In an incendiary season finale, the insightful and hilarious K. Austin Collins joins to discuss Dennis Cooper's controversial classic, The Sluts. Other topics of debate include the old internet, social media in fiction, and the world's ultimate unreliable narrators: service review writers. Thanks to all our listeners and guests for a wonderful second season!

K. Austin Collins is a film critic. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Ringer, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of BLACK COP, forthcoming from Doubleday, and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, about Frederick Wiseman’s 2001 documentary of the same name, forthcoming from Fireflies Press.  

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

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Charlotte comes in salty about Lorrie Moore’s annoying 9/11 novel A Gate at the Stairs, while Jo has been awed by Cockroaches, Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir of losing her family in the Rwandan genocide. 

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte and Jo enthuse briefly but ardently about friend of the pod’s Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and Helen Humphreys’ Followed By The Lark before the powerhouse Shon Faye joins for a rollicking take on Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Shon Faye is an advice columnist for Vogue dot com and the author of two books The Transgender Issue published by Verso in 2022 and the forthcoming Love in Exile a memoir to be published by FSG in May 2025.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo discovers one of the most fascinating books of all time with Extraterrestrial Languages by Daniel Oberhaus, while Charlotte issues her verdict on whether Lional Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin lives up to its good reputation. Beloved critic Lovia Gyarkye then joins to assess the complex, beguiling mother-daughter dynamics at work in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine.

Lovia Gyarkye is a critic at The Hollywood Reporter based in New York. 

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In another host-only bonus episode, Jo reviews Paula Hawkins’ art mystery novel, The Blue Hour, and Charlotte rhapsodizes about Jacqueline Harpman’s bizarre science fiction masterpiece I Who Have Never Known Men.

Other titles discussed: Karen Slaughter’s Will Trent series, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.co

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo is refreshed by Trouble in the Cotswalds by Rebecca Tope but Charlotte quickly ruins their peace by connecting the sex in Heather Lewis’s violent novel Notice with Miranda July’s NBA-shortlisted All Fours. The effervescent Emma Robinson joins to share her love for Dianne Brill’s Boobs, Boys, and High Heels, which inspires further reflection on 90s era beauty books and instruction manuals.

Other books mentioned in this episode: Steven Saylor’s Murder on the Appian Way, Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up, Shelia Heti’s Motherhood, Bobbi Brown’s Teenage Beauty, Amanda Brooks’ Internet Escort’s Handbook, and Sydney Barrow’s Mayflower Madam and Just Between Us Girls.

Charlotte’s review of All Fours and Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up, both in Bookforum. 

Inspired at once by radical philosophers and tulips, Emma Cager Robinson is looking for beauty. As a mechanism for change and source of inspiration, Emma uses beauty as the driving force behind her activism. With a focus on Consciousness Raising and creating “Insurgents,” Emma uses media of all forms to shift the way we interrogate culture and the systems we interact with on a daily basis. A Texan at heart, she’s especially impassioned about spreading this energy through the South; as a means of completing ancestral business, and working in a long line of women committed to making the world suck less for their families and communities.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo opens their mind to further basketball books after reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year, while Charlotte (11:30) revisits a YA novel from her youth, Bette Green’s Summer of My German Soldier. Glamorous Marlowe Granados then joins (24:30) to expound on great novels of mid-century women, namely Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone. 

Other books discussed in this episode: Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything

Marlowe Granados is the author of Happy Hour, a novel the New Yorker called an "effervescent debut." In 2021, it was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel award and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Review. It is considered a RAVE on Literary Hub’s BookMarks, a website that aggregates reviews from major publications. She writes a substack called "From the Desk of Marlowe Granados" and is currently at work on her second novel. After spending time in New York and London, she now lives in Toronto. 

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte is haunted by the lack of violence in Swedish dystopias (Kallocain by Karin Boye and Amatka by Karin Tidbeck) while Jo (17:00) delves into the controlled and uncontrolled horror of medical history in Human Medical Experimentation, ed. Francis R. Frankenberg. Pissed Jeans’ thoughtful frontman Matt Korvette joins (27:00) to share his trenchant take on menace and neighborly predation in Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer. 

Other books discussed in this episode: Emmanuel Carrère's V13: Chronicle of a Trial, J.D. Daniels' The Correspondence, and Robert C O'Brien's Z for Zachariah

Matt Korvette is a writer, critic, lyricist and performer, best known as the vocalist of Pissed Jeans. He resides in Philadelphia, PA.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special bonus episode, Jo and Charlotte talk about J.M. Coetzee, starting with Disgrace and moving to white South African literature, the legacy of colonialism in fiction, animal rights and Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, as well as Athol Fugard’s plays, James Percy FitzPatrick’s Jock of the Bushveld, Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden, Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Tina Post’s Deadpan, Eyal Press’ Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, and much more.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte and Jo discuss the mortifying ordeal of being (visually) perceived and other trials of embodiment as explored in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story. The REAL and spectacular Sarah Miller then joins to give her wholehearted endorsement to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles. 

Sarah Miller has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the Paris Review, covering topics ranging from climate change to American Imperialism to how ugly her unrenovated bathroom is. She works part time at a wine store in Grass Valley California and loves red and blue heelers. Her Substack is called The Real Sarah Miller. 

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. 

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.