At the very least, I should attempt to do so.” Reading “Mercy” inspired Hawthorne to write her own novel, “Dark Matters,” about the erasure of lesbians and violence against lesbians, “a book I had to write as an action and in the hope that through fiction I might be able to change the world. If she were a man, I’m pretty sure “Mercy” would be accorded the same status as James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” But many significant works of literature are difficult to read. I recall the visceral response I had to her short story “Slit” and to her book, “Ice and Fire.” But the greatest effect on me was reading “Mercy” … which has the most extraordinary detail about how it feels as a girl and a woman to be sexually violated for a significant part of her life. When we interviewed women about the impact Dworkin’s writing had on their lives and work, Australian novelist, poet and feminist book publisher Sue Hawthorne singled out Dworkin’s fiction: Writing was Dworkin’s life, and she once said, “To communicate and to survive, as a writer and as a woman: the two are one for me.” The publication of a new collection of many of Dworkin’s well-known works of both theory and fiction, “Last Days at Hot Slit,” has, simply by virtue of its publication, stimulated a reassessment of Dworkin’s work by taking her writings seriously-a far cry from the way her books were treated when they were originally published.Īlong with a timely introduction to Dworkin’s writing, the book contains excerpts from “Woman Hating” (her first book, published in 1974), her epic analysis, “Pornography: Men Possessing Women,” and her soul-wrenching novel, “Mercy.” Other selections are letters Dworkin wrote to her parents and an unpublished essay called “Goodbye to All This,” a biting retort to the “proud, pro-sex, liberated” women who, in her words, fought “for the right to be humiliated … for the right to be tied up and proud, for the right to be hurt.” “Last Days at Hot Slit” ends with “My Suicide,” a previously unpublished essay written before Dworkin’s death in 2005 from myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. When Andrea Dworkin was alive, she despaired that her work would never be given its due.

Pornography by Andrea Dworkin