The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (2021)

1. Girl on a Motorcycle
In the 1968 Anglo-French film Girl on a Motorcycle, Alain Delon gives Marianne Faithfull, his young mistress, a Harley-Davidson. For much of the movie she is on the bike, blissful and windblown as she cruises the European countryside. The motorcycle was a wedding ( Read more... )

The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (2021)

11. Made to BurnThe first image I pinned up, to spark inspiration for what would eventually be a novel, was of a woman with tape over her mouth. She floated above my desk with a grave, almost murderous look, war paint on her cheeks, blond braids framing her face, the braids a frolicsome ( Read more... )

Chelsea Girls: A Novel by Eileen Myles (1994)

Bread and WaterUsually I steal vitamins. I tuck them inside my suede jacket or I slip them in the pocket of my dirty white jacket. Once I had a bag of grapes and stood there munching them in the drugstore and dropped in a bottle of Es when the woman at the cosmetic counter turned. Thievery is a split ( Read more... )

97,196 Words: Essays by Emmanuel Carrere (2019)

Philip K. Dick
When I started reading him around 1975, I wore little round glasses, an Afghan vest, and a pair of beat-up Clarks on my feet, and I went around saying he was the Dostoyevsky of our time; in a word, the man who’d grasped the bigger picture. For me his books Ubik, The Three Stigmata of ( Read more... )

What If This Were Enough?: Essays by Heather Havrilesky (2018)

A Scourge of GurusThe guru is not an expert in happiness or inner peace, although he plays one on the internet. He is not a role model in the realm of fighting injustice or saving the world from disease or throwing his body onto the battlefield. He is a champion of the self. His ( Read more... )

I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyoncé by Michael Arceneaux (2018 ( Read more... )

Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime by Ron Stallworth (2018)4. My New Friend David ( Read more... )

Full Disclosure by Stormy Daniels (2018)

Chapter One“Me and Susan split up,” he said ( Read more... )

No One Tells You This: A Memoir by Glynnis MacNicol (2018)

Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
--Virginia Woolf

4. Woman of a Certain Age
It’s a luxury to worry about your age, those high-rises seemed to be reminding me, to worry about being alone when there are so many other not inevitable things to ( Read more... )

I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays by Tim Kreider (2018)

Kind of LoveMy own snobby theory had always been that anyone who needed to go to elaborate lengths to make themselves look interesting must not be. I liked go forth into the world disguised as a grown-up, the better to wrongdo unmolested by the police. But this was of course just ( Read more... )