinary women. But Taddeo isn’t inventing her characters’ stories. They’re the result of a decade of immersive journalism, research and countless interviews in pursuit of what she calls “longing in America.”

Jack the Ripper, the serial killer who terrorized London’s East End in the late 19th century, may be the catalyst for historian Hallie Rubenhold’s fascinating new book, but he is in no way its subject. Readers who wish to linger over the bloody details of the murders or speculate as to the killer’s still-unknown identity will have to look elsewhere, in the rich seam of Ripper lore. This is a story of life, not death.

In the summer of 1936, a short, snappy, and stealthily radical self-help book for single women became a surprise bestseller. In the depths of the Great Depression, Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman celebrated women’s pleasure and glorified their independence.

The bicycle’s place on city streets has been contentious from the beginning. At once vulnerable and menacing—fragile in the face of oncoming traffic, but with the power to flatten unwary pedestrians—bikes provoke extreme reactions. In urban settings especially, they inspire cults of allegiance and waves of opposition.

How does a woman writer get lost—and found? Brigid Hughes’ story of rediscovering the Chicago writer Bette Howland follows a now-familiar path of chance encounter, pursuit, and recovery. A few years ago, on the dollar cart of a used bookstore, Hughes found a copy of Howland’s 1974 memoir W-3, spurring her to track down the author’s son, then uncover a trove of unpublished writing—selections of which she published.

The names of most of the characters in Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments are not familiar. They aren’t supposed to be. History rarely pays attention to the stories of “wayward” girls born into poverty, still less to their desires and dreams.

In the middle of Sally Rooney’s new novel Normal People, one of the protagonists, a young Irish college student named Connell, finds himself “in a state of strange emotional agitation” over a moment of romantic drama in Jane Austen’s Emma.

Growing up in England in the 1980s and ’90s instilled in me a Pavlovian reaction to the scene of a horse-drawn carriage crunching up the gravel driveway of a stately home, scored to a rousing string orchestra.

The first militant act of the Women’s Social and Political Union was a dry-mouthed spit, “a kind of pout,” from 25-year-old Christabel Pankhurst into the face of a police officer, the only physical assault she could manage while her arms and legs were restrained. Her action, carried out in Manchester in 1905, got her labeled a “spitfire,” which pleased her, and arrested, which pleased her even more.