Bari Weiss of the Wall Street Journal reports on newly released book titles and the world of publishing in The Book Reader.

Ari, the narrator of Elisa Albert’s ferocious, brilliant new novel, “After Birth,” is not the kind of new mom you’ll find pushing her thousand-dollar Bugaboo up Park Avenue. She is not masterminding a plan for getting her infant into Dalton. And no, thank you very much, she will not be joining you at your 9 a.m. Soul Cycle class to spin off that baby weight.

Instead, she is going to wear “enormous pants,” eat peanut butter from the jar, smoke weed to calm her nerves and breast feed whenever and wherever she pleases. For anyone that has a problem with that, Ari has this to say:  “I will not stay out of sight. I will not go sit in the toilet in the middle of many dinner so you don’t have to trouble yourself about the fact that you’re a bipedal mammal, bitch.”

In case you didn’t grasp it, Ari is pissed. She is living in a post-industrial town in upstate New York where her husband, Paul, is a professor. Her one-year-old son, Walker, was delivered via a C-section she thinks was unnecessary and in any case was traumatic. That dissertation she was working on? Yea, don’t ask her about it.

Hope comes in the form of Mina Morris, a visiting poet and former indie rocker who arrives in the town enormously pregnant and who gives birth to her son at home. In Mina, Ari finds not only a friend but a sister, a comrade, a warrior.

This is a book about feminism, birth, motherhood, friendship, rivalry, post-partum depression—all of that. It is also wickedly, obscenely funny—though most of the best lines include words unfit for family television. If “Portnoy’s Complaint” is the definitive rant of a the young Jewish male,  “After Birth” is the stinging rant of the Jewish mother.  

And boy, can she scream.

Intrigued? Pick it up. I could not put it down.

And come join me, Elisa Albert, and two other writers March 24th at the Jewish Museum. For more information, go to jewishbookcouncil.org