Sex, Love and Murder in ‘Mr. Fox’

“Once upon a time there lived a man who possessed fine houses in town and in the country, dishes and plates of silver and gold, furniture all covered in embroidery, and carriages all gilded...” So opens the tale of Bluebeard in Charles Perrault’s original version of the story, but unfortunately, the man also had a stack of dead wives in all of those gilded houses, as he had a nasty habit of killing off the women he loved.

Read the last Bookslut on Pricing Beauty and what modeling can tell us about real-world economics.

The titular Mr. Fox of ...

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The Model of Today’s Working World

Freelance writers are a lot like fashion models. Stay with me here. In Ashley Mears’ Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, the changing demands and workplace challenges of your typical not-yet-shooting-off-into-superstardom model are very reminiscent of the same challenges writers are facing in a changing publishing world. There’s very little job security as people are hired out for contract work, there is a rapidly swelling number of desperate workers willing to take your (fragile) place in the food chain, and everyone now wants you to work for free.

Read the last Bookslut at Kirkus on 'Hinges.'

It ...

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'Hinges' is a Small-Press Gem

Fall book season is upon us with a slew of big names releasing giant tomes within weeks of each other. It will be difficult to keep up with even the greatest of the Great American Novels and the Booker short list, let alone anything coming out of the smaller presses.

Read the last Bookslut on Coco Chanel. 

So what should be done about the small, hard-to-categorize gem of a book about art and literature, released by a tiny mathematics specialty publisher that has thus far been overlooked and neglected?

Grace Dane Mazur’s Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the ...

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The Mystique of Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel was quite the scandalous woman. Decades after her death we’re still speculating and gossiping about who she may have slept with. 

Chanel is back in the news...as if she were ever comfortable out of it. Two new muckraking biographies will be out in the next year, one claiming Chanel was a Nazi, the other saying she used drugs and slept with women.

Read the last Bookslut at Kirkus on Mina Loy.

That Chanel was a force to be reckoned with there is no doubt. Her perfumes, clothing and personal image are all tied closely to our ...

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The Unsung Work of Mina Loy

Time has not been kind to Mina Loy’s reputation. Her work itself has retained its vitality—it is as silvery and as lush as it was when she was writing in the early-20th century. But as many of her peers, from T.S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf, have become the formidable representatives of Modernism, Loy’s work has often been shuffled to the side, seen as slight or dismissible.

And yet her champions continue championing. Her reissued poetry collections and her biography felt more like arguments for her reputation’s restoration. And now a new collection of Loy’s ...

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Michael Holroyd: 'A Book of Secrets'

History is generally the domain of men of action. Battles, stirring speeches, conquering and plundering. The downtrodden and the discarded are merely footnotes, casualties to the greatness that is the progress.

Read the last Bookslut on Wayne Koestenbaum's Humiliation.

And yet, biographer and historian Michael Holroyd finds himself putting the man of action, a British aristocrat who went by Ernest William Denison and then Ernest William Beckett and then the Second Baron Grimthorpe, into the margins of his own history to focus on the creatures who would normally populate the sidelines. His new book A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate ...

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Bookslut: ‘Humiliation’

What is it about us that makes us crow for the humiliation of others? From the nefarious (Rupert Murdoch) to the talented but troubled (Amy Winehouse, when alive), the spectator revels in the images of their downfall and cries for more.

Read the last Bookslut on My Two Worlds.

Some might call this a symptom of our age of media saturation and megalomaniacal celebrity, but cultural critic and writer Wayne Koestenbaum believes this is more likely a symptom of our humanity. In his new book Humiliation, he examines his role as spectator of other people’s degradation, the humiliation of ...

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Bookslut: Wandering, Online and Off in ‘My Two Worlds’

There is a tone of hysteria that comes into many voices when we start to talk about the influence of the Internet on our brains, on art, on literature, on the way we process information. Surely the Internet is making us all incredibly shallow, as we click from link to link, reading the first two paragraphs of each news story before escaping elsewhere. Surely this is doing irreperable damage, and the inevitable result is widespread cultural decay. 

Read the last Bookslut column on opera lovers.

“I’m a victim...of the early days of the Internet,” the narrator of Sergio ...

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Bookslut: The Power of Opera

What makes a fan a fan? What pushes a person past an affection for a certain something—a football team, or comic books, or a certain band—into a real, genuine, overpowering love?

Read the last Bookslut on All About Love.

I’m convinced the answer lies somewhere in Claudio Benzecry’s The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession. Benzecry spent some time at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, trying to understand a fan culture that proved itself to be intense, obsessive and insular, as well as welcoming and fascinating. By talking with men and women who sacrifice ...

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Bookslut: ‘All About Love’

When Harry Harlow announced that he wanted to study the science of love and attachment, the scientific community thought him mad. This was during the midcentury reign of behaviorism, and it was believed that all of our psychological processes were simply cued with reward and punishment—free will was a term most serious scientists rolled their eyes at. Harlow made his announcement at a psychology conference, and the others scoffed at his use of the word love. A fellow scientist interrupted him, “Don’t you mean proximity?”

Read the last exclusive Bookslut column at Kirkus on Heatwave and Crazy Birds ...

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Bookslut: ‘Heatwave and Crazy Birds’

Heatwave and Crazy Birds begins with a return. It’s a reluctant turn homeward after a death, an inheritance, a house left long ago. From there, it moves backward, from protagonist Loya standing in the doorway of her house in Israel, from the tumultuous present to the first days of her nation, then back into her family’s history in Central Europe after, during and before World War II, and dips all the way back to ancient civilizations and their languages and their deities. Loya shows up in the town of her childhood as the last surviving member of her ...

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Bookslut: Rebecca Wolff ‘The Beginners’

“I was standing there in my usual spot behind the counter at the Top Hat Cafe, looking down, thinking about evil, buttering toast.” From that killer first sentence, Rebecca Wolff drops us into the mind of Ginger Pritt, a 15-year-old girl from a small New England town named Wick. She is still innocent enough to want to play make-believe with her best friend Cherry, but she’s about to come into awareness of the world of sex, death and evil, in the form of her connection to the history of the Salem witch trials and the drowned town that lies ...

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Bookslut: Jesse Ball ‘The Curfew’

Jesse Ball doesn’t simply write novels—he creates worlds. Not in the sense of those 600-page “world-building” science fiction tomes, where every building and every weirdo creature is extensively described. But in each of Ball’s novels and stories—and with almost a dozen books in print and with others stashed unpublished in his Chicago home, you’d think it’s not just him behind these books but perhaps an entire construction crew—he meticulously creates a new place, with its own rules, its own reality and its own mysteries to delve into.

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Bookslut: Christine Redfern on ‘Who is Ana Mendieta?’

Who is Ana Mendieta? Maybe if you know her name it’s because she went “out a window,” as her husband Carl Andre put it when the police came to question him about her mysterious death. (Charged with her murder, he was later acquitted.) Maybe a few people know that she was once an important visual and performance artist who has been forgotten since her death in 1985. But anyone who has seen her work melding nature, self-portrait and Thanatos would have trouble forgetting her.

Read Bookslut at Kirkus.

She’s now the subject of a heartbreaking graphic biography, written ...

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