Sloane Crosley is a super-hero of sorts; book publicist by day and best-selling author by night. For her day job, Sloane works at Vintage Books as the publicist for big dogs like Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Jay McInerney, and Dave Eggers. In her free time, she wrote her own book I Was Told There’d Be [...]
Category Archives: Nonfiction
Kissing the Mask
Get a load of William T. Vollmann’s new title: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater With Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines. In other words, welcome to the work of William T. Vollmann. I [...]
John D’agata, About a Mountain
Shawn Vandor’s first book, Fire at the End of the Rainbow, is recently out from Sand Paper Press
Photograph by Skye Parrott
Sexually I’m More of a Switzerland, edited by David Rose
We are all in the gutter, and most of us have our minds firmly entrenched there. Certainly that’s the case with the lovelorn desperadoes who populate the personal ads of The London Review of Books. Like most of us, they’re looking for love but willing to settle for a little dirty action…yet what separates these [...]
Fire At the End of the Rainbow
Fire At the End of the Rainbow, the first book by Shawn Vandor, is a poised and unusual performance, an autobiography made of very brief chapters which eschew the typical surreality of short prose forms in favor of a less experimental, more vernacular directness. It begins with jokey pieces about men confronting men, but [...]
Letters to Jackie Kennedy
More than a million people wrote letters to Jackie Kennedy after her husband’s assassination. Some were famous, like Langston Hughes, but most were just normal people, sending their condolences and expressing their sadness and bewilderment. In her new book, “Letters to Jackie: Condolences From a Grieving Nation,” released by HarperCollins, Ellen Fitzpatrick went through these [...]
Sam Shepard’s “Day Out of Days”
Photo by Brigitte Lacombe
Surely it would be blasphemy to suggest that the strongest suit in Sam Shepard’s fecund, polymath deck is his prose. His plays have won him the Pulitzer (“Buried Child”). His acting has garnered an Oscar nomination (The Right Stuff). His direction on stage and screen is highly respected, or better. But it [...]


