Kelly McMasters, editor of Wanting, with contributors Joanna Rakoff and Jennifer De Leon

Porter Square Books is delighted to welcome Kelly McMasters, editor of Wanting: Women Writing About Desire, for an event in conversation with local contributors Joanna Rakoff and Jennifer De Leon. This event will take place on Thursday, March 2 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (25 White ST. Cambridge, MA 02140). Please RSVP below to let us know you're coming and to receive event updates!

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

What is desire? And what are its rules? In this daring collection, award-winning and emerging female writers share their innermost longings, in turn dismantling both personal and political constructs of what desire is or can be.

In the opening essay, Larissa Pham unearths the ache beneath all her wants: time. Rena Priest’s desire for a pair of five-hundred-dollar cowboy boots spurs a reckoning with her childhood on the rez and the fraught history of her hometown. Other pieces in the collection turn cultural tropes around dating, sex, and romance on their heads—Angela Cardinale tries dating as a divorced mother of two in the California suburbs only to discover sweet solace in being alone; Keyanah B. Nurse finds power in polyamory; and when Joanna Rakoff spots a former lover at a bar, the heat between them unravels her family as she is pulled into his orbit—an undoing, she decides, that’s worth everything.

Including pieces by Tara Conklin, Torrey Peters, Camille Dungy, Melissa Febos, Lisa Taddeo, and so many others, these candid and insightful essays tackle the complicated knot of women’s desire.

Featuring essays by Elisa Albert, Kristen Arnett, Molly McCully Brown, Angela Cardinale, Tara Conklin, Sonia Maria David, Jennifer De Leon, Camille T. Dungy, Melissa Febos, Amber Flame, Amy Gall, Aracelis Girmay, Sonora Jha, Nicole Hardy, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, TaraShea Nesbit, Keyanah B. Nurse, Torrey Peters, Amanda Petrusich, Larissa Pham, Rena Priest, Joanna Rakoff, Karen Russell, Domenica Ruta, Susan Shapiro, Terese Svoboda, Lisa Taddeo, Ann Tashi Slater, Abigail Thomas, Merritt Tierce, Michelle Wildgen, Jane Wong, and Teresa Wong

Kelly McMasters is the author of the forthcoming The Leaving Season: A Memoir and Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, the basis for the documentary film The Atomic States of America. She is coeditor, along with Margot Kahn, of This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home, and her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, The American Scholar, and River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner living in New York.

Joanna Rakoff is the author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the bestselling novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction and the Elle Readers' Prize. Rakoff's books have been translated into twenty languages. The film adaption of My Salinger Year opened in theaters worldwide in 2021 and is now streaming. Her new memoir, The Fifth Passenger, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2024.

Jennifer De Leon is author of the YA novel Don't Ask Me Where I'm From (Simon & Schuster), which was chosen as a Junior Library Guild selection and the essay collection White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing (University of Massachusetts Press), which is a recipient of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is also the editor of Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education (University of Nebraska Press), an anthology that won an International Latino Book Award. An associate professor of creative writing at Framingham State University and faculty member in the Creative Writing & Literature Master Program at Harvard University, she has published prose in Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and more. Her next YA novel Borderless is forthcoming in 2023. Also on the way are two children's picture books—So Many Gifts and a biography of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú.