Should literature engage with Me Too and the sexual dynamics of power relations? It should. How much has it done so? A thread of novels I read over the past year that both broke me and opened my eyes. I highly recommend reading them all. (Unsurprisingly, they& #39;re all by women.) https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="👇🏾" title="Down pointing backhand index (medium dark skin tone)" aria-label="Emoji: Down pointing backhand index (medium dark skin tone)">

Whisper Network by Chandler Baker is compulsively readable, uncomfortably funny, depressingly relatable. Its over-the-top deliciousness and the feminist revenge fantasy plot against misogynistic corporate culture add layers to its thriller-like pace. It& #39;s messy but fantastic.

I can& #39;t recall the last time I was quite as shaken by a book as I was by Putney by Sofka Zinovieff. This modern Greek tragedy, which I would describe as Oedipus Rex meets Lolita, tears to shreds any notions you may have about victim-memory with a taut, relentless narrative.

I read with terrifying compulsiveness My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell, about the consummate evil of child sex abuse and the insidious complicity of our collective betrayal. Its pale-fire recounting of predatory grooming powerfully unpacks the mechanics of vulnerability.

This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill is a reckoning of sorts, a book that chalks fall and rehabilitation, and leaves all arbitration to its reader, almost as if relinquishing control but not narrative, offering questions without answers, but quietly dispensing rage all the while.

Susan Choi& #39;s Trust Exercise pulled the rug out from under me so many times it barely left me standing. Every microscopic detail in it was a precisely plotted double-cross, even a triple-cross, an inquest of the sometimes theatrical spectacle of power games in sexual exploitation.

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday is a twisty little diptych about the dynamic of informal tutelage that can emerge in an unequal relationship and the casual erasure of selfhood when a woman is told to constantly be in awe of, and therefore less ambitious than, her (male) partner.