The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

Download The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374608105
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (746 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays by : Joan Acocella

Download or read book The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays written by Joan Acocella and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Yorker critic examines the books that reveal and record our world in a new essay collection. Joan Acocella, “one of our finest cultural critics” (Edward Hirsch), has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it—its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it has sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?” The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella’s career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: “life and art.” In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella is our dream companion among its shelves. Includes 25 black-and-white images

Mark Morris

Download Mark Morris PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780819567314
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (673 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Mark Morris by : Joan Ross Acocella

Download or read book Mark Morris written by Joan Ross Acocella and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Morris emerged in the 1980s as America's most exciting young choreographer. Two decades later, his position remains unchallenged. Morris was born in Seattle in 1956. His Mark Morris Dance Group began performing in New York in 1980. By the mid-eighties, PBS had aired an hour-long special on him, and his work was being presented by America's foremost ballet companies. Morris's dances are a mix of traditionalism and radicalism. They unabashedly address the great themes--love, grief, loneliness, religion, community--yet they are also lighthearted, irreverent, and scabrous. Joan Acocella's probing portrait is the first book on this brilliant and controversial artist. Written with Morris's cooperation, it describes how he has lived and how he turns life--and music and narrative--into dance. Including 78 photographs, Mark Morris provides an ideal introduction to the life and work of one of America's leading artists.

Strange Situation

Download Strange Situation PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Ballantine Books
ISBN 13 : 0399181458
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (991 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Strange Situation by : Bethany Saltman

Download or read book Strange Situation written by Bethany Saltman and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A full-scale investigation of the controversial and often misunderstood science of attachment theory, inspired by the author’s own experience as a parent and daughter. “A profound and beautiful work . . . searingly honest, brazenly fresh, and startlingly rich.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon When professional researcher and writer Bethany Saltman gave birth to her daughter, Azalea, she loved her deeply but felt as if something was missing. Looking back at her lonely childhood, dangerous teenage years, and love-addicted early adulthood, Saltman thought maybe she was broken. Then she discovered the science of attachment, the field of psychology that explores the question of why—from an evolutionary point of view—love exists between parents and children. Saltman went on a ten-year journey visiting labs, archives, and training sessions, while learning the meaning of “delight” from Mary Ainsworth, one of psychology’s most important but unsung researchers, who died in 1999. Saltman went deep into the history and findings from Ainsworth’s famous laboratory procedure, the Strange Situation, which, like an X-ray, is still used today by scientists around the world to catch a glimpse of the internal workings of attachment. In this simple twenty-minute procedure, a baby and a caregiver enter an ordinary room with two chairs and some toys. During a series of comings and goings, a trained observer studies the minutiae of the pair’s back-and-forth with each other. Through the science of attachment, what Saltman discovered was a radical departure from everything she thought she knew—about love and about her own family, her story, and herself. She was far from broken—she saw that love is too powerful to ever break. Strange Situation is a scientific, lyrical, life-affirming exploration of love. Not only will readers be taken on an emotional ride through one mother’s reckoning with her own past and her family’s future, but they will also be given the tools with which to better understand their own life histories and their relationships today. Praise for Strange Situation “A fascinating deep dive into attachment theory . . . Carefully researched and with copious endnotes, this is an excellent resource for anyone interested in child development.”—Publishers Weekly “Honest and complex . . . A thoughtful engagement with a topic that affects all parents.”—Kirkus Reviews

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism

Download Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803210462
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (14 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism by : Joan Ross Acocella

Download or read book Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism written by Joan Ross Acocella and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defending Willa Cather against historical and critical distortions, the author argues that Cather's central vision was a tragic vision of the human condition rather than a firm political agenda.

Take Nothing With You

Download Take Nothing With You PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609384571
Total Pages : 88 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (93 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Take Nothing With You by : Sarah V. Schweig

Download or read book Take Nothing With You written by Sarah V. Schweig and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are worlds we can imagine, but we live in this one: contingent and absurd. In her first full-length collection, Sarah V. Schweig aims to capture something essential and universal about this faulted inheritance. ​These poems operate on the notion that the lyric can be discovered in scattered headlines, office-wide emails, road signs—the detritus of the everyday. But a poem doesn’t stop at found fragments; it creates something from them. These poems question and re-question what can be truthfully said, rediscovering the lyric in the very process of thinking, revising, and re-envisioning.

Valentino and Sagittarius

Download Valentino and Sagittarius PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681374757
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Valentino and Sagittarius by : Natalia Ginzburg

Download or read book Valentino and Sagittarius written by Natalia Ginzburg and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two novellas about family life and fraudsters by one of the twentieth century's best Italian novelists. Valentino and Sagittarius are two of Natalia Ginzburg’s most celebrated works: tales of love, hope, and delusion that are full of her characteristic mordant humor, keen psychological insight, and unflinching moral realism. Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents, who have no doubt that their handsome young son will prove “a man of consequence.” Nothing that Valentino does—his nights out on the town, his failed or incomplete classes—suggests there is any ground for that confidence, and Valentino’s sisters view their parents and brother with a mixture of bitterness, stoicism, and bemusement. Everything becomes that much more confused when, out of the blue, Valentino finds an enterprising, wealthy, and strikingly ugly wife, who undertakes to support not just him but the whole family. Sagittarius is another story of misplaced confidence recounted by a wary daughter, whose mother, a grass widow with time on her hands, moves to the suburbs, eager to find new friends. Brassy, bossy, and perpetually dissatisfied, especially when it comes to her children, she strikes up a friendship with the mysterious Scilla, and soon the two women are planning to open an art gallery. But knowing better than everyone, it turns out, is not that different from knowing nothing at all.

Aseroë

Download Aseroë PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bellevue Literary Press
ISBN 13 : 1942658796
Total Pages : 78 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (426 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Aseroë by : François Dominique

Download or read book Aseroë written by François Dominique and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A singular novel.” —Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t and Essays One “An exhilarating adventure!” —Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night and Fabulous Monsters “Extraordinary. . . . Brings to mind the great mushroom scenes of the film Phantom Thread. How not to be aroused by this whopping treat of verbal virtuosity?” —Mary Ann Caws, author of The Modern Art Cookbook Aseroë, the mushroom, as object of fascination. First observed in Tasmania and South Africa, it appeared suddenly in France around 1920. It is characterized by its stench and, at maturity, its grotesque beauty. Aseroë, the word, as incantation. Can a word create a world? It does, here. François Dominique is a conjurer, who through verbal sorcery unleashes the full force of language, while evoking the essential rupture between the word and the object. An impossible endeavor, perhaps, but one at the very heart of literature. The narrator of Aseroë wanders medieval streets and dense forests, portrait galleries, and rare bookshops. As he explores the frontiers of language, the boundaries of science, art, and alchemy melt away, and the mundane is overtaken by the bizarre. Inhabited by creatures born in darkness, both terrible and alluring, Aseroë is ultimately a meditation on memory and forgetting, creation, and oblivion. François Dominique is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, poet, and translator. He has received the Burgundy Prize for Literature and is the author of eight novels, including Aseroë and Solène, winner of the Wepler Award and Prix littéraire Charles Brisset. He has translated the poetry of Louis Zukofsky and Rainer Maria Rilke and is the cofounder of the publishing house Ulysses-Fin-de-Siècle.

28 Artists & 2 Saints

Download 28 Artists & 2 Saints PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307389278
Total Pages : 562 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis 28 Artists & 2 Saints by : Joan Acocella

Download or read book 28 Artists & 2 Saints written by Joan Acocella and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-02-12 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene). Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist, who wrote the classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz; M.F.K. Fisher who, numb with grief over her husband’s suicide, dictated the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf; and many other subjects, including Dorothy Parker, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Saul Bellow. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints is indispensable reading on the making of art—and the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires.

If the Body Allows It

Download If the Body Allows It PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496223055
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (962 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis If the Body Allows It by : Megan Cummins

Download or read book If the Body Allows It written by Megan Cummins and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, If the Body Allows It is divided into six parts and framed by the story of Marie, a woman in her thirties living in Newark, New Jersey. Suffering from a chronic autoimmune illness, she also struggles with guilt over the overdose and death of her father, whom she feels she betrayed at the end of his life. The stories within the frame--about failed marriages, places of isolation and protection, teenage mistakes, and forging a life in the aftermath--are the stories the narrator writes after she meets and falls in love with a man whose grief mirrors her own. If the Body Allows It explores illness and its aftermath, guilt and addiction, and the relationships the characters form after they've lost everyone else, including themselves. Introspective, devastating, and funny, If the Body Allows It grapples with the idea that life is always on the brink of never being the same again.

To Keep the Sun Alive

Download To Keep the Sun Alive PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1948226103
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (482 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis To Keep the Sun Alive by : Rabeah Ghaffari

Download or read book To Keep the Sun Alive written by Rabeah Ghaffari and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “How do we recognize the moment our future has been written for us? In To Keep the Sun Alive, as the Islamic Revolution looms just outside the gate of an Iranian family orchard, Rabeah Ghaffari has built a world so lush, so precise that you will find yourself rewriting history if only to imagine it could still exist.”—Mira Jacob, author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing "[A] tenderhearted début novel . . . A wide–ranging narrative, showing the enduring ramifications of filial and political violence." —The New Yorker The year is 1979. The Iranian Revolution is just around the corner. In the northeastern city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi–Khanoom, continue to run their ancient family orchard, growing apples, plums, peaches, and sour cherries. The days here are marked by long, elaborate lunches on the terrace where the judge and his wife mediate disputes between aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews that foreshadow the looming national crisis to come. Will the monarchy survive the revolutionary tide gathering across the country? Will the judge’s brother, a powerful cleric, take political control of the town or remain only a religious leader? And yet, life goes on. Bibi–Khanoom’s grandniece secretly falls in love with the judge’s grandnephew and dreams of a career on the stage. His other grandnephew withers away on opium dreams. A widowed father longs for a life in Europe. A strained marriage slowly unravels. The orchard trees bloom and fruit as the streets in the capital grow violent. And a once–in–a–lifetime solar eclipse, set to occur on one of the holiest days of year, finally causes the family—and the country—to break. Told through a host of unforgettable characters, ranging from servants and young children to intimate friends, To Keep the Sun Alive reveals the personal behind the political, reminding us of the human lives that animate historical events.

Tower of Lies

Download Tower of Lies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781631683046
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (83 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Tower of Lies by : Barbara a Res

Download or read book Tower of Lies written by Barbara a Res and published by . This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara A. Res worked directly with Donald Trump for eighteen years on some of his biggest projects and had nearly unlimited access to him. Trump selected Res to be in charge of construction of Trump Tower, his greatest success as a developer. In this insider's look at how the ambitious real estate developer became the most divisive president in recent U.S. history, Res takes us into closed-door meetings, boardrooms, limo rides, and helicopter flights to really understand what makes him tick and shows us why his claim to be a great dealmaker and savvy businessman is just a mirage. No one with this kind of access to Trump during his formative years as a developer has ever written so completely about who he is away from the cameras. It's no wonder that when the media are looking for someone who really understands Trump, they turn to Res. Candid, personal, and deeply perceptive, Res shines new light on the man whose depravity has put us allƒƒ‚ƒƒ‚‚‚ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"ƒƒ‚ƒƒ‚‚‚ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚€ƒƒ‚ƒƒ‚‚‚ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"and democracy itselfƒƒ‚ƒƒ‚‚‚ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"ƒƒ‚ƒƒ‚‚‚ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚€ƒƒ‚ƒƒ‚‚‚ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"in danger. Includes a 16-

Exhausted on the Cross

Download Exhausted on the Cross PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681375532
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Exhausted on the Cross by : Najwan Darwish

Download or read book Exhausted on the Cross written by Najwan Darwish and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A much-anticipated follow-up to Nothing More to Lose, this is only the second poetry collection translated into English from a vital voice of Arabic literature. “We drag histories behind us,” the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish writes in Exhausted on the Cross, “here / where there’s neither land / nor sky.” In pared-down lines, brilliantly translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Darwish records what Raúl Zurita describes as “something immemorial, almost unspeakable”—a poetry driven by a “moral imperative” to be a “colossal record of violence and, at the same time, the no less colossal record of compassion.” Darwish’s poems cross histories, cultures, and geographies, taking us from the grime of modern-day Shatila and the opulence of medieval Baghdad to the gardens of Samarkand and the open-air prison of present-day Gaza. We join the Persian poet Hafez in the conquered city of Shiraz and converse with the Prophet Mohammad in Medina. Poem after poem evokes the humor in the face of despair, the hope in the face of nightmare.

A Visit to Don Otavio

Download A Visit to Don Otavio PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN 13 : 1458759776
Total Pages : 450 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (587 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Visit to Don Otavio by : Sybille Bedford

Download or read book A Visit to Don Otavio written by Sybille Bedford and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This affectionate study of the Mexican temper is ''one of the most charming travel books ever written.'' - The Atlantic Monthly Before returning to the Old World after World War II, Sybille Bedford resolved to see something more of the New. ''I had a great longing to move,'' she said, ''to hear another language, eat new food, to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible.'' And so she set out for Mexico - and, incidentally, to write what Bruce Chatwin called the best travel book of the twentieth century, ''a book of marvels, to be read again and again and again.''

Taking A Long Look

Download Taking A Long Look PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1788739787
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (887 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Taking A Long Look by : Vivian Gornick

Download or read book Taking A Long Look written by Vivian Gornick and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, All That Is Given brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight, the essays in Taking a Long Look demonstrate one of America's most beloved critics at her best.

Sophomores

Download Sophomores PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 052554268X
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (255 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Sophomores by : Sean Desmond

Download or read book Sophomores written by Sean Desmond and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What a vibrant, propulsive, wildly intelligent and big-hearted slice of life Sophomores is, an intricate portrait of a family in crisis rendered with a great deal of humor and compassion. I loved this family, this corner of the world, this novel." -Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had The late 1980s come alive in this moving and keenly observed story of one boy's unforgettable sophomore year, and his parents' surprising journey alongside him. It's fall 1987 and life as normal is ending for the Malone family. With their sterile Dallas community a far cry from the Irish-American Bronx of their youth, Pat and Anne Malone have reached a breaking point. Pat, faced with a debilitating MS diagnosis, has fallen into his drinking. Anne, his devoutly Catholic wife, is selected as a juror for a highly publicized attempted murder trial, one that raises questions--about God, and about men in power--she has buried her entire life. Together, they try to raise their only son, Daniel, a bright but unmotivated student who is shocked into actual learning by an enigmatic English teacher. For once, Dan is unable to fly under the radar, and is finally asked to consider what he might want to make of his life. With humor and tenderness, Sophomores brilliantly captures the enduring poignancy of coming of age, teenage epiphanies and heartbreak, and family redemption.

Horizontal Vertigo

Download Horizontal Vertigo PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1524748897
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (247 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Horizontal Vertigo by : Juan Villoro

Download or read book Horizontal Vertigo written by Juan Villoro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city. Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers. In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.

Everything and Less

Download Everything and Less PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 183976385X
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (397 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Everything and Less by : Mark McGurl

Download or read book Everything and Less written by Mark McGurl and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Best Book of Fall (Esquire) and a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 (Lit Hub) What Has Happened to Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. L. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic—if you like this, you might also like ...—has reorganized the fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works. This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Amazon’s platform is not just a retail juggernaut but an aesthetic experiment driven by an unseen algorithm rivaling in the depths of its effects any major cultural shift in history. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica. Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place.