Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill

Gaitskill's incredible collection is filled with women walking the borderlands—of sexual experience, of self-actualization, of family. This book digs under your skin, titillates, forces you to re-evaluate everything you ever thought about sex and love and what it means to be a person in the world. This book is terrifying.

A Guide to Being Born, Ramona Ausubel

This one doesn't come out until May, but I'll recommend it now for good measure. Ausubel's luminous collection is organized around the origins of life—that is, the stages of love, conception, gestation, and birth—but her stories aren't as simple as all that. Men may never be able to feel the fetus in their stomach and be sure that it is a three-headed giraffe, but with this collection, they'll at least get a taste.

Bossypants, Tina Fey

Everyone likes Tina Fey, so this shouldn't be too hard a sell. The comedian's memoir is (obviously) hilarious, but also filled with reflections on being an awkward girl, a woman in show business, and a mother. You bros will be laughing so hard that you won't even realize you're learning about what it's like to be a real-life lady.

Speedboat, Renata Adler

In her aforementioned interview, Meg Wolitzer laments, "Something nebulous and thought-based—a book of ideas—people seem much more willing to have that from a man than a woman." Well, here is exactly that: a loose, penetrating, ruthless, glorious novel about a young journalist making her way through New York City.

The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter

The modern fairy tale, whether in retelling or creation, has become a ripe area for feminist thought, for explorations of sexuality, for wit and irony and vulgarity to seep out of what was once a prim little moralistic package. No one does this better than Angela Carter, whose rich retellings of the classic tales thrum with blood and language.

The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner

Here's a special lure for all you male readers: girl racing motorcycles across salt flats. Past that, the book is gritty and searing and immediately essential, a subtle novel about art and love and truth and a woman on a knife's edge. Read it.

Self-Help, Lorrie Moore

No one does wry brilliance better than Lorrie Moore. In this collection, she will teach you everything you need to know: how to talk to your mother, how to be an other woman, how to become a writer, how to live. Darkly comic and dazzling, it's a way inside the head of all the smart women you've ever known.

Heroines, Kate Zambreno

In Heroines, Zambreno traces the impact—or rather, the exiling—of the female experience on and from literature, untangling the stories of "the mad wives of modernism" both historical and fictional, "who died in the asylum. Locked away, rendered safe. Forgotten, erased, or rewritten." Enlightening and intense, it's a must-read.