“There’s something unique about being a member of the sex worker club, an instant camaraderie that bonds one to people who would otherwise be strangers, and this chemistry is something of which Sterry can’t get enough.”

…more

Craig Seymour is funny, precise, and egoless: the perfect combination for a good sex worker memoirist. …more

Laura Kipnis began her career as a visual artist but is best known for her writing on a range of provocative topics, including pornography, and adultery. She is the author of the bestselling polemic, Against Love. Her most recently published book was The Female Thing. …more

My assertion is that you will not have read a novel quite like Madeleine is Sleeping because I hadn’t, until I read it. A young girl jerks off the local idiot and so her hands are burned in a pot of lye, turning her into a traveling freak who eventually uses her “paddles” to spank a flatulent man for a widow’s entertainment; or the same girl lies in her home surrounded by siblings and a vaguely concerned mother who cannot make her daughter wake. Bynum’s sentences are precise and compact (“Beatrice is enraptured by rules, especially those of her own making”) and the world they create operates with such inarguable dream logic that even a fat, flying woman is a plausible character in both the sleeping and waking realms. It’s a lovely, surprising book.

…more