What happens when a grown woman wears a ton of Axe body spray? The question is nightmare fuel, but Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick — in what can only be described as a heroic act of journalism — doused herself in America’s most notorious fragrance for a week to see how it felt.
Scent of a Woman
Man Uses Twitter to Tweet About…His Roommate
Shhdontellsteve is a Twitter account devoted to “Steve,” the roommate of the unnamed narrator. Kind of like The Truman Show for Twitter. (As I write this, it occurs to me that this may constitute “telling Steve.” Apologies if that’s the case.)
An Arrow Pointed to Meaning
Anthony Domestico interviews C. E. Morgan about her second novel, The Sport of Kings, one of the most anticipated books of 2016. As she puts it, “Every aspect of the novel is–or should be—an arrow pointed towards its ultimate meaning, or a multiplicity of possible meanings.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Bezmozgis, Dyer, Professor X, Pletzinger, Still
New this week is David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, the new Geoff Dyer collection of criticism Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (reviewed here today), “Professor X’s” higher ed expose In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, Funeral for a Dog, a German novel in translation by young author Thomas Pletzinger, which John Wray has blurbed as “ballsy,” and Chinaberry, a posthumously published novel by the Appalachian author James Still.
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The Squirrels Are Coming!
Whether they’re “coordinat[ing] kamikaze attacks on the power grid,” “damaging [a nuclear missile] base’s physical infrastructure,” or even just water-skiing, I feel that it must be said unequivocally: I for one welcome our new squirrel overlords.
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Put a Bird on It
Jonathan Franzen spent the first half of his life thinking about literature, now he plans to devote the other half to birds. It looks like Freedom is becoming reality as he puts on his bird-watching binoculars again to discuss the “appalling” songbird hunting in the Mediterranean for National Geographic.
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“Strings unleashing”
“I have tried them all,
The cotton, the nylon,
absorbing water, rolling in sand,
sticky flakes of broken glass.
We all drown in the end.”
Anne Sexton’s summer bikini tips.
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Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winners Announced
For the past 17 years, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award has celebrated “six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.” This year’s winners are Melanie Diane (poetry), Apricot Irving (nonfiction), Fowzia Karimi (fiction), Namwali Serpell (fiction), Merritt Tierce (fiction), and JoAnn Wypijewski (nonfiction). They will accept their awards on September 22 in New York City.
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