Library Journal, A Best Book of the Year
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Zibby's Mag, A Most Anticipated Book of 2023
"Superb essayists congregate on the pages in this brilliant, vibrant collection of thoughts and confessions." —Zibby Owens, Good Morning America
"Eclectic . . . Karen Russell, Larissa Pham, Lisa Taddeo, Amanda Petrusich, Camille Dungy, and other writers quarrel with this notion of desire as a suppressed emotion, which as a reading experience feels less concerned with stepping over the line than with assessing the reaction of the player on the other side. Yet the diversity of desires (and writing techniques) raises the cumulative effect of Wanting to the level of triumphant." —J. Howard Rosier, Vulture
"If the desire for selfhood is the beating heart of this collection of personal essays, the anthology also pulses with the relationship between wanting and writing, demonstrating how desire propels the urge to create . . . The thirty-three contributors to Wanting risk sharing their desires on the page in empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it an anthology that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, yes, but also between wanting and voice." —Kaitlyn Teer, Ploughshares
"In Wanting, the essays don’t just address sexual desires, as some people might assume from the title. Instead, they discuss desires of all kinds: time and money, having children and families, being a caretaker, having the freedom to express oneself fully, shielding young people from the horrors of violence, buying a car, relishing the possibilities new love brings with it, and ushering in the start of a better world, among other different kinds of yearning . . . After each essay finishes, you’re left with an overwhelming feeling of familiarity and compassion for the writers whose works are included in Wanting. The best essays in the collection . . . illustrate the myriad ways our cravings and our willingness to articulate them often lead to new understandings about ourselves, about the people around us, about the influence we have on the world around us, about how the world influences us, and about the opportunities available to us when we choose to share them . . . Over and over again, the essays in Wanting prove Kahn and McMasters’s claim about the power of speaking our desires out loud is true, not just because it helps us fully realize them but because it gives other people power to do the same." —Stef Rubino, Autostraddle
"An intimate and empowering anthology of essays that explore the changing face of female desire in whip-smart, sensuous prose, with pieces by Tara Conklin, Camille Dungy, Melissa Febos, Lisa Taddeo, and others." —Kailey Brennan Dellorusso, Write or Die Magazine
“Erotic desire is, unsurprisingly, a prominent theme here. And yet, each individual handling of the topic feels fresh and revelatory, a testament to the diversity of perspectives these editors have gathered . . .There’s an inherent pleasure in reading about desire. It is, after all, what gives narrative literature its stakes, keeping us hooked as we root our protagonists on. To proceed through Wanting is to be swept up, again and again, into moments of urgency, which makes it the only literary essay collection I’ve encountered that I could accurately describe as a page-turner. But beyond this delight, what sets Wanting apart is how uniformly artful these essays are: insightful and poetic, thought-provoking and stirring. They do what all great essays do, which is to push beyond surfaces and make space for complication. Female wanting, in these writers’ hands, isn’t something to conceal or deny, chase or extinguish, but something to value in its own right because, quite simply, it is ours.” —Nicole Graeve Lipson, Chicago Review of Books
"In reading Wanting, I found camaraderie in the sheer breadth and diversity of that solitary longing, and catharsis in seeing the rawness of that longing so openly expressed on the page . . . No anthology can fully capture the multiplicity of women’s desires, but in just over 300 pages, Wanting really does have something for everyone." —Mara Filey, The Rumpus
"The book is impossible to put down. With abundant candor and grace, every piece is a courageous gift." —Booklist
"The essays in this voluptuous, multivarious volume comprise an essential compendium of female desire." —Michelle Hart, An Electric Literature Most Anticipated Book of 2023
"In Wanting, writer-editors Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters have collected 33 deeply intimate and thoughtful essays by women writers on the range of what constitutes desire . . . Wanting is at its best when it's demonstrating the wide scope of what desire can mean, what forms it can take and what its object might be. Like the wide range of topics in this collection, the styles here are a potpourri of prose, wistful and tender one minute, razor-sharp and raw the next . . . Wanting is a wide-ranging collection about desire by women writers that is, like wanting itself, haunting, poignant, vicious, meditative and hopeful, all at once." —Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness
"Editors Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters offer a thought-provoking collection that deserves to be talked about by readers." —Library Journal (starred review)
"An impassioned anthology of women’s perspectives on desire . . . The wide-ranging essays reflect the diversity of their authors while sharing a captivating rawness and sincerity. The result is a striking and powerful compendium on the multifaceted nature of longing." —Publishers Weekly
"A stunning collection that will change your life, Wanting is a deep excavation into desire's endless forms and perspectives. No anthology has moved, thrilled, and expanded me as much as this one, delivering essay after essay that shifts desire's ground from under its reader's feet. True to its own subject, Wanting is sure to leave you hungry for more." —Meredith Talusan, author of Fairest
2022-11-29
Women writers present vastly varying perspectives and journeys of the meaning, cost, and fulfillment of their wishes.
Kahn and McMasters, editors of This Is the Place, take a similar tack in this second compendium of personal essays. Their introduction lays out their sincere yet sappy aims—e.g., “to create a space for women to interrogate and luxuriate in their desire.” The editors cast a notably wide net, although several essays would have benefitted from tighter editing. While the majority of pieces are engaging, frequent unoriginal word choices wear thin—desire appears nearly 250 times. The contributors explore myriad topics related to wanting objects (a $500 pair of cowboy boots, a dildo) in addition to experiences, which run the gamut from criminal to spiritual but are predominantly sexual. Tracing longings to their roots, many of the essayists deploy powerful metaphors that possess the capacity to connect women to themselves. The cowboy boots, for example, signify far more than footwear. “The opposite of a cowboy is an Indian woman,” writes Rena Priest. “I exist in the aftermath and ruin wrought by cowboys….I desire the power available to the self-assured cowboys of the American West.” In a stunning consideration of the enjoyment she takes in being sexually degraded by her White husband, Keyanah B. Nurse both implicates and empowers herself: “I center my own pleasure.” Long stymied by self-doubt, Domenica Ruta acknowledges craving “that feeling of control I first discovered in my abortion…the knowledge that my body would do exactly what I wanted it to do.” In an excellent study of Thomas Merton’s thorny relationship with his yearnings, Amanda Petrusich writes, “It’s a brutal cycle—we want things, we get things, we want more things, we get them, we want more.” By turns piercing and bloated, the book’s core magnetism lies in its breadth of voices and their respective depths. Other contributors include Larissa Pham, Karen Russell, Lisa Taddeo, Camille Dungy, and Melissa Febos.
Despite repetitive language, this anthology will appeal to fans of women’s short-form confessional nonfiction.
