Joanna Biggs

New Haven, New York

Writer and Editor at Freelance

Writer and Deputy Editor at The Yale Review

writer and deputy editor of @yalereview | A LIFE OF ONE'S OWN (@wnbooks & @eccobooks)

Articles

Beneath the White Scarf

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Joanna Biggs

Awriter ‘with whom I feel no affinity’: that’s how Annie Ernaux, the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, described Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. When the 77-year-old Yourcenar entered the Académie on 22 January 1981, wearing a black velvet double-layer cape designed by Yves Saint Laurent, she looked severe, as if she had spent her life as a nun in service to literature.
An Enigma Embodied: On Monica Vitti, Italy’s Muse of Incommunicability

Dec 3, 2024 | lithub.com | Joanna Biggs

First, there is her beauty. (Cinema is a visual medium after all.) Her face has angles but they are soft ones; her skin is pale but dusted with freckles. Her lips are full, her eyes sleepy. Her hair is sculpted but it moves. Her hands ruffle and fly. Her back is a whole landscape. Michelangelo Antonioni was drawn to Monica Vitti by the nape of her neck. She had her hair pinned up, dubbing a film, and he was sitting behind her in the studio. “You have a beautiful nape.
Glimpses of Utopia

Sep 20, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Sally Rooney |Joanna Biggs

‘Love,’ Alain Badiou wrote, ‘is the minimal form of communism.’ In communism for two or for two billion, the way the gulf between people narrows is of great interest: both scenarios seem to involve mysterious and transformative forces. I remembered Badiou’s formulation when I heard Sally Rooney describe the genesis of her books.
Let It Tumble | Joanna Biggs

May 18, 2024 | nybooks.com | Lauren Kane |Joanna Biggs

In our May 23 issue, Joanna Biggs reviews Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel (whose previous biography, Ninth Street Women, took as its subject five female abstract expressionist painters in the midcentury).
‘Give Me Joy’ | Joanna Biggs

May 2, 2024 | nybooks.com | Joanna Biggs

I was eight, and I wore a black tulle petticoat from Marks and Spencer. Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour came to London’s Wembley Stadium for three nights in July 1990, after Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris, and Rome. My mother took me after having spent hours on the phone to get tickets, which had a silvery seal when they came. I still have the stub, as well as the Like a Virgin cassette that was pretty much the only thing I played in my brown Fisher-Price tape recorder.
Sometimes Gamesome, Sometimes Sad

Jan 9, 2024 | harpers.org | Joanna Biggs

When Phyllis Paul died on August 30, 1973, after a motorcycle hit her as she crossed a road in Hastings, England, the authorities had to identify her from the name tag sewn on her handkerchief. Paul had believed that a writer should be known simply for her work, and she had been forgotten once already, for fifteen years, the period between her second and third novels.
A Year in Reading: Joanna Biggs

Dec 7, 2023 | themillions.com | Joanna Biggs

A Year in Reading: Joanna Biggs I haven’t finished it yet but my best discovery this year was Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In Florence in June with one of my best friends from college, we took a walk between drinks and dinner and came across the plaque at Casa Guidi: “Qui scrisse e mori ELISABETTA BARRET BROWNING.” She wrote and died here.
A Year in Reading: Joanna Biggs

Dec 6, 2023 | everand.com | Joanna Biggs

I haven’t finished it yet but my best discovery this year was by . In Florence in June with one of my best friends from college, we took a walk between drinks and dinner and came across the plaque at Casa Guidi: “Qui scrisse e mori ELISABETTA BARRET BROWNING.” She wrote and died here. Inside the next day, we found out that she slept a century later, in the middle of the living room so that her baby son could interrupt her as often as he pleased.
A Masterful Depiction of Male Cruelty

Nov 30, 2023 | newsbreak.com | Joanna Biggs

The AtlanticBy Joanna Biggs,3 hours ago Halfway through Small Things Like These , the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted 2022 novel, something out of the ordinary happens. The coal merchant Bill Furlong discovers during a Christmas-week delivery that a young woman has been shut in a nunnery’s coal shed overnight. Her bare feet are black with dust; she has had to go to the toilet where she slept. Horror is shot into the narrative like a hidden pouch of stage blood being pierced.
The Feminist Realism of Claire Keegan

Nov 30, 2023 | theatlantic.com | Joanna Biggs

Halfway through Small Things Like These, the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted 2022 novel, something out of the ordinary happens. The coal merchant Bill Furlong discovers during a Christmas-week delivery that a young woman has been shut in a nunnery’s coal shed overnight. Her bare feet are black with dust; she has had to go to the toilet where she slept. Horror is shot into the narrative like a hidden pouch of stage blood being pierced.