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Subscribers got this at the beginning of the month. You can get it even if you’re not one for $1.99!
These essays were produced during our second three months in operation and they’re about the three books we read during that time. Those books were: Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez’s memoir of being intensely mentored by Susan Sontag; Glory Goes and Gets Some, Emily Carter’s stories about a woman who experiences both the exaltation of total debasement and the boring ordinary everydayness of redemption; and the buddhist, Dodie Bellamy’s belletristic exploration of her breakup with an emotionally abusive spiritual teacher.
Clearly our writers had a strange and varied salad bar of big themes to hook their essays onto. Emily Cooke used Sempre Susan to inform her own description of a failed experience of mentoring. The same book inspired Minna Proctor to remember how confusing and sad it felt to surpass her mentor’s achievements. Glory Goes and Gets Some prompted Ruth Curry to think about addictions of all kinds, and to explain to herself the counterintuitive appeal of obvious badness. the buddhist reminded Mitchell Sunderland of a one-night experience that had left him wondering about love in some of the same ways Dodie Bellamy does, and it made me think about ladyblogs, Lana del Rey, public suffering and writing as performance.
We also interviewed Dodie about the bloggy origins of her book, an interview where she described blogging as “kind of mashing around with the boundaries between personal and public, bringing a larger community into the work.” We hope that’s what we’re doing here and we look forward to doing it a lot more in the future.
I’m way more interested in Emily Books publishing original content than rehashing old stuff.
(via emilygould)
