Cassandra Neyenesch is a Brooklyn-based writer, curator, and founding director of Abortion Stories, an organization that provides safe, supportive spaces for people to tell their abortion stories in the context of art and performance. Her debut novel A Little Bit Bad will be coming out with Simon & Schuster / Summit in June of 2026.
Cassandra Neyenesch
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Writing on Public Books
Young Almodóvar Versus Old Almodóvar in the World Series of Love
“In recent years, Almodóvar’s films have become more serious, moving away from the campy melodrama and drugged gazpacho we knew and loved him for, toward a mature reckoning with the bigger questions of existence.”
Watching “Go Fish” with My Queer 15-Year-Old
“You can wear something to be cool,” you told me, “or because another person likes it. You don’t have to be truly ‘yourself,’ or whatever.”
How Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” Misses the Mark
When in December I heard an interview with Greta Gerwig on All Things …
Taking a Nine-Year-Old to See “The Danish Girl”
I decided about a year ago, when my younger child turned eight, that Pixar and I were calling it quits. Don’t get me wrong, Up and Toy Story were great, but given the choice between a real movie and a formulaic narrative involving fauna with catch phrases, I am a grown-up and prefer the former. […]
A Small, Simple Stone: Looking for Barbara Pym in Oxfordshire
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In the summer of ‘14, as my family was planning a trip to England, I learned that I would be missing the annual meeting of the Barbara Pym Society in London. It gave me pleasure to imagine the […]
Murakami on Friendship
It might be fair to say that Haruki Murakami has had two narrative modes in his novels and short stories. Works like Norwegian Wood (1987) illustrate his “normal” mode, in which he recounts a nostalgic, affecting tale of relationship and loss. In his “weird” mode—weird in the eerie, old-fashioned sense—he gives us talking animals and […]
That Silver Building on Powers
East Williamsburg is fast becoming one of the most dramatically gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn, with glass-fronted condo buildings shooting up in their narrow lots like beanstalks in a developer’s fairy tale. It also continues to be one of the ugliest. The problem with the area’s housing stock may be vivid to anyone who has read […]
Déjà Vécu
Kate Atkinson has had an intriguing literary career. After winning popular and critical success with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), and a Whitbread Prize, she spent most of the 2000s publishing mystery novels centered on a Scottish private investigator, Jackson Brodie. Even putting the genre distinction aside, it’s hard to […]
