Major works:
The Female Man (1975) • The Adventures of Alyx (1976) • We Who Are About To . . . (1977) • On Strike Against God: A Lesbian Love Story (1980) • How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983)
“Russ wrote unsparingly, if also elegantly, against those elements in society that keep women, especially lesbians, from becoming our best selves.”
—Stephanie Burt
“Joanna Russ offers a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction, women who are rarely victims and sometimes even victors, but always engaged sharply and perceptively with their fate.”
—Marge Piercy
“As hard and mean and fine as Flannery O’Connor . . . I wish that everyone would read Joanna Russ’s books.”
—Dorothy Allison
“Beyond questions of genre or gender, Joanna Russ is one of the best prose writers working in the English language today. . . . Informed throughout by her intelligence, wit and imagination . . . by her vision of the pertinence and necessity of speculative fiction to feminists.”
—Marilyn Hacker