An excerpt from the 1970 novel by Paula Fox: Status-conscious Sophie and Otto Bentwood attend a dinner party in Brooklyn Heights in the late sixties, shortly after Sophie sustains a bite on her hand from a stray cat.
Sari Botton
Posted inFeature, Fiction
Desperate Characters
An excerpt from the 1970 novel by Paula Fox: Status-conscious Sophie and Otto Bentwood attend a dinner party in Brooklyn Heights in the late sixties, shortly after Sophie sustains a bite on her hand from a stray cat.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
Jennifer Nix on June Carter Cash’s Influence on Her Life
In our hotel room that night, I broke out “Press On” and we took turns listening to songs on my Discman. Johnny and June’s duet “The Far Side Banks of Jordan” visibly stirred my dad, and at song’s end he said, “I wonder which one will go first. The other won’t last long after that.” […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Tig Notaro on Going Topless Onstage, Post-Double Mastectomy
Last week, ‘Tig’, a documentary about stand-up comic Tig Notaro–whose career reached new heights in 2012 after she opened a set by announcing she had breast cancer–debuted on Netflix. In January, at Vulture, Jada Yuan spoke with Notaro about the film, the assorted grave misfortunes from 2012 that are now behind her, her plans for […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Adam Sternbergh on the Wordlessly Expressive Language of Emoji
Happy World Emoji Day, everyone. The occasion seems an appropriate time to re-read Adam Sternbergh‘s layered history of this “wordless tongue” in the November 2014 issue of New York Magazine. Sternbergh considers not only how those funny little icons came to be, but also how our relationship to them has evolved–and how they make the hard, cold digital world […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Eve Ensler on Abusive Fathers and the Culture That Protects Them
In a short essay for Time, playwright and activist Eve Ensler writes about simultaneously understanding many women’s difficulty calling out abusive fathers—like her own and alleged rapist Bill Cosby—and being frustrated with a culture that protects beloved, powerful patriarchs while vilifying and portraying as liars the women who speak out against them: I think of […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
The First Five Chapters of ‘Saint Mazie’ by Jami Attenberg
UK website The Pool has an excerpt of Saint Mazie, the much-lauded new novel by Jami Attenberg, author of the New York Times Bestselling The Middlesteins. They’ve got not just one chapter, but the first five from this book of historical fiction about legendary “Queen of the Bowery” Mazie Phillips—an irreverent but kind figure known for handing […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Katie O’Reilly on the Downsides to Donating Your Eggs
For a brief while in my late twenties, I toyed with selling my eggs. In the end, I was afraid of having the procedure, of what the fertility drugs might do to me—and the idea of having offspring out in the world whom I might never know. (I was afraid enough of having offspring I […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Author Porochista Khakpour on New Age Treatments for Lyme Disease, and ‘Mind Over Matter’
As someone who’s twice been diagnosed with Lyme Disease, I’ve read an awful lot about it. The more I read, the more confused I am; for every long, boring article about antibiotic treatments, there are two or three about widely varying alternative cures. The Last Illusion author Porochista Khakpour has been living with Lyme for […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Station Eleven’ Author Emily St. John Mandel on Finally Quitting Her Day Job
Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel recently tweeted that she’d quit her day job—something she’d been unable to do for years before the success of her highly acclaimed fourth novel, which was nominated for a National Book Award, among other prizes. In interviews over the years, Mandel has talked about her necessity for at […]