Most people consider Donald Trump to be a gratuitous self-promoter, a somewhat charismatic actor, a clown, a demagogue, a misogynist, or a racist. But what everyone needs to understand about him is that what he considers himself, first and foremost, is a builder. In his latest book, Crippled America: How to Make…
Umberto Eco’s first new novel in five years, Numero Zero, weighs in at 192 pages, versus 400+ for his previous efforts. I’m pretty Eco-friendly—The Name of the Rose was a lot of fun, if a bit overlong—so I was looking forward to something like Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum, except shorter, tighter, and brighter.…
While I was reading Khloé Kardashian’s book Strong Looks Better Naked in a Brooklyn café, the person sitting across from me gingerly asked, “What genre is that?” I had no answer.
In April, several months before Rachel Dolezal became head jester of racial appropriation court, Rush Limbaugh called celebrated black image activist and feminist Michaela Angela Davis, “a mixed-race little orphan Annie.” The statement was shockingly ugly, a blatant reminder from the court’s self-appointed king that,…
Few communities are more culturally rich than the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights, which boasts some 167 spoken languages, a strong LGBT presence, and some of the greatest restaurants in the city. Frederick Wiseman, the 85-year-old director of observational documentaries (whose narratives are never forced with…
Shitty internet man and mediocre comedian Josh “The Fat Jew” Ostrovsky took some heat this summer when the entire internet agreed that his career is based on stealing jokes from other people. But like any fraud, Ostrovsky has a book deal. Now, that whole book is online, for free, from someone else.
“Exposure Doesn’t Pay Your Rent,” goes the headline on a recent blog post at The Rumpus, a literary website that doesn’t pay its writers.
Despite being a mere 169 pages long, Crippled America, the newest book from obscenely prolific author and current presidential candidate Donald Trump, is not an easy read. It becomes physically painful around page 11, when Trump is, ostensibly, explaining why he makes outrageous comments:
After a high-profile book tour that included a blockbuster interview on 20/20, Leah Remini’s memoir about her life in the Church of Scientology, Troublemaker, was released Tuesday. The book is a quick read (the final 50 pages or so are just photos), but covers a lot of ground—from Leah’s mother first explaining…
The mainstream media is but one slice of the paid writing world. The deeper you go, the murkier it gets.
So often, when we look back on our formative years, the memories which scream loudest are the ones marked by fear, death, and adolescent angst. Some of these memories are grounded in reality while others, we’re told to believe, are pure fiction. Yet for many of us, the scary stories we encountered in the books of R.L.…
Florida State University’s Chi Omega house looks exactly as a sorority house should: large and stately, with a conservative symmetry in its manicured lawn and beige portico that transmits the values of the sisters who live there. With large Greek letters on its exterior and hand-painted banners hung from its…
This week saw the release of the first major, large-scale biography on one of pop music’s biggest and most guarded stars: Beyoncé. The product of hundreds of hours of interviews from dozens of sources, J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Becoming Beyoncé aims to be the definitive chronicle on the creation of an icon. It also…
I was drinking my second Ketel One and orange juice at 9:30 am on a private jet between the Marine Air Terminal at Laguardia Airport and Grand Rapids, Michigan when I realized this trip might have been a bad idea.
You’ve seen a painting of Norbert Grupe. A heavy, creased brow and shoulder-length hair framing a frightening scowl, the massive work hung in the fictional Manhattan Museum of Art in Ghostbusters II. When the medieval sorcerer pictured within the painting begins to physically manifest, it is on the Ghostbusters to…
In her 81 years on Earth, including a long former career as a journalist, Gloria Steinem has only written six books, three of which are essay compilations. None are specifically about her life, despite its figurative importance to so many people; she’s never quite explained how she’s accomplished all that she has, how…
We are living through a mass extinction. From climate change to overpopulation to poaching, the world we’ve created is closing in fast on the incredible and still-mysterious animals we share it with.
“This nowhere,” begins Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts in her 2011 chronicle Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, “between dream and reality, between what one sees and what one imagines, between what is happening and your attempt to describe it, is the territory we wander while awake.”
On Tuesday, Marlon James became the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker Prize in the award’s 47-year history for A Brief History of Seven Killings, an “expansive and near-mythic survey of his homeland.” Revisit our interview with the author here.
The most important rap song of 1997 was “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” by Puff Daddy. Let me explain.
