books

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.

Like many connoisseurs of young adult lit, I've been excited and wary about the upcoming film adaptation of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. On Friday, I greeted the news that Jennifer Lawrence had nabbed the part of protagonist Katniss with nothing but dismay. Now, I didn't like Winter's Bone as much as many seemed to, but Lawrence's performance was powerful, and I'm sure she's capable of the emotion necessary to play the mockingjay.

Here's the thing, though: In the books, Katniss is clearly not white.

Everyone have a good International Women's Day/Feminist Coming Out Day? Check out these compelling links from this week, and feel free to share your stories below!

• Andrea Grimes at HAY LADIES! and Shelby Knox at change.org encourage us to demand an apology from the author of the horribly irresponsible New York Times article about an eleven-year-old rape victim. Over at the Rumpus, Roxane Gay speaks poignantly about the article and its connections to rape culture.
• Excited for the new collection Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica Yee and featuring Latoya Peterson and Andrea Plaid? Us too! Read excerpts now at Racialicious!
• Also at Racialicious, Latoya writes about tokenism, the blogosphere, and book deals in "On Being Feminism's 'Ms. Nigga.'"
• Halle Kiefer responds to worries about the ephemerality of pop culture jokes on Splitsider.
• Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown writes about poet Diane Di Prima for Autostraddle!
• At Colorlines, Jamilah King reports on Cairo's Million Woman March, which overcame anti-feminist protesters.
• Also at Colorlines, Jamilah discusses the saddening need for the upcoming International Anti-Street Harassment Day.
• Still celebrating International Women's Day? Same here! Check out this list of IWD-related pieces from around the world, compiled by Bitch contributor Chally Kacelnik for Feministe!
• Beth Saunders shares the latest in bad abortion-restriction news at RH Reality Check.
• In good news, Renee at Womanist Musings reports that trans* prisoners in the United Kingdom are now allowed to dress to match their gender identity!
• At The Good Men Project Magazine, Amanda Marcotte explains how the more the wrongheaded Men's Right Activists sometimes recognize actual problems. Their solution? More feminism, natch! (via Feministing)
• Erica Payne at the Huffington Post talks about Wal-Mart vs. Dukes, calling the equal pay-focused case "one of the most important civil rights cases in the country's history."