The tradition of reading on the toilet may be as old as wiping our asses, but as we’ve stopped using newspapers and catalogs to clean ourselves with, why have we continued to find new ways to read on the toilet?
Still, she was fearful of returning. She had been invited by Pat Nixon to attend a small ceremony to mark the hanging of the formal White House portraits of President Kennedy and Jackie, painted by the artist Aaron Shikler.
“As you know, the thought of returning to the White House is difficult for me,” she repeated in a handwritten letter to Pat Nixon on Jan. 27, 1971.
This is an entertaining and atmospheric picaresque – though in the midst of our own pandemic, Wilson’s satire of misguided churchmen and unscientific plague doctors feels somewhat quaint: our own leaders appear far more monstrous. Still, it is often ingenious and frequently hilarious. Brother Diggory kills many, yet survives to tell the tale. I for one am glad.
Sarah Langan's Good Neighbors is one of the creepiest, most unnerving deconstructions of American suburbia I've ever read. Langan cuts to the heart of upper middle class lives like a skilled surgeon and exposes the rotten realities behind manicured lawns and perfect families, and the result is horrifically plausible.
Sam van Zweden’s debut memoir, Eating With My Mouth Open, is a sprawling narrative that examines ideas of family, home and identity via food. As she reflects on her own food memories, Van Zweden attempts to unpick the tangle of ideals, expectations and contradictions that lie at the heart of our relationship with food, with each other and with our own bodies. This is more than just a story about food; it is the stories we tell ourselves about food, and the stories that food tells about us.
Some people say the devil is beating
his wife. Some people say the devil
is pawing his wife. Some people say
the devil is doubling down on an overall