Nonrequired Conversations
My essay “Conversations You Have at Twenty” was apparently shortlisted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009. (Thanks for telling me, Alexi.)
My essay “Conversations You Have at Twenty” was apparently shortlisted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009. (Thanks for telling me, Alexi.)
This children’s book on ritual abuse — a product, no doubt, of the ’80s Satanism scare — is the kind of thing my mom would have sold at her ¨ber-fundamentalist bookstore alongside the Jack Chick tracts and Dungeons and Dragons exposés, so for me it inspires a dull sort of dread rather than surprise or amusement. (Via.) Even I was . . .
J.G. Ballard raised his children alone after his wife’s death. The Guardian publishes his daughter’s eulogy.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, given how steeped my childhood was in Bible stories, that R. Crumb’s graphic rendition of Genesis infiltrated my thoughts the way that it did, but I was. Because his book was the one that affected me the most this year, it’s my pick for Salon. What I say there is partly a retread . . .