“My friends joke that I’ve become a pornographer,” says Lucy Roeber. “I haven’t, of course. But the English don’t know how else to describe a magazine about sex. So we joke about it instead.”
Later this month, Roeber and her deputy editor, Saskia Vogel, will publish the first edition of the revamped and relaunched Erotic Review. During the late 1990s, the Erotic Review was a high-end, lavishly illustrated print magazine, but for the past 14 years, it has languished as a little-read online newsletter. Now, at a moment when sex parties and orgies seem to be all the rage, it will be back to its pomp as a physical product, available from bookshops and published three times a year.
There are many interesting games going on in Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel about art and politics that seeks to skewer the prim puritans of radical wokery and the sweaty dinosaurs of the right. Part of the joke is that it is written very clearly in the style of, and in deep engagement with, a canon that literary America is doing its best to forget: Roth, Bellow and Updike are the obvious models. What’s more, as if snubbing his nose at those who will be looking for reasons to take offence, Taranto, a white male (he’s a former lawyer), writes from the perspective of a young Jewish woman, Helen, a graduate student. He takes great and obvious pleasure in describing her sex life, with a passage about masturbation that might have come straight from the pen of Philip Roth.
For those who came of age in the Vietnam era, whether they served, protested or did neither, the call of the past in “The Women” revives the physical and psychic pain inflicted on the grunts, the lasting sorrow of surviving family and friends and the nightmares and noises that continue to rattle battle-scarred veterans for years.
Splinters is a book about a woman who struggles to see herself clearly after a lifetime of being taught to find herself in the needs of others. This is an eternal danger for women, and mothers especially, a plight Jamison shares with the troubled Teen Mom cast and with Heather Armstrong, who died by suicide last year. But what makes Jamison’s memoir remarkable is its happy ending. Seemingly to its author’s surprise—although really in demonstration of her skill—the book provides a record of Jamison shrugging off a prewritten life and embracing the process of discerning her own.
Questioning the validity of “conquering” mountains isn’t new (see Nan Shepherd) and the ugly, racist side of mountaineering history will be familiar to anyone who has read up on the British Everest Expedition of 1953. Putting these two things together, though, raises uncomfortable questions about the still largely results-driven world of Western-style outdoor recreation. What are you trying to prove by doing that? And, culturally, where did the desire to do it come from? Important to try and see ourselves as others see us, even (or perhaps particularly) when we don’t like what we see.