Publishers Weekly
★ 01/29/2024
Shechtman, a crossword compiler for the New York Times and the New Yorker, debuts with a rigorous yet fleet-footed exploration of the crossword puzzle’s feminist legacy. Profiling four women pivotal to the crossword’s evolution—Ruth Hale, Margaret Farrar, Julia Penelope, and Ruth von Phul—Shechtman tracks the crossword from its 1913 invention, through its rising popularity in the 1920s and ’30s, to its eventual widespread adoption by newspapers and magazines. Noting that women were long the primary creators of crosswords, Shechtman explains how the rise of computer technology that transformed the way crossword constructors work has led to the field being taken over in recent decades by men. Pairing this history with a ruminative memoir that chronicles both her love for crossword construction and her youthful struggles with anorexia, Shechtman draws effortlessly on feminist theory and psychoanalysis to ultimately make the astute observation that both her eating disorder and her crossword-constructing habit stem from a need for control—of the body and language. Throughout, Shechtman investigates how gender, race, and politics affect crosswords, though her self-analyzing narrative often pushes back against this line of inquiry (“The question risks a double embarrassment: trivializing the serious stuff of politics or, maybe worse, taking trivialities too seriously”). By turns incisive and roving, this teases out hidden connections and forgotten histories that will enthrall readers. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"A book too mischievously multiform to classify…witty and rewarding…a witty and crisp stylist . . . Shechtman is a constructor in the best sense of the word. . . . Her puzzles are designed to teach us. Her book, at once a celebration and demonstration of the riotousness of words, does the same." — Washington Post
"The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can’t wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too." — Sophia Stewart, The Millions
"A rigorous yet fleet-footed exploration of the crossword puzzle’s feminist legacy. . . .Throughout, Shechtman investigates how gender, race, and politics affect crosswords. . . . By turns incisive and roving, this teases out hidden connections and forgotten histories that will enthrall readers." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The Riddles of the Sphinx resembles the best themed crosswords: paradoxical puzzles that are simultaneously rigid and relational, entertaining and educational." — BookPage
"The book is also itself a kind of crossword, bringing together worlds that might not otherwise exist in the same place at the same time. . . . Shechtman is delightful when sly...she has a preternatural gift for perceiving perfectly placed pieces of language." — Adrienne Raphel, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Meticulously researched. . . . The Riddles of the Sphinx is an accomplishment in journalism and storytelling, allowing readers to understand how crosswords are not just black-and-white squares on a page but reminders that women, properly recognized or not, have always written history (and crossword) books." — Shelf Awareness
"As a gripping study sprinkled with puns and puzzles, this book encompasses the reasoning behind Shechtman’s own search for meaning while describing the constraints and histories of women who changed the narrative about wordplay. The book also soundly cracks the code for feminists puzzling over how wordplay fits into gender politics." — Library Journal (starred review)
"An absorbing book debut. . . . A forthright self-portrait and perceptive cultural critique." — Kirkus Reviews
"The Riddles of the Sphinx is the best writing on crossword puzzles that I've ever read. So treat yourself. Go get it." — Rex Parker, Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle
"As a memoir of the female body, The Riddles of the Sphinx is, by turns, intensely cerebral and sensual. As a history of wordplay, it is rigorous yet delightful. As a work of nonfiction, it is accomplished, hypnotic, and, at moments, tremendously unsettling. In revealing how femininity can turn into a monstrous ideal, Shechtman stages a serious reckoning with not just her past, but with the whole history of feminist thought." — Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers
"A history of the crossword that is also a memoir of one woman’s dangerous attempt to solve the puzzle of her own body, The Riddles of the Sphinx takes the reader from the Algonquin Round Table to smoke-filled Parisian lecture halls, lesbian separatist marches, a contemporary crossword tournament, and an eating disorder treatment center in Paradise, Utah. Writing with intelligence, clarity, and unexpected humor, Anna Shechtman deftly weaves together the neglected histories of the women who made and make the crossword, raising urgent and fascinating questions about the politics of wordplay and the dilemma of living in language." — Christine Smallwood, author of The Life of the Mind
"At once meticulously researched and beautifully written, The Riddles of the Sphinx unravels the disordered logics of those who live with anorexia and the pathologies of a society that help shape body dysmorphia in so many. Shechtman, a celebrated crossword constructor, traces the fascinating intersections between her personal history and that of the women who helped create—and sustain—the crossword puzzle craze. The result is a propulsive, necessary, and ultimately hopeful exploration—one that urgently speaks to our capacity to solve puzzles that go far beyond those on the page." — Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom
"Part history, part memoir, part feminist reconsideration, it offers a sweeping overview of the American crossword puzzle over the last century, told primarily through the stories of four pioneering women who were integral to its evolution....The Riddles of the Sphinx poses questions—What kinds of intellectual work is considered worthy of our attention? What boxes have women historically been permitted to fill?—only to consistently invert and twist them. What emerges is a surprising and ambitious investigation of language and the varied ways women resist the paradoxes of patriarchy both on and off the page." — New York Times
Library Journal
★ 03/01/2024
For those who have ever wondered why early New York Times crosswords shied away from words such as "enema," Shechtman's book has the answer. (Margaret Farrar, the crossword editor from 1942 to 1968, believed puzzles should activate minds, not bodies.) That dichotomy of body and brain gives Shechtman (a crossword maker in her own right) a fascinating framework for discussing her own story of anorexia, which she astutely describes as a desire for structure and control, analogous to the crossword's rigid format. Her investigation of the sociocultural history of crosswords delves into women's search for meaning and control in a world that often denies them access to both. She uncovers the major crossword contributions made by Farrar, Ruth Hale, Julia Penelope, and Ruth Franc Von Phul, whose puzzles became favorite mental health tools for many. VERDICT As a gripping study sprinkled with puns and puzzles, this book encompasses the reasoning behind Shechtman's own search for meaning while describing the constraints and histories of women who changed the narrative about wordplay. The book also soundly cracks the code for feminists puzzling over how wordplay fits into gender politics.—Emily Bowles
APRIL 2024 - AudioFile
Author and narrator Anna Shechtman guides listeners through this combination feminist history of the crossword puzzle and personal memoir. As a young woman struggling with the compulsions of anorexia, Schectman discovered that crafting crossword puzzles distracted her from self-destructive behavior. At 18, she had her first puzzle published in THE NEW YORK TIMES. Schectman lovingly recounts the complicated histories of the forgotten icons of the crossword, such as Margaret Farrar. Shectman cautiously describes her own struggles, performing the passages on her life like someone who is focused on completing her own crossword. She used insightful inflections but occasionally sounds detached from her own history. The result is an audiobook that is deeply thoughtful, and occasionally heartrending. V.B. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-12-14
A memoir of crossword puzzles and self-discovery.
Essayist and crossword constructor Shechtman makes an absorbing book debut with a feminist history of crossword puzzles interwoven with a revealing examination of her experience of anorexia. In “a memoir wrapped in a cultural history,” the author reflects candidly on the connection between her puzzle-making and self-starvation. Both began when she was 15, and both represented “efforts to make my mental strength, the willed intensity of my interiority, obvious.” As evidence of intellectual prowess, crosswords have long attracted women—as constructors, solvers, and editors. Shechtman highlights Ruth Hale, a feminist activist in the 1920s and ’30s and founder of the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America; Margaret Farrar, the founding editor of the New York Times crossword; Julia Penelope, a queer activist and linguist, author of Crossword Puzzles for Women; and Ruth von Phul, who became “a press sensation” after winning the first two crossword puzzle tournaments in 1924 and 1926. Shechtman interweaves their profiles with a chronicle of her seemingly intractable eating disorder. Although the culture fetishized thinness, paring her body was not her only goal; not eating, she believed, was evidence of supreme, exalted self-control. Devising crosswords felt similar: “The crossword constructor makes chaos out of language and then restores its order in the form of a neat solution.” Her puzzles were published in major venues, and in 2013-2014, she served as assistant to Will Shortz, puzzle editor of the New York Times.In a field dominated by nerdy white males, she has worked to identify racist, sexist, and cultural blind spots. Like the women she profiles, Shechtman uses crosswords “to negotiate the stereotypes, or expectations, of how a woman ought to look, act, and think—in the 1920s or 2020s—sometimes conforming to them, and sometimes subverting them.”
A forthright self-portrait and perceptive cultural critique.
