Thanks to Allie Rowbottom at the Rumpus, you can read a brilliant review of Elizabeth Hall’s I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris (TS, 2016).
Here’s an excerpt:
Hall assembles quotations, fragments of scholarship, and personal reflection on the clitoris into lists that become a ladder, leading readers ever closer to climax. The result is an orgy of information, presided over by the voice of Hall’s narrator, who moderates, comments on, and questions the scholars she cites….
“Suppose I were to say I wanted to chart this pleasure,” she writes, “grab hold of its hemline and follow it slack-jawed, not to better understand it, but to linger, a little longer, within it.”
The luxury of lingering in pleasure is what Hall’s book gives its readers, not only because the subject is at once sexy and scientifically compelling, but because it is rendered with graceful care, delivering in small bites an investigation of the clit that is simultaneously a meditation on the myriad ways in which smallness hides power.