Tag Archives: Sexy Intellectuals

The Child’s Child by Barbara Vine

Synopsis: While working on her PhD thesis on unmarried mothers in British literature, a young woman finds disturbing parallels between a violent work of fiction from the mid-20th century and her own life living with her gay brother. Review: Everything I love about Barbara Vine is present in The Child’s Child: a haunting atmosphere, complicated characters, and a sense of urgency to the storytelling that has nothing to do with a jam-packed plot. The book opens with Grace, a PhD candidate living a peaceful life…

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Real Sex by Lauren Winner

Synopsis: An exploration of the meaning of chastity in the 21st century. Review: Real Sex is an excellent companion piece to Anna Broadway’s Sexless in the City. Winner offers a larger cultural and historical context for Broadway’s desire to live chastely, and has some ideas about why Broadway expresses some disappointment in the way she has been taught by the church to think about sex. Winner’s analysis is thoughtful and well-researched, and is worth reading even by those who don’t hold the same beliefs in…

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Loose Girl by Kerry Cohen

Synopsis: An autobiography of a promiscuous life. Review: The most striking thing about Kerry Cohen’s Loose Girl is the inevitability of her misbehavior. Cohen’s parents divorced when she was a preteen, and neither one seems able to practice any kind of responsible or involved parenting. Her dad is the kind of guy who asks for a toke when he catches his daughter and her friends getting high, and her mother is a gynecologist who prescribes abortion pills for Cohen without even an office visit. Both…

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Sexless in the City by Anna Broadway

Synopsis: The misadventures of a hapless twenty-something woman whose greatest fear is that she will die a virgin, and whose second greatest fear is that she’ll have sex before marriage. Review: I’ll let you know up front that there’s no way that I can be objective about Sexless in the City, because Anna Broadway met the woman who bought her book in my very living room. (Yes, I am Blogyenta, formerly known as Girlfriend #6.) Reading Anna’s book was like sitting down to have a…

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Sexless in the City–Win a Free Copy!

My dear friend Anna Broadway‘s book Sexless in the City is coming out on Tuesday, April 15th. I’m so thrilled for Anna, who met the editor who bought her book in my very living room! I’ve read some sections of it and it’s just great. So how do you win a copy? Easy–just blog about it. Mention the soundtrack and get a second entry. Even if you don’t win, I hope you’ll check this book out.

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The Fair Folk edited by Marvin Kaye

Synopsis: An anthology of short stories about elves. Review: The Fair Folk was put together in 2005 by the Science Fiction Book Club, and consists of stories written about elves and their kin from some luminaries in the field. I enjoyed each one immensely, differing as they do in style and tone. “UOUS” by Tanith Lee takes the familiar “three wishes” story and turns it on its head. An unhappy Cinderalla-esque young woman calls out three wishes, conjuring a fairy who is more than happy…

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Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

Synopsis: A headstrong Upper West Side yearns to escape her family’s Jewish Bronx origins and become a Broadway star. Review: This is the third or fourth time I’ve read Marjorie Morningstar, and every time I find myself absolutely riveted for the first two-thirds, then bored and indifferent for the final third, only to be knocked out by the epilogue. The book is rich with details and some astonishing set pieces–such as Seth’s bar mitzvah–but it’s hollow at the core. It’s as if author Herman Wouk…

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The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Synopsis: A young man with severe amnesia comes to realize that he is being stalked by a conceptual shark (which is much, much scarier than you might think). Review: What surprised me most about The Raw Shark Texts was how fast it moved. For all its high-minded metaphysical aims and experimental underpinnings, the book has the pacing of an airport thriller or Stephen King horror book. There were some sequences in this book, such as protagonist Second Eric’s Sanderson encounter with Nobody, that were are…

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Last Night in Paradise by Katie Roiphe

Synopsis: A look at sexual mores in the age of AIDS. Review: I like a good polemic as much as the next person, particularly when it involves people having lots of sex, mostly because I always feel like that’s nice work if you can get it. Last Night in Paradise isn’t hard-hitting investigative journalism as much as it’s an apologia for all the sex that Roiphe and her friends had in the 80s and 90s: “look, we may have slept around but we are always…

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