Oh, frabjous day. Wonderfully, you can read the winning short story AND all the other short story nominees online, plus a handful of the novelettes and novellas. Do you even need to ask who won Outstanding Dramatic Production? Please. Neil Gaiman writes an episode of Doctor Who and the entire nerd internet orgasms simultaneously.
On another positive note, women are really heavily (and deservedly) represented this year. You go, space women and cosmic ladies!
Catch up with our previous memoir reading lists here, here and here!
West With the Night, Beryl Markham – Have you ever read a BAD book by a fabulous aviatrix? Be honest. This one is lush, and thick, and lyrical, and the marvelousness of Markham really shines though. She was the inspiration for Felicity in Out of Africa! She was a horse trainer! She schtupped one of George V's kids AND Antoine de Saint Exupéry! Hemingway called her "a high-grade bitch" and said she made him feel embarrassed because he couldn't write nearly so well. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
Why Charles Simic still writes poetry.
Happy (early) Mother's Day*, everyone! My mother is extremely high-quality, and, like many other young women of my generation (paging Lena Dunham!), I call her about…six times a day, so it was very easy to obtain a list of her favourite books. You may recognize some of them from previous reading lists, because she has excellent taste.
The Hobbit / The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien – See? She's totally my mother. Now, my dad actually did the different voices and memorized a chunk of Elvish, which I think gives him a minor edge, but my mom read each book aloud to my brother and me on [...]
RIP Mike McGrady. Nowadays, people write terrible books for fun and profit, but in the olden times, they used to do it on purpose as a political statement.
Under the pen name Penelope Ashe, McGrady and a bunch of his likeminded Newsday staffers collectively wrote what is universally considered to be one of the best worst books of all time. It doesn't hang together, the sex scenes are Twilight-worthy, and it scans a little like Desperate Housewives fan fiction, but for a generation raised on Valley of the Dolls, is it really so far-fetched? All author appearances were made by McGrady's bangin' sister-in-law, who purred and slutted [...]
First-time novelist Jennifer DuBois, on writing across gender.
Dave Hill's book of personal essays, Tasteful Nudes, came out today. If you're in a bad mood, or place, just pick it up! Boom. Problems temporarily solved. Not to give everything away, but here are some things about Dave: dude worked at a homeless shelter, opened for Slash, went on a nudist cruise as a non-nudist, grew up in a big Catholic family in Cleveland, drove a pedicab, was depressed at times but had family to lean on who weren't all like "AH! You're leaning on me! Stop leaning on me!" He's like Bill Bryson, except not. We chatted about it.
Today's post was inspired (sadly) by the death of Angelica Garnett, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant (as opposed to Bell's husband Clive, as Garnett was led to believe until she was seventeen).
Deceived With Kindness: A Bloomsbury Memoir, Angelica Garnett – Finding a copy of Garnett's difficult, but compelling, memoir in the United States is a bit of a struggle, it's out of print and used copies are overpriced, but there are loads of options for those in the UK. At any rate, Angelica Garnett has a lot of irritable things to say about the Bloomsbury Group, which, um, does not seem like [...]
