book excerpt!!! book excerpt!!!

+ a way to read the book in advance!

Hi, all!

Today an excerpt of my book is live at the New Yorker. I was amazed and amused that a fact-checker called my husband to ensure that he can, in fact, light a fire without matches (reader, he can!). I hope you love it!!!!! Sorry if you hate it!!!!! Here it is: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/all-good-sex-is-body-horror

Should this excerpt make you want to pre-order the book, you can do so here. Although I have yet to learn why, exactly, it’s common wisdom that pre-orders matter so much, everyone seems to think that they do: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250849915/allthingsaretoosmall

Perhaps a second excerpt is coming in another magazine next week?!?!?!! Who can say?????????

ALSO, for the next 24 hours, the first hundred people with a NetGalley account can download an electronic galley of the book. An honest confession: this far into my reviewing and writing career, I still don’t fully grasp what NetGalley actually is and have yet to actually use it. Nonetheless, I hope that readers who are more savvy and technologically adept than I am take advantage of this opportunity, and I’m grateful that the marketing team at Holt organized this giveaway for me.

I will be back to bother you all again soon with information about book-related events and then, I promise, I will leave you alone to read other books. Some good ones I’ve read lately: Saint Sebastian’s Abyss by Mark Haber and Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai. My personal jury is out on The Phenomenology of Perception, which I am reading at the glacial rate of ~20 pages a week and thus have been reading for something like two months now but am largely enjoying, and Leo Strauss’s commentary on The Symposium, about which I am already skeptical one chapter in.

Cheers!