Mr. Moosewood, AKA Moose, a popular stoner-hippie teacher — ponytail and all — assigns the students in his AP elective a semester-long project of self-discovery that asks “Who are you and who are you becoming?” Fifteen-year-old Tina M. decides to keep a diary during the semester, letters to John-Paul Sartre, in Tina’s Mouth: An Existential [...]
About: Christa
Website: http://blahblahblahler.blogspot.com/
I read memoirs because it is more polite than staring at people, which doesn’t mean I do the latter any less. I like the what-has-it-been-like-for-you-ness of seeing someone’s bullet points and knowing it must all turn out reasonably okay, because they were able to pop a squat and push out these thousands of words afterward. [...]
It’s 1622. It’s 1902. It’s 2000 in Danielle Sosin’s debut novel The Long-Shining Waters the story of three women living on Lake Superior. Grey Rabbit lives with her two sons, husband, and mother-in-law in the winter of 1622 on the shore of Lake Superior and it’s been rough hunting and everyone is starving. Meanwhile, she’s [...]
If you want to see a Hunger Games-head combust, tell the fan that you read book one, dug it enough, but haven’t read any others in the series. Then back away slowly. There are going to be octaves involved. According to Emily Post, one is supposed to read the first book and then light the [...]
I was robbed by a British author. Not cool, Ali Smith. The masses were bleating favorably about the novel There But For The and frankly the premise seemed so intriguing: A man at a dinner party with a collection of strangers gets up, goes upstairs, and locks himself in a spare room — luckily one [...]
It starts with a young James Wolcott riding a ref from Norman Mailer to the grunts of the Village Voice offices. One of those “I like how you write, if you’re ever in NYC, stop by X and ask for Y and he’ll hook you up” scenarios Wolcott took seriously enough to drop out of [...]
Eric Packer has a 48-room spread complete with a lap pool, shark tank, and screening room. His is one in the line of nondescript white limousines parked out in front of the building. The floor of his ride is made of imported marble. It has a bathroom and enough space for his daily rectal exam. [...]
You know who Anne Lamott is, she’s that great great aunt who had a tiny but bright blip in your life and she opened some windows, taught you a few things, and made you look at dreadlocks differently. But here it is, almost Christmas, and you know it’s time to make that annual drive to [...]
At some point you must have had an uncle, probably not related by blood, whose conversational ticks you struggled to understand until finally you cocked your head and realized “Oh, wait. You’re funny! You are a funny person who tells jokes without smiling” and it all forever changed — for the better — the way [...]
These days you can barely swing anal beads without hitting a conversation about the S&M e-sensation, the novel Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James. What started as Twilight fan fiction got name changes and a shopping spree through the hardware store. It has become a frequent download for e-readers and has made its way [...]
If you’re like me, your 20s are packed in a triple taped box and hiding in the dingiest attic corner of your brain beneath garbage bags filled with clothes for Goodwill and that easel you bought the day you decided (in your 20s!) that maybe you were a painter. This was not my shining-est decade. [...]
The premise is simple and surprisingly not considered in more fiction: A man rents a work space in an old building and ends up next door to a psychiatrist. While most of her clients are muted by the doctor’s white noise machine, one patient cannot stand the whooshing unorganized sound and asks that she turn [...]
If you’ve ever known a serial killer, you know that there is a pre-kill period ripe for mining. Instances in a life that foreshadowed the dismembered body stuffed into a drain pipe (or the family all dressed in bloody pajamas, axed to death in their country home, as the case may be). Derf Backderf’s graphic [...]
When we last saw Peter Brown, he was against the wall. Ripping one of the lesser-essential leg bones from his own body to use as a weapon against a mobster. It was a cackle-inducing scene of yuck that remains one of the highlights of my personal highlight reel of contemporary fiction. Eleven years later, he’s [...]
I love Emma Straub. I love that she is a bookseller. I love her blog. I like when she takes to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to tell writers how to win the hearts of the bookstore staff at public readings (See also: Candy). I love that she had four novels rejected, had [...]
