Nearly a decade before Samantha Hunt published her haunting novel Mr. Splitfoot and years before The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, she published The Seas, a poetical and ghostly novel about a girl stuck in a seaside town struggling with the nature of identity and language.…
Ever feel like the world’s trapped in a terrible slide toward chaos and if you can’t fix something right now, immediately, then you might combust? Well, at least this remarkably calming video will show you how to rescue a waterlogged book.
What’s better than a short story collection about the horrors of womanhood? Arguably, an anthology TV series about the horrors of womanhood. As Vulture reported on Thursday, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties–a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award–is currently in development as a Black Mirror-style…
The sky was overcast and gray when I met Lauren Groff for lunch in her adopted hometown of Gainesville, Florida with the rollout of her new book, Florida, just weeks away. The weather was a grim but honest backdrop for our conversation about Florida, both the book and the state. For all of Florida’s insistence that…
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour “Sy” Hersh has a new memoir out, Reporter, that details his role in some of the biggest stories in recent American history, including the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam and abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. In Reporter, however, Hersh also acknowledges a major story…
The unnamed narrator of Sheila Heti’s new contemplative new novel Motherhood is ambivalent about having children. She never envisioned herself as a mother and still can’t quite see herself as one. But, now in her late 30s, the question of motherhood nags at her, demanding an answer. “Time is running short on making…
It appears that Don Jr., a taxidermied subway rat life brought back to life by a witch’s curse, is searching for a book deal. The New York Post reports that, according to publishing insiders, “Trump Jr. is shopping a tome, and is being repped by top agent David Vigliano’s literary firm, AGI Vigliano.”
It is extremely gutsy to take on an adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock when there is already Peter Weir’s perfect 1975 film. But not long into Amazon’s 2018 revamp of the Gothic classic does it become clear that the show’s intention isn’t to simply bring this story of four schoolgirls who…
The Baby-Sitter’s Club is probably coming back to TV and it sounds like it might be teen Girl Boss?
Barbara Ehrenreich is “old enough to die,” she writes in her new book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, The Certainty of Dying, and Our Illusion of Control. With that realization, Ehrenreich abandons what she describes as “medicalized death,” the endless preventive tests, diets, and rituals designed to prevent…
In Mary H.K. Choi’s debut novel, Emergency Contact, most of the conversations between Penny, the novel’s protagonist, and Sam, her friend/love interest/soul mate, take place via texts. It’s a premise that in lesser hands could flop, but Choi’s writing sparkles, gleams, and glistens. Emergency Contact is a true…
When political commentator Sally Kohn sent Aminatou Sow, host of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, a passage from her forthcoming book The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity in which she is quoted, Sow was confused.
Our Bodies, Ourselves, the revolutionary feminist health book first published in the 1970s, will cease publishing, NPR reports.
To mark the publication of their review of Meg Wolitzer’s much-hyped latest novel, The Female Persuasion, the editor of the New York Times Book Review tweeted a link to the piece, which was by Lena Dunham, and the following words: “Lena Dunham. Meg Wolitzer. Our work here is done.” Why exactly would the pairing of…
“Some are born Janeites, some achieve Janeism, and some have Janeism thrust upon them,” Ted Scheinman writes in his charming new book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan. For Scheinman, his temporary entry into Austen fandom was a bit of all three, done “half willingly and half accidentally.”
The late photographer Bill Cunningham, who was documenting the eclectic style of New Yorkers long before “street style” photography was a career for trendy bloggers, left behind a memoir right before he died in 2016.
Penguin is opening up a perfect new book store: one that’s entirely stocked with titles written by women.
Of all the longstanding, beloved subgenres of romance novel, among my personal favorites and also perhaps the most specific is the Regency, set around the same time as Jane Austen. Like Austen, the setting has been occupied by everyone from feminists to conservative evangelicals. Author Cat Sebastian uses the setting…
There are few things more perennially relevant than a book about misogyny, but Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is particularly resonant in the era of #MeToo, Donald Trump, and the often contentious narratives that flow from both. A philosophy professor at Cornell University, Manne uses the tools of her…
When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a young white mother near Wilmington, North Carolina, received the news with resolve to circumvent the ruling, using “nerve and plenty of hell in the personality.” Mrs. Hugh Bell organized the Pender County Association for the…
