February 2012
15 posts
5 tags
Because it's broken
by Sady Doyle
It’s easy to read the buddhist as a feminist text. It’s also easy to read it as a book about dissolving the boundaries between high and low art, or a performance piece about obsession, or a book about the abuse of spiritual authority. It’s even possible to read it as simply a book about abuse and its aftermath. Bellamy explicitly acknowledges that her subject — an ex-boyfriend,...
3 tags
Our tribe
by Rachel Monroe
I read the buddhist in one big thirsty gulp, lying on my bunk in the hostel during the hottest part of the day. I was avoiding talking to people – to the surfer from Alabama, to the irritating Russians. When I finished, it was just after 4 PM and the surfers were readying themselves for the next high tide. “That’s so gay,” the one from Alabama said, I’m not sure about...
4 tags
Without a net: an interview with Dodie Bellamy
Dodie Bellamy’s book the buddhist originated as a series of posts on Dodie’s blog, belladodie, in which she described her life in the aftermath of a protracted breakup with a Buddhist teacher. Dodie has used many writing forms over the course of her career, from poetry to academic writing, often focusing on the sometimes-blurry line between what’s considered “memoir”...
“When I meet them outside the theater and we all shake hands, I’m thinking that I...”
– Emily Carter, “Glory B. and the Gentle Art” (via ellencherrycharles)
buy it
1 tag
In Case You Missed The LIKE A BOSS Panel
a report on the Like A Boss panel by Emily Books College Liason Lillian Warner!
Last Sunday at the Like A Boss panel, Emily asked Will Schwalbe, Alexander Chee, Heidi Julavits and Doree Shafrir to share their insights on mentoring. The panelists offered stories about being mentors, having mentors, and how those experiences have affected them. No one tried to give mentoring a strict...
3 tags
2 tags
“One thing this project has made me realize is that my need to love is even...”
– Dodie Bellamy, the buddhist
ah, love
3 tags
3 tags
Dashed Hopes
by Emily Cooke
In grad school, getting an MFA in writing, I cried in the office of every workshop professor I had but one. In spite of the sensitivity with which as a rule these people responded, the episodes filled me with shame. Post-cry, I assiduously avoided my teachers. When I couldn’t help but see them–in class, or in the coffee line–I tried to be nonchalant, wry, recovered, but I think...
3 tags
ruthcurry:
In the buddhist Bellamy talks about...
4 tags
Lapsus
by Minna Proctor
I was introduced to the idea of Monica Sarsini this way: My college boyfriend— from Florence, Italy—said, “You have to meet my mother’s friend. She’s a writer. She’s strange and beautiful. She’s anorexic. She’s agoraphobic. She lives downstairs. You should read her.” He produced a slender book from his mother’s jammed shelves. The title was Crepapelle. A nonsense word. With...
“…an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of...”
– dodie bellamy, in the buddhist. a year and a half ago, when mike and i broke up, emily gave me i love dick. this breakup season, she gave me the buddhist. i cannot put this book down for obvious reasons. (via karaj)
3 tags
Crone Vision
This is the first day we have Dodie Bellamy’s book the buddhist on sale at Emily Books. To celebrate, I’m posting a tiny part of the book. Though I don’t share Dodie’s opinion on Freedom, this passage made me laugh out loud and feel like I understood her and loved her spirit. This is the kind of complex feeling I love to have about a book.
“I stumbled upon the...
3 tags
More Than Most
by Arianna Stern
“I’ve never actually applied for a traditional job,” my thesis advisor told me over lunch, explaining that she’d gone straight from undergrad to a PhD program. We were out at a vegetarian restaurant, celebrating my completed thesis essay, and the tables that surrounded us were mostly empty. Sparsely-populated storefronts were an ongoing theme of college life: On weekday...
3 tags
January 2012
13 posts
3 tags
Almost-Mentors
by Megan Marz
Sigrid Nunez says Susan Sontag “liked to refer to herself as a self-defrocked academic. She was even prouder to call herself self-created. I never had a mentor, she said.” I’ve never had one either, but I derive no pride from my mentorlessness. I have often wished to have one but never quite succeeded. Only twice have I even come close.
The first time I was 20, attending a weekly...
4 tags
A Mentor by Nature
by Lauretta Charlton
I read Sempre Susan in one sitting, enthralled. You can never fully anticipate a book having that sort of impact on you, but when it does, it’s hard to ignore. Sigrid Nunez is unsparingly honest about her experience with Susan Sontag, and this creates a queasy tension in the reader: I felt embarrassed for Sontag, a woman who, despite her fierce intellect, could be petty and...
2 tags
3 tags
"There's hope for you, too:" an excerpt from...
Over the years, I have met or learned about a surprising number of people who said it was reading Susan Sontag when they were young that had made them want to be writers. Although this was not true of me, her influence on how I think and write has been profound. By the time I got to know her, I was already out of school, but I’d been a mostly indifferent, highly distracted student, and the gaps in...
4 tags
4 tags
“Some of her enthusiasms mystified me. As we sat in the theater, sharing a giant...”
– From Sempre Susan
BUY IT HERE
3 tags
2 tags
Getting Rid of Some
by Zan Romanoff
J was a curly-haired sophomore who drove what we called the party car: whenever he showed up he would unload an enormous duffel bag of hookahs and weed and terrible alcohol, for some reason usually electric blue bottles of Alizé. There were other drugs, too, but I didn’t partake so I couldn’t tell you what all he provided. It was never clear to me where it all came from, how...
3 tags
The Same Situation
By Sari Botton
I got a nice email from Emily (Gould) the other day about my conversation with Emily Carter, published as part of a series I write for The Rumpus. She said she wished the piece had been longer, and I immediately regretted two choices I had made.
The first was not pursuing further with Carter the subject of addiction to male approval and attention. We touched on it...
2 tags
What Glory Gets
by Alice Gregory
As the title suggests, Glory “gets” things. She gets more punishments than prizes, though, and together her list of experiential acquisitions is long: She gets expelled from all the good schools in New York City. She gets thrown out of CBGB (literally). She gets “dope-sick.” She gets fucked in the ass by guys whose last names she doesn’t know. She gets HIV. She gets sent to rehab...
December 2011
15 posts
4 tags
Elisa A. on Glory B.
a little appreciation from Elisa Albert
These stories have the self-satisfied fierce unflinching ha-ha-ha-oh-I’m-going-to-kill-myself quality of having been written very, very late at night, probably almost dawn. Glory in all her hilarious bleak alcoholic junkie glory is unsustainable, of course, even if she is a crazy fucking joy to read, so the bulk of the book is like a rough come down, this...
5 tags
No Hierarchy of Pain
by Sady Doyle
Emily Carter spends a lot of time, in Glory Goes and Gets Some, playing with ideas about who has the right to pain. I suspect that inside many of us there’s a voice that says me, I’m the one with the problems, pay attention to me, along with a conviction that we will lose out if we’re not the saddest person in the room. Carter actually invites you to do this. She pushes your...
5 tags
What You Deserve
by Miranda Popkey
I didn’t expect to recognize myself in a short story collection that centers on an HIV-positive ex-heroin addict who moves to Minnesota to get her body clean and her life in order. I own a lot of skirts that hit below the knee and the only thing I’ve ever really been addicted to is other people’s approval.
Emily Carter knows what it’s like, whatever “it” is. She knows the sweet...
3 tags
3 tags
5 tags
On Glamour
by Ruth Curry
“You had better STOP that SHIT. You don’t know THE STREET. They will eat you alive. You think you’re going to get away with THAT SHIT? Do you know what’s going to happen to you? You’re going to get FUCKED UP THE ASS. Let me tell you something before you let some man fuck you up the ass: You make sure he LOVES YOU.” – Emily Carter, “The Bride,” Glory Goes and Gets Some
The...
1 tag
Calling all Eileen Myles fans...
thingsiatethatilove:
orbooks:
Send blank email to badmirror@orbooks.com and see what happens! (Don’t worry: it’s free.)
Do it!
3 tags
"Ask Amelio" by Emily Carter
Emily Books’s coverage of Glory Goes and Gets Some will be ramping up later this week, but in the meantime, we’ll leave you with this short story from the collection, one of our favorites.
***
Ask Amelio
***
On an early Sunday morning a reporter called to ask me questions about women with AIDS. Don’t waste your time with me, I told her, I’m nothing more in the scheme of things...
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
Emily Books December Pick
Psyche. Due to extensive holiday programming, the Emily Books December selection will be announced…today or tomorrow. But in the meantime, allow your anticipation and excitement to be cultivated by this December-pick-inspired playlist. If you can guess what the book is given these musical clues, we’ll send you a free copy! It’ll be our holiday gift to you.
UPDATE 10:17 AM...
1 tag
2 tags
Songs To Have a Literary Launch Party To (*)
Perhaps you’re hosting a chill holiday gathering soon, or perhaps you just had such a good time on Monday night that you want to listen to this playlist forever. Either way, I feel you.
(*tip of the hat)
“I am so glad I am not an artist. A poet kind of is, but really it’s like you’re...”
– Eileen Myles, Inferno (via suddenlysamuel)
November 2011
16 posts
1 tag
3 tags
"Willis really thought that happiness was within... →
Richard Beck on Ellen Willis at n+1.
BUY NO MORE NICE GIRLS HERE
2 tags
3 tags
3 tags
4 tags
"Her refusal to subsume her personality to a... →
— n+1 on Ellen Willis. The introduction to No More Nice Girls is available here for your reading pleasure.
BUY THE BOOK