sundance

Top 10 dirtier books

A few weeks back we jumped on the Twitter hashtag #lessambitiousbooks bandwagon, with a list of our Top 10 Less Ambitious Sex Books (The Joy of Dry Humping, Slight Hangup About Flying, etc.). This time around we figured we’d create our own damn hashtag — #dirtierbooks — so that nobody could accuse us of being late to the game. The trick with #dirtierbooks is to be clever without sounding like a cheesy porno (The Da Vinci Load, A Tale of Two Titties, et al). Below are our top 10 best attempts. So, er, anyone want to jump on our bandwagon? (That came out dirtier than we meant it.)

The slow but (hopefully) steady erosion of our gender stereotypes

For our book club, we’re reading the 2003 novel “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver.* I, Lo, knowing nothing about the book or its author, began reading and was amazed that a male author could create a female narrator that sounded so authentic and convincing, especially regarding childbirth and motherhood. That is, until halfway through the book when I happened to catch a glimpse of the author photo on the inside back flap: turns out Lionel is a woman.

Hip reads for 2012

We know it’s hard to invest in a story, play, or essay these days. But with Kindles, Nooks, iPads, old fashion print, and audio books, there are convenient ways to keep your brain stimulated and find time to text. Besides, looking like you care about something other than a video game score during your morning commute totally increases your sexy points in the voyeuristic eyes of fellow passenger. Here’s a list of new releases for 2012 that should keep you current, occupied, and slightly out of reach from all your fans.

Top 10 less ambitious sex books

We’re suckers for a good Twitter hashtag — they can make everyone feel like a stand-up comedian for a few minutes (not to mention giving us all a break from reading what our colleagues ate for breakfast). We particularly loved the #lessambitiousbooks hashtag that was trending this week, and of course we jumped on the bandwagon, finding ourselves hilarious @EMandLO. We were planning on publishing a round-up of our favorite sex- and love-related entries found on Twitter, but as it turned out, we had more fun coming up with our own. So here are our top 10 less ambitious sex (or sexy) books:

When parents text

“Some people worry that technology is hindering human communication, creating more distance in relationships, but we think When Parents Text is evidence to the contrary,” write co-authors Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Fraioli about their new book.

A digital, serialized, erotic novella for the month of August

On July 31st we got a press release about “29 Days of August,” a “digital novella of appetites” meant to be read throughout the month on “the social networks you already use.” Here’s the scoop:

Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut chilling

I figure this photo of authors Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut sharing a lifeguard seat is apropos selfishly for the fact that I’m at the beach today and soaking in this awesome 100 degree New York heat. The other thing I find interesting about this photo is that Tom Wolfe isn’t outfitted in his trademark [...]

New summer reading: “Lola, California” (excerpt #2)

Last week, we gave you a first look at the new novel from Edie Meidav, “Lola, California,” called one of “the most anticipated novels of 2011″ by TheMillions.com. This week, a second excerpt: this one a glimpse into the world of stripping, as two female friends navigate that seedy terrain for the first time. To read Meidav is to enter a world of beauty, depth and detail; to hear her speak about her craft is to realize that world is not merely a concoction or a slight of hand — Meidave lives and breathes her art. So if her book tour happens to take her to your neck of the woods, go. (Her tour dates and locations are listed here and after the excerpt below):

New fiction (and music and film): “Lola, California” by Edie Meidav

The amazing writer Edie Meidav (who also happens to be our friend and neighbor) is out today with a new novel: “Lola, California”, called “brilliant” and “awesome” by Publisher’s Weekly. Meidav is such a force of inspiration that art practically gets spontaneously generated in her wake: above is a beautifully haunting short film created by Snapdragon that’s inspired by “Lola” along with Meidav’s narration; and here is music inspired by the book from Kevin Salem, who calls it “part soundtrack for the reader, part songs inspired by the text … and part music inspired by the cultural identity of the novel.” Below is one of two excerpts from “Lola, California” that Meidav is generously allowing us to publish here — this one about a rape on a Greek island. Stay tuned next week for the second excerpt about two friends go-go dancing. Both are compelling creepy and deeply moving, even without the context of the full novel:

Letters to the children of Troy

In 1971, Marguerite Hart, the first children’s librarian at the local library in Troy, Michigan, began a letter writing campaign to many famous people asking them to respond with an open letter to the town’s children about the importance of libraries and reading.

The way we stray today

Pamela Haag‘s new book “Marriage Confidential” has one of the best subtitles we’ve seen in a long time: “The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules.” That’s a lot to live up to, but the book delivers. And it’s getting good buzz. Below is an excerpt from the section “New Twists on Old Infidelities, Or, The Way We Stray Today”:

The Lover’s Dictionary

The nameless narrator of David Levithan’s novel The Lover’s Dictionary narrates his relationship in the form of dictionary definitions of words, from aberrant to zenith. Some definitions are a page long, others just a sentence. Which makes it sound gimmicky and cute and Twitterific, but this book is anything but. It’s moving, hilarious, heartbreaking and smart. It’s also something of a guessing game, because the definitions leap back and forth across the span of the relationship. This book is a poignant reminder that words can say everything and nothing — and the same goes for the spaces and the pauses between them. Levithan’s is a spare tale and yet it feels universal, especially because the narrator addresses his partner as a nameless, gender-less “you.” But enough with all this wordiness, let’s just show you what we mean with a few of our favorite entries:

In praise of the quickie (and quickie erotica)

Have you ever glanced over at the alarm clock on your night-stand during sex and calculated exactly how many hours are left until it rings? An extended 69 or a slow and sensual love-making sesh is suddenly much less appealing when every minute of pleasure is a minute less of shut-eye. Which might explain a recent study which found that 8 in 10 people would choose a good night’s sleep over sex. But what if you didn’t have to choose, what if you could have both sleep and sex? Hello, quickie!

Reasons you’re still single

Mike Sacks is one fifth of the hilarious Association for the Betterment of Sex, the cabal behind the book Our Bodies, Our Junk, which we wrote about last year. So we weren’t surprised in the least to discover how much funny there is in Sacks’ own book, Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason. It’s a collection of 54 short humor pieces, many of them written in collaboration with the other members of the ABS, amongst others. The essays include everything from “Rules for My Cuddle Party” (“#1: Please do not give birth in the hot tub.”) to a bridegroom on Twitter (“Attempting to fist-bump rabbi”) and icebreakers to avoid (“This party reminds me of 9/11″). To give you a taste, we’re excerpting one of the essays here in full…

Charles Dickens’ bizarre letter opener

The New York Public Library has one of the more bizarre artifacts of our literary past that I’ve seen. Apparently Charles Dickens loved his pet cat Bob, and to remember the feline when he passed away, the famed author “took one of Bob’s paws, had it stuffed and slapped it on a letter opener.” Feel [...]

New York City makes the heart grow fonder

Ariel Sabar’s new book, Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York, follows couples from the 1940s to the present whose matchmaker was New York City. We chatted with him about location-location-location — and what it means for love.

EM & LO: What got you first interested in how place interacts with the way strangers meet and fall in love?

ARIEL SABAR: The spark for me was my parents’ love story. My mom, Stephanie, and dad, Yona, were these really different people. Stephanie was the daughter of a well-off Manhattan businessman and his sophisticated wife, the kind of folks who held season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. Yona was born to an illiterate teenage mother and peddler father in a mud hut in northern Iraq. But one fall day in 1966, they both somehow find themselves in Washington Square Park, that wonderful gathering place in the heart of Greenwich Village. Through a series of circumstances I describe in the book, Yona, lonely and homesick, strikes up a conversation this interesting woman — thinking mistakenly that she is also a “tourist.” Four months later they are married. The more I quizzed them about their story, the more convinced I became that the park itself had played a kind of matchmaking role. Forty-four years, two kids, and four grandkids later, they’re still happily married.

Norman Mailer’s “jungle gym” apartment

The New York Times has a great photo gallery of Norman Mailer’s stunning and highly personal Brooklyn Heights apartment on its website. Norman Mailer, who passed away in 2007, tackled his fear of heights (stemming from his vertigo problem) when he drastically remodeled his apartment over forty years ago “by designing a space that resembled [...]

The 10 types of sex dreams

Freud, Schmroid. If you’re looking for a good book on the interpretation of dreams, check out the brand new one by our friend Lauri Loewenberg, the nicest dream interpreter you’ll ever meet! Dream On It: Unlock Your Dreams, Change Your Life (published by St. Martin’s Press) features hundreds of real dream interpretations and a comprehensive dream symbol dictionary to help you understand and make the most of your nocturnal visions, especially the sexy ones. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to sex dreams, which Lauri says are often “not about a physical union you want, but rather a psychological union you need!” There are 10 kinds of sex dreams; below are 5 of them; check out Dream On It for the other five archetypes (The Friend, The Same Gender, Oral Sex, Family Members, and Masturbation):

1. The Mystery Lover – This is the most common of all sex dreams. Many of us wonder if this dream is actually a glimpse of our soul mate who might be out there somewhere waiting for us. Alas, t’is not so. But what is so is that the unknown, faceless man or woman that often appears in our dreams does indeed hold significance….Our dreams have a cool way of showing us the different parts of our personality in the form of a person so we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick. That being said, the mystery lover in your dreams is the embodiment, the personification of the qualities we tend to associate with that gender….Throughout life we struggle to incorporate the right balance of each [gender] into our personalities and behavior. A man wants to be caring and understanding, yet he doesn’t want to be a sissy. A woman wants to assert herself, yet she doesn’t want to be labeled the B word! Our mystery lover dreams are guiding us towards that perfect balance of firm and gentle, bold and caring, yin and yang.
   
   

Getting insulted by authors

Two first-namer Bill Ryan has a novel (pun!) hobby that takes him to book signings where he asks authors to commemorate his copy with their signature and an insult, which he then shares on his blog. Amy Sedaris’ insult is rather NSFW, but SUNfiltered readers are a mature and appreciative crowd!

Zions, and Mormons, and polygamists, oh my!

There seems to be Mormonism and polygamy in the air lately (at least for us), so we wanted to spread the love to you and you and you and…:

• Escape — Just finished this crazy page-turner of a memoir from Carolyn Jessop, one of the few women to escape The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or FLDS (of Warren Jeffs infamy) with her 8 kids (and 8 is a low number for this radical polygamist sect). She recounts how the cult basically imprisons women as sex/baby-making slaves — you’ll boggle over how something like this could exist in America in the 21st century. Katherine Heigl is slated to make the movie version of the book (which, we hate to admit, we’re morbidly excited about).
  
  

7 personality types to avoid when you’re dating

In a world of Facebook “likes” and online dating questionnaires that seem to narrow down the soul-mate search to a simple (and yet oh so witty!) checklist of wants and needs, it’s easy to focus on the superficial ways in which we do or don’t connect with each other. And granted, that stuff can make or break a first date, and can be indicative of a long-term connection. We both love darts! He’s got a flat butt too! Another unabashed Miley Cyrus fan?! Still, superficial connections have a tendency to mask bedsheet-sized red flags. Like, oh, say, the fact that your date is a raging narcissist. So we turned to Gordon Livingston, M.D., author of the book How to Love: Choosing Well at Every Stage of Life, and asked him to weigh on the, well, weightier issues. Specifically, seven personality types that you should avoid in your search for Mr./Ms. Right. Even if said Mr./Ms. performs the best damn air guitar solo you’ve ever seen.

1. The Self-Absorbed Hysteric

These so-called “histrionic” people often describe themselves as “passionate and emotional.” Their primary drive is to be the center of attention. Their self-absorption and superficiality make it hard for them to engage in the give and take of healthy relationships. Danger signals that one is in the presence of a self-absorbed “hysteric” include shallowness and a more or less constant need to be the focus of attention. It is just very hard for them to get beyond their own needs to consider their obligations to others, even their own children.

BOOKS: the plague of boring biography titles continues

A well-reviewed biography on artist Amadeo Modigliani written by seasoned biographer Meryle Secrest came out earlier this month. Modigliani: A Life dutifully chronicles the artist’s notoriously tumultuous life, one fraught with poverty and bouts of alcoholism and drug-addiction that quickly worsened his struggle with tubercular meningitis. Of course, none of this drama is relayed in the title, nor is there any evidence of the artist’s misfortunes or madness in the cover, which shows a young Modigliani in a polo and V-neck sweater, looking ready to teach high school economics. There exist several other biographies on the late artist. In fact, five years before Secrest’s Modigliani: A Life was published, Jeffrey Myers wrote the biography Modigliani: A Life.

When sex hurts…and we don’t mean heartbreak

We’ve been writing about sex for more than ten years, and when we started out, the topic that our female readers wanted to hear about most was orgasms — how to have them (either solo or with a partner), how to have them more often, how to have different kinds, how to have them simultaneously with a partner, how to stop faking them, and so on. Well, the Big O is still a favorite topic, but these days it practically ties with another topic: painful sex. (And we’re not talking about the attending heartbreak, though consistent physical pain during intercourse can itself be heartbreaking, of course.) We don’t necessarily think that sex is suddenly more painful for women, but rather that it’s becoming more acceptable to talk about the fact that, for women especially, sometimes sex can hurt like a motherfucker…not to put too fine a point on it. But too many women still fail to speak up. So we were thrilled to hear about a new book that focuses on this topic: When Sex Hurts: A Woman’s Guide to Banishing Sexual Pain, by Andrew Goldstein, MD, Caroline Pukall, PhD, and Irwin Goldstein, MD. We definitely don’t have nearly enough letters after our names to adequately address the issues involved here! The authors were kind enough to allow us to publish an excerpt from the first chapter of their book, which you can read below. Check back in next week for their summary of the various causes of painful sex, and the week after that for a Q&A with the authors, in which they address some of the most common question they hear about painful sex.

Stop-motion bookshelf

Watch this fun stop-motion video of books rearranging and organizing themselves on a bookshelf, and stay for the credits. As one YouTube commenter wrote: Things to do while on house arrest. -> Looking at you Mubarak and Qaddafi.

The wisdom and wit of Snooki

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 why Snooki’s novel contains both a Bella and an Edward — not exactly the most common names overheard on a Jersey boardwalk.) We’re too busy reading George Eliot right now to actually read her entire snook, as we like to call it, but we have been enjoying reading the following brief excerpts out loud while lounging around in our silk pajamas and feeding each other grapes. Just in case you were expecting Hemingway, the cover helpfully explains that the novel is about “a girl [named Gia] looking for love on the boardwalk (one full of big hair, dark tans, and fights galore).”

• “Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show. She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky.”
• “He had an okay body. Not fat at all. And naturally toned abs. She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face.”