In an excerpt from her forthcoming book An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work, Charlotte Shane reflects on what her clients revealed when they talked to her about their wives, and how this information affected Shane’s view of her own role. “My allegiance was forever shifting between the two, the husband and his invisible wife,” she writes, later concluding, “Whether or not a wife sounded likable, I knew I usually had more in common with her than with him.”
BOMB magazine’s Small Press Flea will be held at Amant in Williamsburg on August 17th. Participating presses include Archipelago Books, Wendy’s Subway, Seven Stories Press, Song Cave, and more.
In a new essay for Granta, Christian Lorentzen writes about corporate publishing, “the stories we tell about literature,” and recent books by Mark McGurl, John Guillory, and Dan Sinykin. Turning to Sinykin’s book Big Fiction, Lorentzen argues that “Sinykin’s larger claim about American literature—that conglomeration changed it in a meaningful way—is founded on a category error. Whereas creative-writing programs and the MFA system generally can reasonably be thought of as a site of literary production—places where novels are written and environments that in some ways shape the books written in their confines—the publishing industry is in fact the first stage of literary consumption.”
This Thursday, n+1 is hosting the launch of the first print edition of Mouse magazine.
Elvia Wilk interviews Jennifer Kabat, author of The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.