Over at The Week, Jeva Lange recommends books based on where your travels are taking you this summer. For other recommended reading, don’t miss our Great Second-Half Book Preview.
Literary Destinations
Football Book Club: ‘The Case Against Satan’
It’s a brand new week and Football Book Club is reading Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan. For those of you scoring at home, that’s an exorcism novel written by a former executive editor of Playboy. Plus posts about Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk and Filth.
Appropriate Today More Than Ever
For the tenth anniversary of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich has penned a new foreword and introduction which you can read here.
How To Be A Woman (For Less)
(American) Readers who dug Rob Delaney’s Year In Reading post will be pleased to learn that the eBook of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman is on sale for the low, low price of $1.99. (Along with nine other memoirs, too!)
The Crisis of Criticism
“Then there’s the no-one-reads-anymore hysteria, the lack of supportive careers for apprenticing writers, the MFA deathtrap, etc. It feels self-indulgent as a critic to say, ‘But the whole critical structure has broken down, let’s talk about that.’ The critic only comes into play when the books are actually produced and put onto the market, meaning their jobs are tied into this whole decaying, rotting mess of an industry.” Jessa Crispin writes on the self-hating book critic.