Somehow in the post-holidays hangover, we missed the fact that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi — a.k.a. the Jersey Shore star with a pouf — made her debut as a novelist earlier this month, with A Shore Thing. Yep, she’s the one who once admitted she’d only read two books, Twilight and Dear John. (Which might explain […]
We’re totally hooked on Google’s new book search tool, which lets you search and graph the frequency of words in millions of books from 1800 to today. You can even compare and contrast two words or phrases to see how they fare in print over the years. It’s intended for scholars, but it’s free for anyone […]
Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among […]
Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among […]
Books make awesome holiday gifts: They can be mailed directly from Amazon et al if you remember someone at the very last minute; they won’t cause weight gain or allergy attacks; they show more thought and insight than a gift certificate; and they’re easy as anything to wrap (ever try gift-wrapping a cactus plant?). We’d […]
Our friends, Em & Nora (who we like to call “Em & No”), recently launched a site for grown-ups about young adult literature called LoveYALit.com*, since (according to the New York Times) more and more people 18-and-over are enjoying books originally intended for the 18-and-under set. Of course, books about teens, the most hormonal among […]
Laura Kipnis is the kind of writer we’d like to be if we weren’t so fond of making poop jokes and cheesy ’80s references (but, hey, there’s still time to grow up, right?). She writes smart books about topics close to our hearts, like love, sex, pornography, and — most recently — scandal. Her new […]
One of our biggest pet peeves is our society’s automatic acceptance — the giddy embrace, even — of the theory that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, with nary a space shuttle between them. We’ve written before on the lazy scientists who are suckers for a sexy headline about the “innate” differences […]
Sex is funny. People clunk heads, make foolish noises, and generally exhibit the grace of Michael Bolton on Dancing with the Stars. But if you’ve read most of the sex manuals published in the past thirty years, you’d think we were all missing the joke. You’d conclude that good sex required a bearded man, a […]
We’re the first people to say that avoiding fights completely in a relationship is not a realistic — nor a particularly healthy — goal. In fact, studies have found that couples who can fight passionately but civilly tend to have stronger romantic connections, i.e. their relationships don’t turn platonic as quickly. In other words, it’s […]
Affection: An Erotic Memoir by Krissy Kneen is a story of compulsive sexual exploration, sex addiction — and, ultimately, blissful, married monogamy. Australian author Kneen was raised by a group of protective and eccentric women who forbade any and every expression of sexuality… and we all know where that leads. We chatted to Kneen about […]
You wait your whole life for a book making fun of hippie seventies sex manuals and then, boom, two come along in a month — what are the odds? But only one of them includes the top five pastry-related euphemisms for female genitalia, and only one of them includes a suggested list of effective safe […]
scene from Five Hot Stories by Erika Lust We’ll admit it: we know very little about porn. In theory we know that there’s better porn out there than the crap our male hallmates used to watch in college with their doors “accidentally” left open. Especially now there are many online websites such as hdpornvideo that […]
photo by jcestnik Normally we don’t bother covering books that we think are terrible, but every now and then we can’t resist. There’s a book available for sale at a car wash (seriously) in L.A. called WTF? How to Survive 101 of Life’s Worst F-ing Situations. (That’s the name of the book, not the car […]
We’ve been a fan of Kristen Schaal’s since she played super-fan Mel on the awesomely genius show Flight of the Conchords. (If you’ve never seen it, stop reading this post immediately and add it to your Netflix queue. But come back!) She’s now a correspondent on The Daily Show, where her boyfriend Rich Blomquist is […]
We’ve always been torn by porn. We’re not fans ourselves, but we’re not comfortable dictating where to draw the line for other people’s fantasies either. So it was with great interest that we read this Guardian interview with Gail Dines, author of the new book “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality,” along with the […]
