Elizabeth Merrick
How we love her! Let us count the ways: Francine Prose, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gordon, Aimee Bender, Samantha Hunt.... We are so excited, This Is Not Chick Lit comes out August 1st!
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July 27, 2006
July 20, 2006
Totally, perhaps, unrelated to anything save beating the heat (for even on the shores of northern california the day waxes hot), I stumbled across this little nugget in the Times. My favorite summer food! I slurped this down one hot day in Seoul after pointing to it on a picture menu. Waitress cut the noodles with a trusty pair of scissors and I was simply ga-ga over it.
And may I humbly suggest bingsu as world's greatest summertime dessert?
Brought to you by the headlines and by my greedy gus palate.
July 18, 2006
Word For Word Event
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Erica Jong, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life
Hosted by: Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
In this smart and clever autobiography, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, Erica Jong tells spicy tales of New York and Hollywood, and describes life after best-selling novel Fear of Flying.
Time: 12:30 pm
Location:
The Bryant Park Reading Room on the 42nd Street side between 5th and 6th Ave across the street from Coliseum Books.
*Please note: In the case of rain the events will be moved to the Coliseum Books Café.
Information for the public: Coliseum Books, 212-803-5890
You should go. Then, have some lunch. Make an early afternoon of it, you know?
July 14, 2006
Okay everybody, so if you're in New York, save the dates--we'd love to see you!
A reading and discussion of THIS IS NOT CHICK LIT, with contributors:
Jennifer Egan * Carolyn Ferrell * Binnie Kirshenbaum * Dika Lam * Curtis Sittenfeld * Lynne Tillman and editor Elizabeth Merrick
FRIDAY AUGUST 4, 7pm
At Barnes and Noble (on the UWS)
2289 Broadway @ 82nd St.
With a fabulous party to follow!
Also
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 23, 12:30 p.m.
Lynne Tillman, Jennifer Egan, and Elizabeth Merrick will discuss
THIS IS NOT CHICK LIT
At Word for Word
In the Bryant Park Reading Room
alongside 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues
July 10, 2006
Tuesday 7/11 I will be guest-blogging over at Bookslut so come check me out there.
July 09, 2006
In college the following is true according to the Times today:
The honors students are girls girls girls. Not so true at the New Yorker, Harpers, etc.
"The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys," Ms. Mead said. "I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or something else the boys may be doing?"
It is so hard for me to even write about this anymore--it's so obvious and digested to me I can't even repeat myself anymore. Just go visit the Guerrilla Girls cause those statistics are pretty close to what's going on today, the reasons are the same, there is nothing new under the sun. Women college students fill up liberal arts majors and rock out and do amazing things--yet when they graduate, and ten, fifteen years on, they are lucky to be writing for CosmoGirl. What the fuck.
When story and image is at stake, everything is at stake, so the gatekeeping, while invisible to most of the world, is fierce.
July 06, 2006
i'm all about reading right now, gearing up for our book recommendations for the fall. reading as a project also helps me get through that 3:00 to 5:00 slump when the light gets really flat and thin and time treads slowly across the boards. anyway, between novels tin house offers up some nice palate cleansing stories. i've always liked this magazine and with lydia davis, anthony doerr, yiyun li (Grace Book Club), and the rest of the bloodhound gang you can't go wrong.
plus it's such a pretty magazine.
July 05, 2006
Gorgeous photographs from girls in a collaboration program between ICP and the high school at Rikers Island here (click on the slideshow on the left).
The hundreds of photographs the girls took of themselves and of one another became a weekly window on their lives. One girl, assigned to focus on her body, took a blurry, postmodern-looking picture of her unshaved armpit. "It's my street revolution," she explained. "I don't shave."
Yeah, I'm sick to death of New York's grooming obsession too. You can't shock or disturb anyone with your pottymouth or your girls-gone-wild bag of tricks anymore but you can with your hairy legs. I think this piece of information is not to be underestimated.
July 04, 2006
This whole town and horse pastures and back roads and everything lost power for four hours on Sunday so, bored, we drove to the parking lot of the country club to watch the fireworks, the the only single thing going for entertainment except the amazing Mexican ice cream place and we were all full.
(And the fireworks were after a giant tree fell across the street from my dad's house--miracle no cars were underneath. You can only watch guys clearing the limbs away with chainsaws for about 45 minutes though--although it's interesting that whole time, I'll tell you that much.)
Shocked by lack of cable, during the fireworks next to the golf course I had this gripping paranoid fantasy to increase the drama: what if there was a big blackout and we found ourselves in a position of being grateful for the chance to move into a refugee camp at the country club with all the tennis people who dream about making out with Bill O'Reilly and don't have a thought in their heads and are completely irritating and apocalyptic and I hate them? And I was stuck sharing water rations and crab cakes and iceberg lettuce salads and gin and tonics with them in gratitude not to be stuck without amenities? And listen to them talk about their fucking Hummers and the south beach diet?
I was completely frozen in panic with this thought. It was the scariest thing I could think of. It is what the people who waitress there surely have to deal with and it is why I got fired from every single waitressing job I ever lied my way into.
And then when I was at the point of imagining that I'd just have to make friends with a leathery-tan older lady smoking Mores and get her to share her Xanaxes and Vicodans with me, I realized that I would just teach a writing class. In the imaginary hell of weeks at the country club refugee camp, if I teach a writing class I can get to the interesting bits of people no matter how much America in its current surface incarnation has obliterated their nuance. Fuck yes. (And I would definitely try to get the lady smoking the Mores in the writing class for sure.)
Hilarious. And I'm so thankful there was a way out of that worst case scenario! The challenge and amazing fun adventure of the idea totally buoyed my spirits and I felt really, really lucky.
Right now part of my meandering/composing day is reading Neko Case interviews. I like this one (and you have to kind of scroll down a bit to get to the best parts including the morning she woke up with gum stuck in her panties) but there are tons more