PodcastsNew podcast Stiffed investigates the forgotten story of Viva, a progressive magazine for women that featured Anna Wintour on staff
Back in the mid-aughts, right before the internet made Play-Doh spaghetti of the magazine industry, Jennifer Romolini was an editor at Lucky, a Conde Nast property dedicated to all things shopping. It was while researching her column on eBay and Etsy finds that she stumbled across something even better than a secondhand Laura Ashley frock: a back issue of a chic and not a little absurd erotic magazine geared for the thinking woman of the 1970s. Read More...
Fiction in translationReviewThis novel about a young woman growing up in a dysfunctional family in Rome is a gleeful dance between truth and fiction
Originally published in Italy as Niente di Vero, or “Nothing True”, Veronica Raimo’s autofictional fourth novel comes garlanded with praise and prizes. The story of a young woman growing up in Rome in a dysfunctional family who goes on to become a writer, it’s cruder and more slippery than Fleabag, funnier but less insightful than Deborah Levy’s “living autobiographies”, and ultimately frustrating for the way in which its author, for all her startling candour, somehow eludes our gaze. Read More...
Book of the dayFictionReviewA young man with gender-shifting powers seeks love (and lots of sex) in this witty debut set in 90s America
You might think a novel that positions itself as a Bildungsroman in which the lead character is described as a flaneur who makes zines would be insufferable – an assumption that Andrea Lawlor acknowledges in their playful and charming debut, which follows 23-year-old Paul on his queer journey from a college in Iowa City to the rainbow-coloured lights of San Francisco. Read More...