Bad sex in fiction! Here are your excerpts from Literary Review‘s annual contest.
Bad Sex in Fiction
Walking the Cigar
We all have our obsessions. A friend of mine moved to New York City about a year ago and has made it his mission to catch a glimpse of Gay Talese taking his cigar for a walk. He’s been unsuccessful thus far.
Making Mistakes
“These were my two first mistakes about honesty: I thought it meant relentless self-flagellation, and I thought it could redeem everything.” Leslie Jamison and Anna Holmes discuss the mistakes they made as young writers.
●
●
Songs of Zora
Recommended Listening: Florida Memory’s great collection of Zora Neale Hurston singing.
●
●
Particularly Piquant Peppers
Move over Naga Viper. There’s a new hottest pepper in town, and it’s called the Carolina Reaper.
Tuesday New Release Day: Ghosh; Murakami; Hoffman; Jackson; Miéville; Brelinski; Crucet; Celt
Out this week: Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh; Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami; The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman; Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson; Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville; The Girl Who Slept with God by Val Brelinski; Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jeanine Capo Crucet; and The Daughters by Adrienne Celt. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
●
●
“That’s Just My Life and It Seems Quite Normal to Me.”
●
●
“The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”
In 1946, George Orwell wrote that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
●
●
Empathy for the Devil?
Ruth Franklin of TNR probes the weaknesses of American novels about terrorism.
●
●