VenusZine
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On January 29, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger explodes, killing all seven astronauts on board. The local community’s shock and the nation’s growing disenchantment with what was once an exciting discipline serve as the backdrop to Margaret Lazarus Dean’s debut novel...
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Originally published March 2006, VenusZine
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“Slowly it dawned on me that I could cobble together the jagged fragments of my life into one glittering pastiche,” Molly Crabapple writes in Dr. Sketchy’s Official Rainy Day Colouring Book, co-written by John Leavitt. She’s speaking of her evolution from art school–nude photography model to the creator of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School, a life drawing class where average Joes and Janes come together to sip drinks and sketch buxom models. But she could just as easily be describing the book itself: a glittering, fragmented ode to all things boozy, busty, and burlesque...
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Originally published March 2007, VenusZine
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When you’ve exhausted the list of people in your life that are worthy of a hand-knit scarf, Nikol Lohr hopes you’ll pass up the standard sock patterns and head instead to the bedroom to make something fun for yourself. In Naughty Needles: Saucy Knits for the Bedroom and Beyond, Lohr offers up more than 25 fresh patterns, from fun and flirty to downright dirty...
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Originally published February 17, 2007, VenusZine
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In “How To Get a Book Deal” from issue No. 30, we wrote that half of the publishing game is doing your research. Because the publishing industry can be riddled with tricks that would boggle the mind of any aspiring writer, we’ve made it just a bit easier for you with our listing of news sources, blogs, and web sites. Here, you can learn about the current publishing industry, get some insider advice, avoid getting conned, and just for extra measure, listen to others rant and bitch...
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Originally published January 2007, VenusZine
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Remember that a-ha! moment in school when you realized that history isn’t as tidy and boring as the textbooks would have you believe? A Fictional History of the United States lets you experience that moment all over again, with a distinct, varied collection of work by 17 authors—such as Neal Pollack, Sarah Schulman, and Kate Bornstein—who present “fictional histories” in forms ranging from political cartoons to absurdist fiction to interview....
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Originally published Fall 2006, VenusZine
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Mary Gaitskill emerged onto the literary scene in 1988 with her darkly erotic short story collection Bad Behavior. Herself a teenage runaway who sold flowers on the streets of San Francisco before working as a stripper in Toronto, she now lives with her husband in bucolic upstate New York. Those readers who worried married life in the countryside would mute Gaitskill’s fascination with psychosexual themes, a consistent undercurrent in her oeuvre of work, breathed a collective sigh of relief with the 2005 release of her latest novel Veronica, winner of the National Book Award...
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Originally published December 2006, VenusZine
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In Come Together, Fall Apart, a collection of eight short stories and one novella, Cristina Henriquez displays a strong, sparse voice, characters that strike near-perfect pitches of vulnerability and fallibility, and just the right knack for picking details in a tale. The stories in this collection are individually beautiful and collectively haunting...
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Originally published June 2006, VenusZine
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