We weren't quite done with Friday's "who knows?!" dialogue about the best way to link to books on our (or your) website, and we asked Emily Gould to stop by and clarify a few things.
Nicole: Hi Emily, we've been talking about that thing you wrote, in case you wanted to flesh anything out.
Emily: Thanks for giving me the opportunity to respond! I'm kicking myself now for not explicitly explaining, in that post, why I don't think it's a good thing when sites like The Hairpin participate in the Amazon Affiliates program. It's not at all because I don't approve of making money — wow, do I [...]
Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins, which hits bookstores today, tells the story of a Midwestern family whose matriarch is binge-eating herself to death. There's a lot of talk about the obesity crisis in the country, but it tends to happen along one of two set tracks: either accompanying stock footage of headless fat people, or else coming from sinewy trainers barking at the imagined laziness of their frightened charges. It's fair to say that people are ready for another kind of story, and The Middlesteins has the potential to fill that gap. It isn't a polemic about the sagacity of good nutrition, or about personal foolishness. It's about how and [...]
"Kathy Zeitoun said she considers Eggers' book a faithful and accurate portrait of the couple's shared ordeal during Katrina. But she believes she must publicly shed light on her ex-husband's violent side, which she says has emerged in recent years. 'I'm not going to be quiet about it anymore because being quiet puts him in a position to do it again,' she said." —Well, this is very sad. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the protagonist of Dave Eggers' account of Hurricane Katrina and the atrocious government response that followed, is in jail for assaulting his wife. Zeitoun is beautifully written, and gives an invaluable look at a city in the [...]
Is there a disease more sensationally gruesome, more thrillingly disturbing than rabies? The macabre virus, which has haunted the imaginations (and nightmares) of nearly every human culture for thousands of years, is the subject of a new nonfiction book by Wired journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy, a husband-and-wife team perfectly matched to tackle the cultural history of this most dreaded of zoonotic infections.
In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, Wasik and Murphy explore rabies' influence on such diverse subjects as immunology, 19th-century celebrity, religion, and, of course, zombies, werewolves, and vampires. It's also a history of the relationship between humans and dogs—with [...]
First book crushes: The feelings are so strong and obsessive. The books seem smart, sophisticated, cool; the characters in them say and do such great things, they seem like guides sent to teach you how to be that way too. But then the crush goes, and the object of one's former affection becomes an embarrassment—or at least the memory of you quoting them so seriously does. To explore this phenomenon, we asked an assortment of literary-inclined people to revisit the books they loved back in the day, the ones that make them absolutely cringe today.
Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine
Oh man, I suspect you're going to [...]
In your twenties you just kind of chug along,” Eileen Myles says, “dredging up feelings as you go.” You “consider your behavior just art, grist for the mill.” So when I said “it’s over,” I was talking about the grist. Goodbye, mill.
Ladies we like teaming up and whatnot! The Emily Books book-of-the-month club is putting out Eileen Myles' Inferno today. (You can still buy it in actual "paper" form here.) And here are some thoughts on the book today. You will remember Myles either quite warmly or angrily from her work right here and also here.
I discovered Kate Christensen’s work several years ago, when I read The Great Man, and then all the rest of her books, in one weekend. After I praised them on the radio, she emailed me and we became friends, which is great because she's a wonderful, smart, funny, generous person, but it's also weird, because she's one of my favorite living writers, and here she is, flesh and blood, moving through the world like the rest of us.
Her latest novel, The Astral, is about poet and sometime lothario Harry Quirk, 57, whose wife has just destroyed all the sonnets he’s been working on for years [...]
