The Queen Is in the Garbage (Classic Feminist Writers)

“Deft, defiant . . . accurate.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Karp . . . get[s] it all on paper for a whole generation.”—Kate Millett

A landmark stream-of-consciousness novel for the women’s movement in 1969. Shuttling between past and present during fourteen hours of labor, the thirty-two-year-old unmarried protagonist revisits family and mother-daughter conflicts, problematic relationships with men, and identity questions. Lila Karp hijacks the experience of giving birth to present searing meditations on a feminist politics of the body.

Lila Karp was a former director of Princeton University's Women's Center and a codirector of The Institute for the Study of Women and Men at the University of Southern California. She taught literature, film, and feminist theory in women's studies programs at many U.S. universities. At the time of her death in 2008, she was teaching existential psychotherapy at Antioch University in Los Angeles.