Books

OK, before you get too caught up in the discussion about whether husbands and dads get equal treatment in the Nights Out department, focus on who’s leveling the complaint (however sweetly cushioned it is). It’s Rick Marin. The Rick Marin who wrote “Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor” about his personal contribution to the neuroses of New York women. The man who wiped his hands with the dignity of 80 percent of New York’s female population. That Rick Marin.

Literary perverts the world over can rejoice! The Literary Review’s eighteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award winner has been announced: Rowan Somerville’s second novel, “The Shape of Her.”

The book Heaven is a book about sexuality and spirituality. The spirituality is of a predominantly Christian sort, but it’s the kind of Christian spirituality found among the refugee camps of those disaffected souls who chafed on the boundaries of their parents’ church.

If the forbidden is what is exciting, we have to work hard to bring the taboo into our most intimate relationships. If transgression is so titillating, we have to learn to transgress where we’re most safe.

Judy Blume’s children and young adult novels have covered everything from racism to menstruation to religion and sex. Her dedication to writing about difficult issues for the younger set has resulted in her fair share of controversy. She is one of the most challenged children’s authors of all time. On her site, Blume writes about…continue reading.

“There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it,” wrote Anne Frank in her famous diary. “The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!” This, according to the…continue reading.

A couple of days ago we reported on a Riverside County district that had banned the dictionary because of the graphic manner that it defines oral sex (“the ora stimulation of genitals”). According to the Huffington Post, a committee of parents, teachers and administrators decided this week to allow the kids at Oak Meadows Elementary…continue reading.

I wish this was a joke or a statement about how the three people who hit on me at the coffee shop this morning seemed to only use monosyllabic words and so liberally sprinkled the word “like” in statements that nothing they said made too much sense. It’s not. Some schools have in fact banned…continue reading.

Vanity Fair‘s Claire Howorth talks with Joshua Ferris, lit darling and author of the acclaimed Then We Came to the End and the new The Unnamed. VF: Do you think your generation of writers is conflicted about sex? Or feels awkward writing about it? The Unnamed contains two pretty notable sex scenes and they’re… relatively…continue reading.

“It’s not the business of all sex writers everywhere to solve the world’s sex problems.” Written by tech and sex writer and sex educator Melissa Gira Grant, this statement would become the premise of the book Coming & Crying: real stories about sex from the other side of the bed. Using crowdsourcing to fill the…continue reading.