A famous act of political violence is often used to illustrate the utter collapse of civic norms in the run-up to the Civil War: the caning of Charles Sumner by his fellow congressman, Preston Brooks of South Carolina, on the floor of the Senate.
Author John Steinbeck is revealed to have been a “sadistic man” and serial womanizer in the newly unearthed memoir of his second wife Gwyn Conger Steinbeck.
After I texted Joyce Maynard on a Saturday morning in late July, to make plans to meet for coffee, I realized that she has her read receipts on. I suggested that we meet at a nearby farmers market; she reads my text at 11:59 a.m. and responds right away. Eleven minutes later, she texts to tell me that she beat me…
How did you get your information about puberty? If you were receiving those details sometime after September 1998, there’s a good chance it was from the cozy illustrations of American Girl’s The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls.
That all-but-confirmed Crazy Rich Asians sequel is officially underway.
Though Omarosa Manigault Newman’s gossipy tell-all, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House, has taken over August headlines, there is nothing in its salacious pages that offers valuable insight on the dysfunctional Trump administration or the man at its center. Instead, the book is another in a string…
Michael Arceneaux, a longtime writer and author of I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé, describes his first book as his B’Day or Janet album. Released in July, the book is a series of charmingly cynical, reflective essays about his Houston upbringing, finding his…
We are born, we quit comedy, we die. Sometimes, like if we produce a brilliant hit standup special along the way, we even write memoirs. It’s the natural life process.
In the 1998 movie You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan plays indie bookseller Kathleen Kelly, whose business is forced to shutter after a giant chain bookstore Fox Books moves in next door, undoubtedly based on the encroaching success of Barnes & Noble stores across the country. But in 2018 the “theme park, multi-level,…
Justin Timberlake has written (?) a book of sorts that contains, he says, lots of “pictures and stories.”
It’s often said that young people shouldn’t write memoirs—that the younger someone is the more trouble they might have in assessing their own life story and relaying it to others, to say nothing of how uninteresting that story might be. We here at Jezebel started talking about this today for no fuckin reason. We…
In spite of and perhaps because of her greatness, Lauryn Hill left many of her fans conflicted. Released on August 25, 1998, her solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, gave depth and cathartic dimension to the subject of black women in love. She sang about pulling away from an ex and finding salvation in…
Omarosa Manigault, one of the many former Trump officials who rode the coattails of a maniac just long enough to turn it into a book deal, says that while working for Trump she “realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald’s brain.” To which I say: no shit!
New York Times best-selling author Jessica Knoll’s second novel, The Favorite Sister, is set on a fictitious reality show called Goal Diggars—a sort of Real Housewives meets Project Runway where five female entrepreneurs turn their startup business narratives into familiar Bravo plot lines. While they raise capital…
In Alice Bolin’s book Dead Girls, she describes going to a karaoke bar by herself, soon after moving to Los Angeles. When it’s her turn to sing, she announces to everyone in the bar that she is “new in town and had no friends.” It reads like something that would happen right before the meet-cute in a romantic comedy…
If terrifying villages in which humans are sacrificed for the sake of raising bountiful crops is your deal (it’s definitely my deal) then boy do I have a movie adaptation for you!
Breaking up is not only hard to do, but there’s little precedent for women being able to do it, observes Canadian journalist Kelli MarĂa Korducki. In Hard to Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up, Korducki examines the historical shifts that enabled women to end partnerships simply because they want to,…
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…
