“The future is here,” sci-fi author William Gibson famously said. “It’s just not evenly distributed.”
In some visions, it’s not fairly distributed either and definitely not very nice. It’s a mainstay of science fiction and science fact alike to conjecture a future world in which only the very few have the resources to live well on a ravaged planet—or ravaged otherworlds—while the bulk of humankind lives like the people of Los Angeles in Blade Runner—in other words, much like we live today, if turned up to 11.
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“Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots is an emergency intervention,” writes Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in the introduction to the new anthology. The collection of diverse and unruly writing, subtitled Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was put together in response to what Sycamore and other writers saw as a flattening of a vibrant gay culture, a culture more obsessed in participating in consumer culture with “Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers” than celebrating its schism from the outside world.
Read the last Bookslut on 'Portrait of the Mother.'
Of course, that is the way most ...
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Award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan traces the origins of the current incarnation of America’s food supply in The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Wal-Mart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table.
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Working undercover as a laborer in the grape fields of California, a produce clerk in a Wal-Mart superstore on the outskirts of Detroit and on the line in a Brooklyn Applebee’s, the author was determined to live and eat off her wages. What she discovers is the depressing reality millions of Americans face daily—no matter ...
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Already a bestseller in the UK, Mikey Walsh’s life story of growing up a Gypsy offers that rare glimpse into a fascinating yet horrifying life that many of us can hardly imagine in Gypsy Boy.
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Born to a family of bare-knuckle boxers, Mikey’s dad is intent on teaching his son the ropes. Mikey, however, fails horribly at learning the family trade, which leads to yet more hideous abuse within his clan. We called it “a poignant memoir that bears comparison to the bestselling Running With Scissors—but better written and far darker ...
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This year has already been bountiful in outstanding releases. Check out these books (hint: most have earned starred reviews) as potential must-reads to cure the winter doldrums.
Read more new and notable nonfiction this February.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo
Mumbai’s sparkling new airport and surrounding luxury hotels welcome visitors to the globalized, privatized, competitive India. Across the highway, on top of tons of garbage and next to a vast pool of sewage, lies the slum of Annawadi, one of many such places that house the millions of poor of ...
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In a social and economic experiment as bold as it was challenging, Maggie and John Anderson pledged to spend a year buying only from black-owned businesses in their hometown of Chicago. In Our Black Year, Maggie and co-author Ted Gregory chronicle the results of the couple’s experience, balancing the harsh realities of the business world with an inspiring story of a couple’s real investment in their community.
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We talked to Maggie Anderson about her year, but readers can visit EEforTomorrow.com for more information on this modest, game-changing proposal ...
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As the founder and publisher of edge.org, a website devoted to great thinkers discussing the world’s greatest challenges, John Brockman has a pretty decent idea of what makes a person smarter.
Here, he’s collected ideas from many of today’s top thinkers—including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Kahneman and Kathryn Schulz, to name but a few—in one book, aptly named This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking. Brockman was kind enough to allow us to run a few passages from this collection that we called in a starred review, “a winning combination ...
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Fans of “Just the Way You Are,” Billy Joel’s 1978 Grammy-winning Song and Record of the Year, listen up: Steven Craig has some relational advice for you.
“Don’t go changing to try and please me [… ] I need to know that you will always be / the same old someone that I knew.” Both outlooks, Craig says, forecast doom when it comes to managing your love life.
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In this provocative relationship guide, The 6 Husbands Every Wife Should Have, the Michigan-based clinical psychologist, corporate coach and radio host offers numerous tips, quizzes ...
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Nearly five years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Katherine Boo discovered Annawadi, a twilight settlement buried in the heart of metropolitan Mumbai. There she found a rich universe, plagued by poverty, whose residents resolutely cling to their fragile aspirations.
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In her debut, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo delivers unto readers their story with a crisp, graceful prose that elegantly captures the hidden lives of her subjects. In a starred review, we called it "the best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition."
What first drew you to Annawadi ...
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When history is told, it is the stories of the bold and the victorious that we want to hear about. Enemies and invaders being thwarted, moments of struggle and adversity overcome, the rise of the nation state into a place of glory.
Read the last Bookslut on 'The Green Sofa.'
And yet that discards so many rich tales of the nations and peoples who did not make it. Take Alt-Clud, or the Kingdom of the Rock. Situated on the River Clyde in what is now the United Kingdom, all that remains of a civilization from the time of the Vikings ...
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Dave Isay has helped bring oral history into the media fray with his StoryCorps project, which records the real-life stories of everyday people, providing a fascinating examination into our culture and heritage.
The author of two New York Times bestselling books, Listening is an Act of Love (2007) and Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps (2010), he now delves into that thing that makes us all tick—love.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here’s an excerpt from his new book, All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps.
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JOEY ...
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From an early age, esteemed prolific novelist Christopher Bram incrementally became aware of the lives and works of influential gay authors. He brings forth this wealth of knowledge in his latest book, Eminent Outlaws, which, decade by decade, charts the rise of gay writers, and how each of them contributed to the education, the enlightenment and the social culture of the American homosexual movement.
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Here, Bram fondly elaborates on the course of this gay literary history lesson, his opinions on small presses, relationships and marriage, some thoughts on James Baldwin, Truman Capote and others ...
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Ugandan short story and children’s book author Hilda Twongyeirwe coordinated the effort to put together this searing collection of real-life stories spotlighting many of the issues that contemporary Ugandan—and African—women face on a daily basis.
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I Dare to Say: African Women Share Their Stories of Hope and Survival is filled with powerful remembrances of domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, female genital mutilation and war. The vignettes highlight the strength and resilience of each of the women profiled by Ugandan female writer’s collective FEMRITE. These often-inspiring testimonies of survival in ...
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There are hundreds of Indian reservations scattered across the United States. Some, such as the Navajo Nation and the Tohono O’odham Nation of Arizona, are the size of Connecticut. Others are postage stamps, just barely big enough to fit the by-now-inevitable casino. Some see tourists. Others see barely any traffic at all, Native American or otherwise.
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David Treuer, a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, has spent much of his life on the Leech Lake Reservation of Minnesota, not far from the Canadian border. In ...
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Isn’t it strange how we are able to look back at those brief decades between World War I and World War II and be romantic about it all? Like Woody Allen’s rosy Midnight in Paris, we remember the glamour, the creativity, the writing and the painting, the decadence and the hedonism at the time, particularly in cities like Paris and Berlin. It was the time of Coco Chanel and Ernest Hemingway, of Otto Dix and the cabaret.
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From this distance, it is easy to miss the devastation that inspired that ...
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After completing her education at Princeton and Harvard Law, Susan Cain worked for years as a corporate lawyer and negotiations consultant. Though she was quite successful, she admits that she was “shy and daydreamy,” dreaded the spotlight and disliked aggression—traits that aren’t typically celebrated in the cutthroat world of corporate law.
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Over time, Cain discovered that her introverted temperament was an invaluable career asset. Her literary debut, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, is a Kirkus-starred narrative that we called “an intriguing and potentially ...
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Every single day, we are disgusted. It just happens. We blanch at unpalatable foods. We feel revulsed by corruption and intolerance. We’re grossed out by snails, worms and cockroaches.
Read more new and notable nonfiction this January.
And while most of us are content to live with disgust without trying to understand why it exists, there are compelling reasons to cozy up to our disgust and get to know it well, all of which are explored in Rachel Herz’s thoughtful and entertaining book That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion. Herz, a professor at Brown University and ...
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Award-winning reporter Deborah Scroggins turns a critical eye on the intersection between women’s rights and modern Islam in her latest, Wanted Women.
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Scroggins profiles two of modern Islam’s most provocative figures, using them as a lens to illustrate the various roles women have played in the conflict between radical Islam and Western culture. “This is the story of two Muslim women, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali politician and author who is a fierce critic of Islam and served in the Dutch parliament, and her polar opposite Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani ...
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Former high school teacher turned New Yorker staff writer Caitlin Flanagan dissects the harrowing world of female adolescence in her second book Girl Land.
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Weaving her own recollections of adolescence with on-the-ground research and history, Flanagan’s portrait of this transitional period in a girl’s life is a fascinating study of how society itself has changed—and not always for the better.
Flanagan recently spoke with us about the pitfalls of modern feminism, what’s bad about the Internet and why your teenage daughter might be off sulking in her bedroom ...
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Richard Seaver’s exemplary literary life has been beautifully captured in his just-published chronicle The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age.
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While his memoir has been published posthumously (he died in 2009), we spoke to Jeannette Seaver, the distinguished author’s widow, who was also the editor responsible for the scrupulous abridgement of Seaver’s substantial original manuscript. Mrs. Seaver provided a unique and intimate perspective on her late husband’s life and work, and on the labor ...
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