Kevin Roose is just an average college student: he sings in an a cappella group, he writes for the newspaper, and he studied abroad—at Jerry Falwell’s evangelical Liberty University. Listen to an interview about his new book, The Unlikely Disciple.

“If I were selling, I would, as they say in the Match.com ads, clean up good. Shopping for a house is like dating, minus, unfortunately, the cocktails and sex.”
The following is an excerpt from Gimme Shelter by Mary Elizabeth Williams. Read Larry Smith’s interview with Williams here.
A Tomb With a View
The ad says the [...]

In her new memoir, Kathleen Rooney talks about her experiences as a nude life drawing model, and explores the the practice in the context of both the art world and modern society. Be sure to check out her g-chat interview with Katherine Wootton, and read an excerpt from the book below.

Artist Kim Smith combines images and text to create delicate, whimsical graphic memoirs. Check out our interview with her, and get a sneak peek at the collages from her new book, Where Quirky Meets Menacing.

“This only makes me angrier—that we’ve all been placed at the mercy of her disease, that it’s trapped us in this house, warping even our arguments. It’s not an apology she’s giving me, it’s a reminder of the time constraint.”
“The heart of this book was written quickly, during and right after my mother’s death,” writes [...]

“I spent four lost, interminable days in lockup that first time in the bin, getting worse, weeping at the sealed windows, yelping for rescue through the pay phone in the soul-destroying dayroom, wrapping into my roommate’s seamless paranoia, and, finally, out of sheer rage, altogether losing what was left of my tenuous grip.”
Norah Vincent is [...]

“I grew up accepting the inevitability that once you became a woman, you were always on a diet. Being a woman equaled loss. As I reached for a bright orange Cosmopolitan with an equally orange Jessica Simpson on the cover, I wondered what was I about to give up—and what I would eventually gain.”
An excerpt [...]

The follow is an excerpt from Pretty is What Changes: Impossible Choices, the Breast Cancer Gene, and How I Defied My Destiny by Jessica Queller. Read Rebecca Paoletti’s interview with Queller.
“I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and decks of cards were talking. As if the logic and rules of my universe had suddenly changed. [...]

An excerpt from Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies, a big book of essays, photos, and braces edited by Roger Bennett and Jules Shell. Read more about the people behind Camp Camp here.
“We filed into the mess hall. I looked hopefully for the rebels. There they were, sitting like sisters at [...]

Sarah Manguso’s fourth book, The Two Kinds of Decay, recounts a harrowing nine-year bout with a rare and complicated blood disease. Her twenties are framed around hospital stays, surgeries, and blood transfusions, with brief moments of respite—concern with having sex before graduating from college, eating the best hamburger ever made—tempered by the angst of her [...]