This Week in Books Susan Sontag visits Sephora

Roxane Gay wrote an excellent piece on the feminist novel. She has been battling haters on Twitter all week long, so read and enjoy and send positive vibes.

UCLA has made Susan Sontag's entire digital archive available online, including the entire contents of her Mac Book and her e-mail account. She was on Sephora's customer listserv, so there's that. I am going to waste so many hours on this.

Karen Russell's short story collection St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves is going to be adapted by ABC into a tv show. Obviously it will focus on the titular story. Perhaps this will finally give me the motivation I need to read the book.

Earlier this week I posted on Katherine Howe's new book The Penguin Book of Witches, and she did an interview with The Toast that you might enjoy if you're interested in the book.

This Week in Books Lena Dunham talks to Roxane Gay

It's been a huge week for Lena Dunham, whose book Not That Kind of Girl was published on Tuesday (I already finished it and enjoyed it). She also had a mild scandal regarding her book tour which is a much larger and more extraordinary event than most authors get to participate in, but I'd prefer to focus on the positive. She got a pretty overwhelmingly positive review in Time Magazine by Roxane Gay, and then Gay and Dunham had a convo for Vulture.

Speaking of Roxane Gay (when am I not?), The Toast announced this week a new vertical called The Butter that will be edited by Gay and include cultural criticism and personal essays, with a distinct focus on writers of color. If you haven't spent any time with The Toast before, I highly recommend it. They do some of the best writing for women on the Internet, and they are decidedly bookish.

I normally try to keep things light around here, but some weeks I just can't deal, and admittedly, this is one of the biggest news stories in the publishing world this week. Ed Champion is a misogynistic jerk in the publishing industry who last gained notoriety by attacking writer (and delight) Emily Gould on Twitter. When she responded in kind, he made some vaguely suicidal threats, so everyone left him alone. He resurfaced last weekend, this time attacking a new female author, Porochista Khakpour.  Don't go fight with him on Twitter (his account has been suspended anyway). Instead show your support by purchasing books by Gould and Khakpour and keep in mind that dumb garbage like this is why #readwomen2014 is so important.

This Week in Books I endorse Roxane Gay and Outlander again...

There was a great piece by Michael Harris at Salon about reading and distractions, which everybody should be able to relate to, even the most hardcore readers among us.

Everybody (except me, who hasn't yet read it) has been loving Kate Atkinson's novel Life After Life, and this week it was announced that she's writing a sequel.

Teju Cole is an excellent Nigerian-born novelist who I've endorsed on the blog before (if you loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and he wrote an essay for The New Yorker on re-reading James Baldwin, another author I really admire. In light of recent events in Ferguson, good writing about race in America is clearly as important as ever.

The #WeNeedDiverseBooks has been gaining a lot of momentum this year, especially among librarians, and it makes a good companion to #ReadWomen2014. NPR has been doing quite a bit of coverage on the topic this week, but I especially enjoyed this story about how to sell diverse books, as the lack of market is often cited as the primary reason for the lack of diversity in serious literature.

Finally, Roxane Gay is recapping the entire Outlander series for Vulture, episode-by-episode, so you have yet another compelling reason to get into this show/book series.

#ReadWomen2014: Roxane Gay

In case you haven't figured it out already, I am a fan of Roxane Gay. I have already endorsed her first novel, An Untamed State, and her essay collection Bad Feminist, out this week. Both are great, and by all means, buy them and read them.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn't include an endorsement for Roxane Gay's prolific writing on all manner of subjects, all over the Internet, most of it freely available. She is at the very forefront of the literary Internet, and her Twitter feed is a joy to behold. There are a few authors I really truly enjoy following on Twitter because they approach it as just another form of authorship, rather than a stream of self-promotion, and Roxane Gay is certainly one of them. I know a lot of people who don't use Twitter because they aren't really sure how or why they need it, and she's a good example of what you might be missing.

Equally as an enchanting is her Tumblr page, which she updates almost daily. This is the best place to find aggregation of all her Internet writing, including terrific essays written for the likes of The Rumpus and Salon. If you enjoyed Bad Feminist, this is the source material from which it was born, and there is plenty more out there. What I particularly love about her Tumblr though is the deeply personal, almost diary-like writing exercises she posts every week. Lately they've been following a similar structural pattern of Gay's narration and photos of her cooking a recipe (she's a devotee of Ina Garten) while she reflects on her life. The results are equally profound and delicious, and if you're a fan of food writing, you'll love it. It reminds me of Nora Ephron's food writing, but maybe a bit more heartfelt and somber. Really, really lovely stuff.

I often try to carve out a ten minute chunk in every work day to see what she's been writing, and I never find myself skimming her content, which is rare for stuff in my RSS feed. I read and digest every word while I sip my coffee, and then I impatiently wait for her to post again. Every voracious reader understands that anxiety and enthusiasm that comes from waiting for a favorite writer to finish a project so it can be consumed, and with Roxane Gay, you only have a wait a few hours.

Finally, she has a work of non-fiction/fiction/poetry on the Haitian diaspora, Ayiti, I haven't read it yet, but I really can't wait to check it out. For those who enjoyed An Untamed State, it will provide a lot of parsing out of the Haitian-American cultural  context of that novel.

#ReadWomen2014 Non-Fiction: 'Bad Feminist' by Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist: Essays
By Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay's book of hilarious and incredible essays drops TODAY so get thee to the bookstore! Some of it has been previously published and circulated on the Internet, so if you're unsure about committing to the whole book, you can dip you your toes in the free content. However, I advocate strongly for just purchasing and reading the whole damn book because there is plenty of new stuff and it's just good.

While she touches on feminism and politics, most of the essays are her pop culture writing, which is some of her absolute best stuff, imho. I am not ashamed to admit that I got into Roxane Gay's writing via her live-tweeting of The Bachelor ( a surprising number of very respected literary authors engage in this), and I'm most looking forward to reading her essay on HBO's Girls, which I somehow missed the first time around.

If you happen to be in the Detroit area, Gay is doing a reading from Bad Feminist  at Literati in Ann Arbor on Thursday, August 7, so you can get a signed copy and support a local independent bookstore.

This Week in Books: David Sedaris is a dump truck...

This week's links will be short and sweet. As a Beyonce fan, I've had a rough one, and I am very ready for the weekend.

A few weeks ago I posted David Sedaris' very funny essay on his FitBit; in it he mentioned his obsessive walks around his neighborhood and all the trash he collected. Now his community has named a dump truck after him. Cute.

John Cheever's former home in Ossining, NY is for sale. Ossining is also the home of the (pre-divorce) Draper family in Mad Men, so that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about John Cheever and Ossining. I read The Wapshot Chronicle last year and it was instantly one of my new favorites.

Finally, Roxane Gay was on Wisconsin Public Radio this weekend and handled some ridiculous questions from callers. Next week Bookhive will be devoted almost exclusively to Roxane Gay (she's doing a reading at my local bookstore and her new book of essays comes out), so consider this your introduction.

This Week in Books, Portland Catch-Up Version: Zadie Smith is a reading addict...

A Prayer Journal
By Flannery O'Connor

Apologies all around for missing the last two "This Week in Books" posts. I know you live for them. It was hard to keep track of what was going on in the world of books while prepping to travel, doing the travelling itself, and then recovering from travelling, but I'm finally back to normal, for a day, and then I prep for a weeked Up North. At the very least I did my best to accumulate some good links the past two weeks, and here they are:

Oprah! Zadie Smith! What they want you to read this summer! Her comments about reading and prison are particularly chilling because that was my primary takeaway from reading Orange is the New Black-- she got to read so many books in prison!

If you, like me, have Joan Didion fever this summer, check out this essay on Play It As It Lays  from Alice Bolin and The Believer. There is a short write-up on it over at The Millions as well, and they recommended it as one of this summer's "Burnt Out Reads."

Hilton Als reviewed the posthumously published Flannery O'Connor book A Prayer Journal. It's behind a pay wall but you can read the intro and if you're a NYT subscriber, you  can enjoy the whole thing (and maybe share some quotes in the comments? Just a thought). This combines one of my favorite contemporary essayists with one of my favorite female authors, so I might even consider paying to read it.

Here's a brief piece on book hoarding from the LA Times. I found it to be abysmally depressing, but that's just me. Also, I tend to read the books I won, so that might disqualify me.

Finally, the thing I am most excited about -- Matter and MSNBC.com are doing a public book club reading of Susan Faludi's recent feminist classic Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women, and have invited plenty of intelligent and inspiring female writers and thinkers to contribute (Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, etc.). You can read along, tweet along, and read their lively discussions of each chapter.

This Week in Books: the Ethics of Shelving, Authors on the Internet

I loved this article from The Atlantic about shelving books in book stores. They actually call out the common Gabriel Garcia Marquez foible (I have actually pointed this out to a grateful book store employee before; in the 'M's people!). 

Marja Mills' new pseudo-biography of Harper Lee came out on Tuesday and has been getting tons of press. Harper Lee herself has been against the publication, which she deems "unauthorized," and she reiterated her sentiments this week.

Flavorwire had a nice round-up this week of "The 35 Writers Who Run the Literary Internet." Some of these I strongly agree with (Teju Cole, Roxane Gay), and others I'm very ambivalent about (the number of Twitter followers does not equate with quality level). However, if you're new to the world of contemporary authorship on the Internet, this is a good place to start. Add a few of the mentioned Tumblrs to your RSS feed to become better acquainted (and don't forget that most of these folks have actually physical books that were recently published, if you're a total ludite).

This Week in Books: Upcoming 2014 titles, Southern reads, and a 'Wild' trailer

The Millions has a thorough preview of upcoming book releases for 2014, and the list is ridiculous. What I especially noticed was how many authors were defying their normal genres and expectations-- a children's book re-telling by Lydia Davis, a very straightforward narrative novel by Murakami, and short story collections from Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood. There is so much on the list to get excited about. I'll be waist-deep in essay collections from Amy Pohler, Roxane Gay and Lena Dunham

I found this lovely discussion on favorite Southern novels by Southern independent bookstore staffers, and thought it was a nice follow-up to my Flannery O'Connor/ Carson McCullers binges.

It's pretty lucky that the official trailer for 'Wild' (based on the book by Cheryl Strayed), came out this week, a few days  after I posted about how much I loved it. The adaptation looks excellent, and I think Reese Witherspoon is a great choice for the role, but I'm still going to strongly advocate reading the book. Normally I'm not a big stickler about literary adaptations, but the book is so great and very bookish, that I think some of its magic will naturally get lost in the translation. I bought my mom a copy of this book last year, so this might have to be a mother-daughter trip to the movies.

#ReadWomen2014: Mid-Year Review

I am now six months in to my #ReadWomen2014 committment, and it seems only appropriate to take a moment to reflect on how my endeavor is progressing so far. I had a few goals in mind when I took up the task of exclusively reading books by women this year; I wanted to expose myself to far more books by women of color; I wanted to catch up on the contemporary literary fiction by women that I kept hearing about but hadn't read; and finally, I wanted to read some of the most noteworthy works of feminist literature/non-fiction, because it seemed in keeping with the spirit of the undertaking. 

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