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Interview: Heidi Julavits
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Interview: Heidi Julavits

By Jess Sauer, eMusic Contributor

Julia Severn, the protagonist of Heidi Julavits's latest novel, The Vanishers, is not doing too well. Her symptoms and prescriptions number in the double digits, and yet no doctor has been able to confirm the origin — or even the nature — of her illness. It turns out, Julia's affliction is an occupational hazard: As a talented initiate at the Workshop, a prestigious graduate program for psychics, she's made herself vulnerable to the competitive ire… more »

The Worst Moms in Literature
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The Worst Moms in Literature

By Jess Sauer, eMusic Contributor

This time of year, drugstore aisles are packed with cards extolling the virtues of the Best Mom Ever. It seems that the happy families Tolstoy once spoke of are truly alike enough to warrant the mass printing of cards with specific childhood memories of cookies, homework help, rides to soccer practice. There are apparently also enough maternal saints to make "Thanks for putting up with me" cards popular. It's rare for a mother to give her… more »

Classic Teen Reads
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Classic Teen Reads

By Elisa Ludwig, eMusic Contributor

It's hard to believe, in this age of Twilight, The Hunger Games and a million imitations thereof, that books for teen readers haven't always been so plentiful. Though coming-of-age stories and novels told from an adolescent point of view have been written and published throughout the history of modern literature, it wasn't until the 1950s and '60s that teens were considered an important demographic for booksellers. And it wasn't until the 1970s and '80s that… more »

Interview: Lauren Groff
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Interview: Lauren Groff

By Jami Attenberg, eMusic Contributor

It's still early in 2012, but it's reasonable to say that Lauren Groff's ambitious new novel Arcadia is one of the most important books of the year. Groff, a New Yorker fiction contributor and the New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton, tackles the concept of utopia and all its strengths and failings. It's a big-idea book, but it's also an intimate relationship drama, following the life of a young boy named… more »

Interview: Michael Ian Black
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Interview: Michael Ian Black

By Alice Gregory, eMusic Contributor

In his new book, cult comedy hero and prolific tweeter Michael Ian Black eats "lesbian cereal," contemplates killing his colicky baby and chastises himself for buying a BMW. Part bildungsroman, part love poem, You're Not Doing It Right exposes the un-fuzzy feelings of marriage and family. eMusic's Alice Gregory spoke with Black about regressive humor, writing about the people you love, and hecklers-as-editors. You open one chapter with a confession: "We are four months into parenthood and… more »

The Hunger Games and the Allure of Dystopia
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The Hunger Games and the Allure of Dystopia

By Jessica Wilson, eMusic Contributor

Big Brother and the Memory Hole. Guy Montag and his fire hose. Ranks of Gamma and Delta children conditioned in their sleep. From 1984 to Fahrenheit 451 to Brave New World, dystopian novels have become cultural touchstones. Who doesn't get a delicious, horrified shiver at the thought of involuntary behavior modification via drug injection, Ã la Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, or being forced to bear children at the order of a repressive patriarchal government,… more »

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Drift

Rachel Maddow
2012 | Unabridged

Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

2012 | Publisher: Random House Audio
Patrick Rapa By Patrick Rapa eMusic Contributor

There's a sense of fairness to Drift that has won some unexpected hearts and minds

"It's not a conspiracy, there aren't rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It's been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that."

For the better part of a decade, pols, pundits and wingnuts have all but held séances to make it look like their side was the one our infallible founding fathers had in mind back in the day. It's been more truthiness than truth, which is a shame because a lot of this stuff can be put to rest with solid research and a little perspective. For Drift, Rachel Maddow — a Rhodes scholar best known for her lefty news… more »

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Wild

Cheryl Strayed
2012 | Unabridged

Cheryl Strayed, Wild

2012 | Publisher: Random House Audio
Sara Jaffe By Sara Jaffe eMusic Contributor

An affecting memoir that voids the temptation for wholesale epiphany

There's a point in Wild, Cheryl Strayed's memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, when she feels herself torn between two identities. Is she, as her trail mates have suggested, the Hapless Hiker, plagued by a series of misfortunes (too-heavy pack, shoes too small, incidents involving an iced-over tent and hundreds of tiny black frogs), or is she the "hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen" that she believes herself to be in more triumphant moments? Strayed realizes, in that moment, that she is neither of them, and both of them, too, and it is this kind of complex realization that is at the heart of this inspiring book.

Strayed, a backpacking novice, decided at… more »

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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Mark Leyner
2012 | Unabridged

Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

2012 | Publisher: Hachette Audio
Alice Gregory By Alice Gregory eMusic Contributor

The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised.

For a certain subset of readers, call them the proto-bloggers, the long wait for The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has felt excruciating. It's was the mid '90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the sort of Internet culture we're all now accustomed to.

In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher, but also the story of the universe's very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of… more »

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House of Stone

Anthony Shadid
2012 | Unabridged

Anthony Shadid , House of Stone

2012 | Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks
Scott Esposito By Scott Esposito eMusic Contributor

A reporter's eye and a son's heart converge in war-torn Lebanon

It's a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone — strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn't have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent, Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death's stead and gives it meaning.

House of Stone's narrative concerns the reporter's efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather's house in Marjayoun, Lebanon,… more »

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International Bookshelf
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International Bookshelf

By Jess Sauer, eMusic Contributor

The idea that diverse languages are a form of divine punishment, serving only to separate us, is a popular one in numerous mythologies and religious traditions. In Genesis, humanity is unified by a common tongue… more »

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