Jeffrey Eugenides: ‘The Marriage Plot’

“To start with, look at all the books.” That’s how Jeffrey Eugenides begins The Marriage Plot, his third—and greatest—novel to date. He goes on to list the novels and volumes of poetry—Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Denise Levertov—that sit on the shelves of a recent college graduate named Madeleine Hanna.

Explore all the best of 2011 fiction.

It’s the early 1980s in Providence, R.I., and Madeleine is trying to figure out who she is, what stories speak to her. Is it the Victorian literature she’s loved for years, the novels that maybe remind ...

Read the full post >

Bookslut: ‘Zazen’

“Sometimes I hate this world,” says Della, the narrator of Vanessa Veselka’s debut novel Zazen. “Especially when it’s more beautiful than I can imagine.” It’s a sentiment that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s lived with depression, with anxiety, with the creeping sense of dread that sometimes can’t be killed with medicine or psychotherapy. You feel things both more, and less—the smallest sadness can feel like it’s threatening to kill you, and you go numb as a result. And it’s notoriously hard to write about, which is its own special type ...

Read the full post >

Bookslut: ‘Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music’

Ellen Willis might have been the best rock music critic in American history, though she mostly stopped writing about music in 1980. It’s understandable—critics burn out, and the late ‘70s were a famously bad time for rock ’n’ roll. But it’s also tempting to wonder what she must have thought of the decades that followed. What would she have said about New Wave, about grunge, about the riot grrrl movement?

Read about more outstanding books with Bookslut at Kirkus. 

Rock fans are lucky we had her for as long as we did though. Willis, who died in ...

Read the full post >

Bookslut: ‘If You Knew Then What I Know Now’

“So how do we learn to be in love?” asks Ryan Van Meter in his essay “You Can’t Turn Off the Snake Light.” He asks his friends, and finds no consensus. One says we learn from old movies; another says he learned by watching his parents. Another friend admits he “doesn’t think he ever learned how,” and a few others have no answer at all. 

Catch up on Bookslut at Kirkus.

Perhaps Van Meter doesn’t himself know the answer to the question. Or perhaps his answer is his new book, If You Knew Then What I Know ...

Read the full post >

Bookslut: ‘You Are My Heart and Other Stories’

Jay Neugeboren isn’t a household name, but it doesn’t matter. The New York author has published more than 15 books over the course of 45 years, and in the process, he’s gained a reputation as a “writer’s writer.” That term shouldn’t be read as an attempt to damn with faint praise—he might not be as famous as some of his compeers, like Philp Roth or John Updike, but it’s becoming increasingly harder to argue that he’s any less talented. His career reminds me of musician Brian Eno’s famous quote about one ...

Read the full post >

Bookslut: ‘The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine’

There’s a moment in Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine when Rosa, the book’s comically antiheroic narrator, tries to restore order to a chaotic situation. Rosa’s granddaughter, Aminat, has become violently ill, and their flatmate Dieter has started to panic. Rosa, who prides herself on her unfailing sangfroid and icy composure, attempts to take control:

“Calm down, calm down,” I said. “This is Germany. Nothing bad happens to people here.”

Dieter looked at me as if I were crazy. He often looked at me that way.

Dieter’s not the only one. It ...

Read the full post >