Few poetic debuts can have exacted as high a price as Forough Farrokhzad’s—she could have been killed for her transgression and her killers barely punished.

She resisted the idea that race was reducible to labels or symbols, exploring it instead as a variable, and highly individual, lived experience.

“The woman writes as if the devil was in her,” Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Fern.

Cagnati refuses to mitigate the pain and isolation of childhood, which she seems to pull, unvarnished, out of the past.

The prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins.

  On Saturday, August 1, 1936, the woman who was poised to become the Depression-era guru of the smart single girl was alone in her midtown Manhattan apartment, preparing to celebrate the release, and the early glowing reviews, of her first b…