books

In a nameless yet all-too-familiar city, where "box-mall-churches" and faceless plazas named after the banks that funded them rub up against vegan cafes, yoga studios, and a "mural of neighborhood black people enjoying gentrification," Della Mylinak thinks about what it would be like to set herself on fire. In her attic bedroom in her brother's house, she places pins in maps to mark where others have self-immolated and rips her mail to shreds to make a papier-mâché head of John the Baptist. She buys candy-colored prepaid cell phones in a mall kiosk and uses them to call in bomb threats that she has no intention of carrying out. Meanwhile, all around the city, actual bombs explode regularly. Della watches the catastrophe with detachment and a muted sense of panic, trying to decide what to do and whether anything can be done.

There are as many ways of being an American Muslim woman as there are American Muslim women, and the contributors to the recently-published I Speak For Myself: American Women on Being Muslim will prove anyone who tells you differently (hello, popular media?) wrong. Edited by Maria M. Ebrahimji and Zahra T. Suratwala, I Speak For Myself, which we're happy to be selling at BitchMart, is an anthology that showcases the voices of 40 American Muslim women who are all under the age of 40, all of whom were born and raised in the US. Through personal stories that portray a vast array of identities, practices, beliefs, and values, this anthology illustrates and celebrates the fact that American Muslim women are, as put in the introduction, "neither the same as non-Muslim American women nor one another."

If you're straight, monogamous, and female, Carolyn Evans wants to SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE! Her new book, Forty Beads, has "simple, sexy" advice: overcome the "libido gap" between women and men by having sex whenever your husband tells you to.

Hopping angry? It only gets worse.

Alissa Nutting's Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a collection of bizarre and wonderful stories about the difficulty of bodies and the possibilities that arise when their inhabitants transcend them. Nutting, who is the managing editor of the awesome Fairy Tale Review, paints a series of women deviants with irresistible fairy-tale simplicity, creating loveliness and magic in some extraordinarily wicked places.

Each month in our newsletter (sign up right here on the homepage if you haven't already!), we poll Bitch staffers and readers on their top five in different categories and posting the polls and results here on the Bitch blog. So c'mon, give us five!

I was lucky enough to speak with beloved author Megan McCafferty this week about her new book Bumped (and more)! Check out the audio and transcript below.

Transcript (.doc)

More about Bumped—and a chance to win your very own signed copy—after the jump!

Bitch is super excited to be selling Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica Yee, a self-described "Two Spirit multi-racial Indigenous hip hop feminist reproductive justice freedom fighter," who founded The Native Youth Sexual Health Network. This anthology takes on the feminist academic industrial complex, asking and answering questions such as, "When feminism itself becomes its own form of oppression, what do we have to say about it?" In Feminism FOR REAL, Yee and more than twenty contributors take on academic and mainstream feminism, exposing ways that "capital F" feminism has failed.

Meg Wolitzer's new novel, The Uncoupling, has an intriguing premise, in a Joanna Russ-meets-Kelly Link kind of way: a spell is cast over the women of Stellar Plains, New Jersey, that makes them stop wanting sex. They all turn away from their male partners for reasons very mysterious and mystical and altogether unclear to everyone (articulated in the novel as "a cold wind"), and though most of them sure did like getting it on up to this point, they suddenly begin to feel that sex with men is generally not such a desirable thing.

I rode on a plane over the weekend, and since I love excuses to buy shiny new hardcover books (and I do not love air travel), I got a copy of Tina Fey's Bossypants to take along. Note to others who might make a similar decision: Bossypants made my trip go by very quickly. It also made me cry tears of laughter, which made the burly dudes on either side of me visibly uncomfortable. You've been warned.

Lori Aurelia Williams has been one of my favorite authors since high school, when I was lucky enough to stumble across When Kambia Elaine Flew In From Neptune. Williams' debut novel was a poetic, mesmerizing story of a working-class family in Houston. It also was the rare story to deal with sexual abuse in a believable yet unexploitative manner, as the narrator slowly discovered that her friend, the title character, was being prostituted by her guardian. Williams went on to write sequel Shayla's Double Brown Baby Blues and additional novel Broken China, and while the latter drew controversy for its depiction of teenage motherhood and stripping, I admire both of those works as well.

So it was that I approached Maxine Banks is Getting Married with astronomical expectations. Williams' first published book in five years, Maxine Banks features a seventeen-year-old protagonist, her oldest yet and arguably her strongest. Seeing her friend Tia's (a character from Williams' first two books) happiness at marrying her longtime boyfriend, Maxine suspects that marriage is the answer to her own life's inadequacies. After all, she loves her sweetheart, Brian... and hates living with her hypercritical mother and her mother's many abusive lovers.