Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel includes, among other discomfiting things, a series of fake advertisements for surreal women’s beauty products. The plot, which follows a proofreader named A, begins with the main character’s attempt to evade her roommate, and eventually brings A to join a “Church of Conjoined Eaters.” At Slate, Molly Fischer argues the book deftly captures our society’s weird treatment of femininity.
Body Works
“Jawline of an aircraft carrier”
“It’s like a crackpot combination of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute and Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it’s both daring and brilliant.” At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir is surprised by Anna Karenina.
“Pardon me, where can I purchase a camel?”
It's easy to forget that traders and travelers a millennium ago were as tongue-tied in foreign countries as college backpackers are today. How convenient for Silk Road travels, then, to have had a phrasebook translating between languages like Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mandarin Chinese.
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You Are What You Buy
This piece by Carrie Murphy is delightful and playful and a couple other "adjective"+fuls all in one.
A very colorful Queen!
Pantone has released a Queenly color wheel, made especially to mark Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee. The wheel is made up of the Pantone referents for the colors her Majesty has worn throughout her reign, and each chip bears a historical note on the particular hue's tie to her wardrobe. This is especially good news if, like Slate, you think that the Queen is the most fashionable woman in the world.
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Lethem on Dyer
Jonathan Lethem's profile of Geoff Dyer for BOMB Magazine is available online for a limited time only.
Something Is Off
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Working-Class Heroine
"That no-way-out is really the difference between boys and girls in working-class culture, because a working-class boy could run, or could when I was growing up." Guernica interviews Dorothy Allison about literature as glory; survival, opportunity, and gender; and working-class heroes vs. heroines. For your reading consideration: Bill Morris's essay on the riches of "white trash" literature.