Category: Nonfiction

I like Lucy Knisley’s work a whole lot, and this was a quick and fun read. It’s a travelogue/graphic-memoir of a trip to Europe that Knisley took in 2011, when she was 27, and includes her travels to/in Norway (Bergen), Sweden (Stockholm), Germany (Berlin) and France (Beaune, Angoulême, Royan, and Paris). The trip is partly…

This book of photographs, with a foreword by Mark Singer and an afterword by Elisabeth Biondi, consists of eighty pictures that were taken while Plachy was the photographer for The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section, plus one that wasn’t. The pictures are a mix of color and black & white, and are mostly…

My Body Is a Book of Rules is a memoir in essay form, but these essays aren’t just straight essays: there’s one (A Cascade Autobiography) that’s broken into sections and interspersed with other pieces; another is an academic paper about the use of the phrase “hooking up” by college-aged men and women, annotated after the…

The structure and subject of and tone of Unmastered—prose in numbered sections, sex, the mix of the personal with semi-academic meditations—made me think of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, though I am not as in love with this book as I am with that one. Which isn’t to say this book is bad, just that it didn’t…

This memoir, which consists of named chapters/linked pieces, some of which were previously published as standalone works, covers a lot of territory. It’s about obsessions, how they can shape a person’s life, how they can give structure/meaning/purpose, but also about the obvious flip-side of that: about how their all-consuming nature can be negative, can be…

One thing about City of Djinns, which is about a year that William Dalrymple spent in Delhi with his wife in his twenties, is that it suffers for me a bit by comparison to Tamara Shopsin’s wonderful Mumbai New York Scranton, which I read in February and loved. It’s not a fair comparison, really: both…

Rookie Yearbook One features highlights from Rookie’s first school year of existence, September 2011 to May 2012. Though I am definitely older than the intended audience (it’s for teenagers; I’m 32) it was still a satisfying read. It’s a mixture of advice pieces, personal essays, and other stuff from a mixture of teen and adult…

This book, whose subtitle is “Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century,” is refreshingly queer-friendly, kink-friendly, poly-friendly, and body-positive. I’m skeptical about some of the concepts Carrellas presents, but that didn’t really keep me from enjoying the book. Take chakras: I can see the usefulness of them as metaphor/visualization technique, but I’m less convinced about things…

A number of images and moments recur in more than one of the twelve chapters that make up this memoir: a film with a scene in which an actress wears yellow stockings, snowflakes on the collar of a violet coat, a tube of red lipstick found in a different coat pocket, a bathroom with a…