NPR: Jessa Crispin

Do powerful women tend to be failures at love? South American novelist Luisa Valenzuela reflects on this and other mysteries in a sometimes raunchy, but always candid, new memoir.

David Albahari's Leeches is a full-steam-ahead, 300-page run-on paragraph told energetically by a nameless narrator. Set in Belgrade in the late 1990s, the novel peers into the dark currents flowing just beneath the surface of human experience.

A year before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique made way for a change in how women viewed their lives, The Pumpkin Eater gave a searing glimpse of unhappy married domesticity. Wickedly funny, it said many things that women were told to keep quiet about in that era.