Reading Writers – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Jo is refreshed by Trouble in the Cotswalds by Rebecca Tope but Charlotte quickly ruins their peace by connecting the sex in Heather Lewis’s violent novel Notice with Miranda July’s NBA-shortlisted All Fours. The effervescent Emma Robinson joins to share her love for Dianne Brill’s Boobs, Boys, and High Heels, which inspires further reflection on 90s era beauty books and instruction manuals.

Other books mentioned in this episode: Steven Saylor’s Murder on the Appian Way, Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up, Shelia Heti’s Motherhood, Bobbi Brown’s Teenage Beauty, Amanda Brooks’ Internet Escort’s Handbook, and Sydney Barrow’s Mayflower Madam and Just Between Us Girls.

Charlotte’s review of All Fours and Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up, both in Bookforum. 

Inspired at once by radical philosophers and tulips, Emma Cager Robinson is looking for beauty. As a mechanism for change and source of inspiration, Emma uses beauty as the driving force behind her activism. With a focus on Consciousness Raising and creating “Insurgents,” Emma uses media of all forms to shift the way we interrogate culture and the systems we interact with on a daily basis. A Texan at heart, she’s especially impassioned about spreading this energy through the South; as a means of completing ancestral business, and working in a long line of women committed to making the world suck less for their families and communities.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo opens their mind to further basketball books after reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year, while Charlotte (11:30) revisits a YA novel from her youth, Bette Green’s Summer of My German Soldier. Glamorous Marlowe Granados then joins (24:30) to expound on great novels of mid-century women, namely Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone. 

Other books discussed in this episode: Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything

Marlowe Granados is the author of Happy Hour, a novel the New Yorker called an "effervescent debut." In 2021, it was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel award and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Review. It is considered a RAVE on Literary Hub’s BookMarks, a website that aggregates reviews from major publications. She writes a substack called "From the Desk of Marlowe Granados" and is currently at work on her second novel. After spending time in New York and London, she now lives in Toronto. 

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte speculates on why Prep is still Curtis Sittenfeld’s best novel, and Jo (17:46) endorses Jeff Sharlet’s sensitive, surprising The Undertow. The scintillating Nicolás Medina Mora (24:05) then joins to revolutionize autofiction discourse with his theory about Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station.

Nicolás Medina Mora is a Mexican writer. He currently works as an editor at Revista Nexos, a monthly magazine of culture and politics published in Mexico City. Before that, he lived in the United States for ten years, where he worked as a financial reporter for Reuters and as a police reporter for BuzzFeed. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. His first novel, América del Norte, is forthcoming from Soho Press in May 2024.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She writes semi-regularly in newsletter form, with additional work linked on charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo (The Shipping News) and Charlotte (“Brokeback Mountain”) share notes on Iva Dixit-endorsed Annie Proulx before incendiary fiction writer Tony Tulathimutte (22:30) shocks by revealing that Alasdair Gray has written more books than just Lanark.

Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and the forthcoming Rejection. He has received an O. Henry Award and Whiting Award, and teaches the independent writing class CRIT in Brooklyn.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo recommends Augusto Higa Oshiro’s restrained The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, while Charlotte’s encounter with the first Twilight book (13:00) leads ineluctably to the Black Eyed Peas. Decorated journalist Connie Wang (26:30) joins to share the delights of Sanmao, the prolific Chinese memoirist who puts Joan Didion to shame. 

Connie Wang is a journalist and writer based in Los Angeles. She was born in Jinan, China and raised in Minnesota. She’s the recipient of several Front Page Awards for her fashion reporting at Refinery29, and an Online Journalism Award for a multimedia essay with the NYT about a generation of Asian American women named after Connie Chung. My book, Oh My Mother! A MEMOIR IN NINE ADVENTURES is with Viking Books, and you can buy it now (please buy it now).

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The writers cast a wide net today as Charlotte goes meg gaga for M.T. Anderson’s Feed and Jo (15:00) expounds on the many pleasures of Iris Yamashita’s Village in the Dark. The hosts also touch upon Sally Hepworth, J.M. Barrie, Telluria, their beloved Lanark by Alasdair Gray, and the entirety of French literature. The brilliant Osita Nwanevu (29:10) brings some dignity to the proceedings as he shares his experience of reading Walt Whitman’s strange and beguiling Democratic Vistas.

Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian. He was previously a staff writer at The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Slate and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Gawker, In These Times, and the Chicago Reader. He is the former editor in chief of the South Side Weekly, a Chicago alternative newspaper.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo finds surprising depth to Susan Casey’s The Devil’s Teeth and Charlotte (8:35) fantasizes that her nonexistent celebrity romance novel is better than Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, with a brief bonus discussion of Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry. The great mind and Mobility author Lydia Kiesling (25:40) then joins to reflect on Lucky Jim and the ways our parents’ book collections shape us as readers. 

Read Jo's review of Asymmetry from 2018 here.

Lydia Kiesling is a novelist and culture writer. Her first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her second novel, Mobility, a national bestseller, was named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, Time, and NPR, among others. It is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her essays and nonfiction have been published in outlets including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, and The Cut. 

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo’s spent the weekend on two books that have their seal of approval—The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright and The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War by Chad L. Williams—while Charlotte (12:35) has been getting Edna O’Brien-pilled. The inimitable Iva Dixit (25:00) stops by to share the remarkable story of her spite-buy of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, a much-loved novel that has “rewired her brain.”

Read Iva’s work on Sean Paul, Oppenheimer, and Retin-A.

Read the Andrea Dworkin essay mentioned in this episode here.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo recommends Tomorrow, Perhaps the Future, by Sarah Watling, while Charlotte (14:00) has some deep thoughts about The Bridges of Madison County and bad books in general. At (32:00), they’re joined by New York magazine’s finest, Rachel Handler, who has a fraught relationship with Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend.

Read Rachel’s writing and find her on Twitter at @rachel_handler or on Instagram at @rachlyha. 

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte is haunted by the lack of violence in Swedish dystopias (Kallocain by Karin Boye and Amatka by Karin Tidbeck) while Jo (17:00) delves into the controlled and uncontrolled horror of medical history in Human Medical Experimentation, ed. Francis R. Frankenberg. Pissed Jeans’ thoughtful frontman Matt Korvette joins (27:00) to share his trenchant take on menace and neighborly predation in Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer. 

Other books discussed in this episode: Emmanuel Carrère's V13: Chronicle of a Trial, J.D. Daniels' The Correspondence, and Robert C O'Brien's Z for Zachariah

Matt Korvette is a writer, critic, lyricist and performer, best known as the vocalist of Pissed Jeans. He resides in Philadelphia, PA.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.