the half-life of love is forever

Earlier this year The Hairpin linked to an incredibly absorbing interview with Junot Díaz in the Boston Review - read here, read it! And then get his latest collection of short stories, because they're everything a follow-up to The Brief Wondrous Life (or more pertinently, the raw and beautiful Drown)ought to be. Sometimes it's just such a relief to hear an intelligent, articulate man address issues of race and sexuality in a thoughtful way - consider it an antidote to the general world at large.

look at you

Oh Rufus.

that obscure object of desire

Speaking of favourite things, Jeffrey Eugenides is finally coming out with a new book! It's been nine impatient years since the gorgeous odyssey of Middlesex, and I've been pining.

"To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic."

— The First Lines of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot via let us read and let us dance

this is all we need: couple of smokes, a cup of coffee and good conversation

Sydney Writers' Festival for russh

What Would John Waters Do?

"If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!"

Is it possible to love this man too much?

Yeah, didn't think so.

smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin

This is maybe my favourite bookcase. Second-hand pulps of wildly varying qualities, from the very good to the pretty much unreadable. But oh, the COVERS.