11.4.04 Matrimony & How Sassy Changed My Life
Sunday, October 28th, 2007
Long in scope, ambitious with its characters, and grounded with realism and wry humor, MATRIMONY introduces us to Julian Wainwright and Mia Mendelsohn. Here are two intensely likeable yet wonderfully flawed characters, who meet their freshman year at Graymont College, a liberal arts school in western Massachusetts. Julian, an aspiring writer, has arrived at college from New York to study with his literary hero. Mia has come from Montreal searching for something new and unknown. When they meet, folding laundry, they fall deeply and happily into first love.
But real life soon intrudes, and a family crisis arises at the end of their senior year that will cement their relationship more seriously and quickly than they could have imagined. Together they make their way through the next fifteen years — through career changes, family conflicts and losses, betrayals and successes. From the university towns of Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Iowa City, to the brownstones of Greenwich Village, the novel moves back and forth between Julian and Mia’s perspectives as Henkin explores the choices and sacrifices we make at different stages in our lives, our changes in ambition and desire, and how we come to lead the lives we live.
Starting at the height of the Reagan era and ending in thenew millennium, Matrimony is about love and friendship, about money and ambition, desire and tensions of faith. It asks what happens to a marriage when it is confronted by betrayal and the specter of mortality. What happens when people marry younger than they’d expected? Can love endure the passing of time?
The author will be joining the show at 6:00pm. Want to score a free copy of Matrimony? Leave a comment for the author here, and if we use it on the air, you’ll win a free book!
The inside story of Sassy is bittersweet—a teen magazine with an enormous, almost cult-like following, it enjoyed a brief but brilliant run from 1988 to 1994. For a generation of teenage girls, Sassy was nothing short of revolutionary, the signifier of all that was hip and cool . . . a phenomenon that brought the idea of girl power and girl culture into the mainstream.
Sassy had a knack for discovering the hippest new celebrities and musicians; it was the first commercial magazine to showcase riot grrrl, was chosen by Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love for their first cover photo as a couple, and also launched the careers of Chloe Sevigny and Spike Jonze. More than that, Sassy embraced social activism—it made feminism cool and it was never afraid to tackle taboo issues like teen sex and suicide. Today, Sassy nostalgia is very much alive. With the mainstream media even more juggernaut-ish than it was in the early ‘90s, Sassy devotees have landed in the blog world, where legions of fans keep Sassy alive by sharing their first-person chronicles of their love of Sassy, pop culture, activism, and stories about their lives.
About the Authors: Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer are New York–based writers. They have written and edited for publications such as The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Elle Girl, Bitch, Jane, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Nylon, Nerve, and Elle.
Essential Links!
www.howsassychangedmylife.com
www.myspace.com/sassybook
Buy the Book
The authors will be joining the show at 6:25pm. Want to score a free copy of How Sassy Changed My Life? Leave a comment for the authors here, and if we use it on the air, you’ll win a free book!
Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work–her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart–come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable. 
A tragic accident sets in motion a cycle of violence and retribution in John Burnham Schwartz’s riveting novel 
An Absolute Gentleman is fiction, the memoir of self-confessed serial killer Arthur Blume, in prison for killing twelve, perhaps seventeen, women. He wishes to correct the media’s distorted view of him and his mother. He juxtaposes memories of his childhood in the hands of that loving, but psychotically cruel woman, with his more recent history as aging writer and itinerant instructor, and with observations about the nature of the world—no place for any creature. Offhandedly, he slips in horrors, some of which he endured, and others, perpetrated. While he’s a nice guy, champion of the insulted and outcast, he is also a monster who will, most certainly, strike. 
In her acclaimed debut novel, Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld created a touchstone with her pitch-perfect portrayal of adolescence. Her prose is as intensely realistic and compelling as ever in The Man of My Dreams, a disarmingly candid and sympathetic novel about the collision of a young woman’s fantasies of family and love with the challenges and realities of adult life. 
After spending ten years in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson’s house—killing two people in the process—Sam Pulsifer is determined to start a new life.
The Reincarnationist is equal parts modern-day thriller, historical fiction and love story. With one foot in present-day Rome and New York and another in Rome some 1,600 years ago, my story is about two worlds on a collision course.
London, 1711. As the rich, young offspring of the city’s most fashionable families þll their days with masquerade balls and clandestine court-ships, Arabella Fermor and Robert, Lord Petre, lead the pursuit of pleasure. Beautiful and vain, Arabella is a clever coquette with a large circle of beaus. Lord Petre, seventh Baron of Ingatestone, is a man-about-town with his choice of mistresses. Drawn together by an overpowering attraction, the two begin an illicit affair.
