Features

25 Brilliant and Literary-Inspired Mixed Drinks

There is no shortage of cocktails that can be related to great books and their authors. Read more »

Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Co-Education in the Ivy League, by Gina Barreca

  Gina Barecca, an English and feminist theory professor at University of Connecticut, is hilarious. And I am a big, stupid dummyhead for not knowing this sooner. Babes in Boyland marks my first exposure to her bibliography, appropriately enough. While I lack the juicy brainmeats (and political/economic… Read more »

Brotherhood: Gay Life in College Fraternities, edited by Shane L. Windmeyer

Yes, it's possible to be both gay and a frat boy. Campus Pride and Lambda 10 founder Shane L. Windmeyer - who serves as Brotherhood's editor - dismantles many of the heterosexist notions so often levied onto the Greek system without ignoring how much work still needs doing before all LGBTQIA… Read more »

I'll Take You There, by Joyce Carol Oates

  Fun fact: Before I'll Take You There, I had surprisingly never read anything by Joyce Carol Oates.  Please don't kill me. Also a fun fact: After I'll Take You There, I seriously want to rent every single Joyce Carol Oates novel out of the library, neglect my paying job,… Read more »

Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

  This book may as well just be retitled Rich, White, Protestant, Heterosexual, Cisgendered Men Pretty Much Have Everything Handed to Them: The College Years. I don't mean cynicism towards author Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's obviously thorough research here, of course. Her assessments all… Read more »

Houston Indie Book Festival

      This past Saturday, Gulf Coast literary ma gazin e , NANO Fiction, The Menil Collection, and The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses hosted its annual Houston Indie Book Festival, the only free gathering celebrating small presses, literary magazines,… Read more »

It's National Library Week! Also, School Library Month

  So. According to the American Library Association, it's National Library Week! And School Library Month! And my very first book-related job was at a school library, actually. While I was working in my master's in English at University of St. Thomas, I took on a position as the assistant… Read more »

Straight Man, by Richard Russo

  If Saul Bellow wrote Wonder Boys, it'd be Straight Man. Sort of. Although yet another novel about heterosexual, cisgendered white men professionally and personally cracking in a fabulous display of middle-aged anxiety, Richard Russo nixes the tiresome cliché of a weepy, justified-because-the-mistress-is-TOTALLY-hot-and-the-wife-is-a-harpy… Read more »

An Evening with Téa Obreht and Gary Shteyngart, featuring Mat Johnson

  Anyone hoping to involve him- and/or herself with the Houston literary sphere - or at least catch some seriously cool, often very affordable programming related to reading and writing - should get to know Inprint, because it's probably their best friend in that regard (that and the Houston… Read more »

"Teddy," by J.D. Salinger

  Like much of J.D. Salinger's most popular oeuvre selections, "Teddy" (available online in its entirety here) involves hyperarticulate, "precocious" youth for whom "Mo Money Mo Problems" would constantly be playing in the background had Biggie been born roughly… Read more »

Moo, by Jane Smiley

Pulitzer recipient Jane Smiley's Moo shouldn't be considered a failure, but it failed to engage me or make me feel like doing much of anything beyond sitting the book down, queuing up 808s & Heartbreak, and looping the synthpop/hip-hop hybrid goodness of "Paranoid" instead. Novels… Read more »

Getting Wasted, by Thomas Vander Ven

Even though passages and concepts from Getting Wasted come partnered with a massive, flashing neon "DUH!!!" sign from anyone who's attended a college party or hit the bars near campus on a Thursday night, the "over seven years of research" (ix) sociologist Thomas Vander Ven offers… Read more »

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, by Paul Barrett

By Jill Silos-Rooney Glock. Say the word, and it has the definitive sound of a bullet hitting bone. Specters of the streets, Glock pistols are part and parcel of the modern American nightmare, symbolizing in one word how quickly our society became one in which it is considered not only commonplace but… Read more »

Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

  I hate Jane Eyre. Like, with enough bile to choke Shamu, I hate Jane Eyre. When Bertha Mason torches Rochester's house, I felt a warm and tingly sense of closure and relief. Sure arson isn't exactly a healthy solution...but then neither is locking away your mentally ill wife in the attic,… Read more »

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Spoilers ahoy!!   Jeffrey Eugenides earned the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex, which sensitively explored the realities of intersexuality in a way that simultaneously de-stigmatized the frequently misunderstood, misportrayed condition (in this case, the result of 5-alpha-reductase).… Read more »

A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Nineteenth and early 20th century science-fiction intrigues me to no end, so obviously the idea of tossing A Princess of Mars into a classroom sounds appealing. Along with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells (of whom I am quite a fangirl!), Edgar Rice Burroughs should be thought of as the genre's… Read more »

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

  For some reason, other reviewers tend to tout Pnin as hilarity incarnate, which only really works if they're referring to the Heh of Existential Recognition. Or "funny boo-hoo" instead of "funny ha-ha." Either one. More tragedy than comedy, Vladimir Nabokov's overlooked… Read more »

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larson

By Jill Silos-Rooney Historian William E. Dodd's bookish and retiring nature made him a most unlikely choice for high-profile diplomatic service, and Erik Larson's entertaining but sobering account of Dodd's tenure as the American ambassador to Nazi Germany shows just how difficult it could… Read more »

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," by James Thurber

  And now for something completely different. Not a man with a tape recorder up his nose (or a man with a tape recorder up his brother's nose), but rather the fact that this go-round, I'm reviewing a short story instead of a book. Specifically...uhhhh...read the title. I probably shouldn't… Read more »

The Replacements

  No, I'm not writing the band. That wouldn't be relevant. Awesome. But not relevant. Actually, what I'm going for today involves taking English syllabus classes and offering up some less popular - yet still fully viable - alternatives. Because I don't want the comments section… Read more »

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

  What makes The Handmaid's Tale such an eerie read is how timely it seems despite its 1985 publication date. Better Book Titles perfectly (not to mention hilariously) summed up the book's contemporary relevance here, and part of me feels like all I need to do is just drop a link to it… Read more »

Fun with Campus Book Clubs

Happy New Year! No doubt many of you, regardless of whether or not you're currently enrolled in any classes, have probably resolved to read more. I'm just assuming this because exploring more books always seems to be a pretty common New Year's goal, of course. For all I know you guys are… Read more »

Sexual Civility: The Hot New College Romance, by Tom Bissonette

  As all two of my readers (hi, Mom!) have no doubt already figured out, I've had a bit of time off this month, and next week won't be any different. So this will be my last posting until next year! We're planning on debuting some cool new features come 2012; please do come back and… Read more »

Crowdsourcing the Canon, Round 2

Crowdsourcing the Canon, Round 1 proved a fascinatingly fertile experiment, and I thought it'd be interesting to try my hand at seeing what sort of response I could scratch up for the second. This time around, I asked What award-winning books do you feel deserve more attention than they typically… Read more »

Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle

  By this point, ruminations on how technology shapes communication and promotes isolation — particularly those involving anecdotes about families at the dinner table clicking away at smartphones instead of talking to one another — have grown into something of a… Read more »