Stories of 10 outstanding intellectuals of the 20th century. Bright, exceptional, prickly, impudent - these women were called as they were for their ability to slay with words and thoughts. The world would be a completely different place without Dorothy Parker's caustic reflections on the absurdity of life, without Rebecca West's ability to retell half the world's history in one travel diary, without Hannah Arendt's ideas about totalitarianism, without Susan Sontag's reflections on photography, without Nora Ephron's skeptical attitude towards feminism, without statements by Janet Malcolm about traps and buns in psychoanalysis and journalism. And the biographies of intellectual women are even more striking if we remember that they achieved success precisely in the twentieth century, when women for the first time in history spoke out loud and it turned out that they had something to say. The author of the book, Michelle Dean, is a journalist, critic, and winner of the Nona Balakyan. As an editor at the New Republic, she has written for the New Yorker, Nation, New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York Magazine, Elle, Harper's and BuzzFeed. PDF A4 format preserves the publisher's layout.