Shechtman writes film criticism for the
New York Review of Books, oftentimes with literary and film critic
D.A. Miller Crosswords Shechtman was 19 when her first crossword appeared in the
New York Times. In May 2019,
The Guardian called her "the new queen of crosswords". The book presents overlapping histories of the crossword and US feminism, arguing that the experience of gender is lived in language. The female constructors covered in the book adopted a formal, sometimes rigid relationship to language to negotiate lives under patriarchy. Some were self-identified conservatives; some were avowed feminists. All shared a preoccupation with word puzzles and an oftentimes punishing relationship to their bodies and the body of language. One figure highlighted in the book is
Margaret Farrar, the first editor of crossword puzzles for the New York Times. == Bibliography ==