The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle

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Combining the soul-baring confessional of Brain on Fire and the addictive storytelling of The Queens Gambit, a renowned puzzle creators compulsively readable memoir and history of the crossword puzzle as an unexpected site of womens work and feminist protest.

The indisputable queen of crosswords, Anna Shechtman published her first New York Times puzzle at age nineteen, and later, spearheaded the The New Yorkers popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse.

In this fascinating workpart memoir, part cultural analysisshe excavates the hidden history of the crossword and the overlooked women who have been central to its creation and evolution, from the Crossword Craze of the 1920s to the role of digital technology today. As she tells the story of her own experience in the CrossWorld, she analyzes the roles assigned to women in American culture, the boxes theyve been allowed to fill, and the ways that theyve used puzzles to negotiate the constraints and play of desire under patriarchy.

The result is an unforgettable and engrossing work of art, a loving and revealing homage to one of our most treasured, entertaining, and ultimately political pastimes.

Author Bio

Anna Shechtman is a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University and will be an assistant professor in the Department of Literatures in English in 2024. In addition to her bimonthly crosswords for The New Yorker, she has written for a number of outlets, including ArtForum, The New Inquiry, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Slate, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.