You could probably run cities on the energy generated between directors like him and actresses like her.   When Frida Slattery and John Reddan meet in a Dublin pub in 2006, neither can imagine how they will come to shape and define each other’s lives.​ Frida is struggling to launch her acting career, while John is already gaining a name for himself as a director. From the first they see in each other potential and the chance to create work that matters, though the lines between collaboration and exploitation, friendship and desire will prove dangerously slippery. With the financial crisis looming, the next 15 years takes them from Dublin to London, New York and LA, and through success and disappointment, joy and heartbreak. Their connection is tested and stretched to the point of rupture, but something remains that outlasts their work and the shifting perceptions of the period. Tracing the complex, winding path of a relationship, FRIDA SLATTERY AS HERSELF is an epic story of art, love and finding your voice, that introduces two unforgettable characters.    

When a cast member goes missing from the hit reality show Sex Island, producers ask the mysterious detective Luella van Horn to go undercover as a contestant and solve the case. What the producers don't know is that Luella van Horn is actually a woman named Marie Jones, a divorced ex-social worker attempting to lead a double life as a glamorous private eye. Unable to resist the opportunity to be a part of her favorite trashy reality show, Marie-as-Luella takes the case. But the more she learns about Sex Island's dark underbelly, the harder it gets to make it out alive. She encounters shady producers, sleazy directors, and contestants willing to do whatever it takes to win the $100,000 grand prize. Will she find the killer? Will she find herself? Will she find... love? Find out now, in Sex Island's most dramatic season yet.

A Today Show #ReadwithJenna Book Club Pick A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help us start anew. It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamt of coming for years―she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe―which makes it that much more surprising when the women can’t stop confiding in each other. In turns uproariously, absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach's The Wedding People is a look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined―and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

An exploration into the very similar work of selling art and selling sex, from a luminous new voice Sex and art, we’re told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy. Our reaction to this should not be moral or political outrage, nor legal regulation or denial, but rather—as Sophia Giovannitti argues here—acceptance, through which we can find a more autonomous way to live. In this searching and provocative work, drawing on cultural and political theory, the contemporary art world, and the author’s own experience as a sex worker and artist trying to make a living, Giovannitti argues that if we delve into our anxieties around art and sex, we can instead find new ways to live and spaces, however small, of freedom. When there is nothing left to protect, she argues, everything is possible.

As the rope was tightening around my neck, an Alien made love to me. Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it. Here is what happens inside a person's body when they starve.Written in the shadow of Georg Buchner's Lenz at razor pitch, Aliens & Anorexia, first published in 2000, defines a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. The book unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using stories and polemics to travel through a maze that spirals back into itself. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and "Africa," her virtual S&M partner who's shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest Woods for the winter to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus argues for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor "self-esteem." Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body a rejection of the cynicism this culture hands us through its food.

We spoke up. We took charge. We asked for more. But where has it actually left us? Not only are generations of women more burnt out than ever, but the gender pay gap has barely budged in decades.In The Ambition Penalty, journalist Stefanie O'Connell presents a deeply researched and sometimes shocking look at the ways women remain passed over and excluded, not for a lack of ambition, but because of it. She calls it 'the ambition penalty' - the sum of the financial, personal, and professional costs women face for daring to want more.The Ambition Penalty dismantles the myth that women are less ambitious than their male peers and debunks common claims - like women aren't confident enough and don't negotiate enough - used to justify stubborn gender gaps in power. This book reveals why decades of educational gains and empowerment messages have not translated into corresponding advances for women at work or at home.The Ambition Penalty gives women the talking points they can use to call out these biases, and lays out proven practices for leaders and allies committed to cultivating environments where women's ambitions are supported, rewarded, and celebrated.

Love Island meets The Hunger Games in this must-talk-about-it read, as bingeable as the best reality TV. Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she’ll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win? Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends

Meet one of the most unforgettable new protagonists in Phoebe Berman. She has one month to lose her virginity before she turns thirty—if her own anxiety doesn’t slow her down. A charmingly authentic and heartwarming debut novel from podcaster and comedian Brooke Averick.Is it possible to find true love when going on a date makes you want to throw up?Phoebe Berman fears the one thing she wants the love, and everything that comes along with it. Thanks to an extremely unfortunate first kiss attempt, crippling intimacy anxiety has plagued her since she was a teen. With just a month to go before she turns thirty, Phoebe is still a virgin. Phoebe has so much going for a dream teaching job, a supportive and hilarious group of best friends, and all the romance novels a girl could want at her fingertips—but she can’t help but beat herself up over the one thing she can’t quite seem to figure out. Determined to change this, she drafts up the ultimate "Guide to Losing My Virginity" checklist with the hope of finally getting laid.Suddenly, she goes from a relatively boring (basically non-existent) dating life to juggling three romantic prospects at once. There's the gorgeous new fourth grade teacher at her school, a former high school classmate that resurfaces through Words with Friends, and there will always be her roommate, who might just be the best friends-to-lovers situation of her dreams.Phoebe’s love life quickly takes a turn in a way she never anticipated. But between the love “square” she’s gotten herself into and the stomachaches and cold sweats that surface whenever she gears up for a potential date, things are complicated. And Phoebe doesn’t do complicated. Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It is a brutally honest and painfully relatable story for anyone who’s ever felt stuck between coming of age and coming apart.

Attempts on Her Life by Martin Crimp is at turns hilarious and shocking, a rollercoaster of twentieth century obsessions from pornography to ethnic violence and terrorism to unprotected sex.

He sat me down in a chair and he told me, in no uncertain terms, that magic was real.This is the true story of a spiritual awakening that turned into a mental breakdown. At the age of twenty-seven, an actress joins a wellness organisation and falls in love with its leader. She is sectioned for a psychotic break and diagnosed with bipolar disorder.The Make-Believe is a deeply personal account of these events. It is a wild ride, a searching attempt for understanding and a call for radical empathy. Lyrical and playful, exploring light and dark, it takes readers on a journey to the edges of reality, to a seductive and dangerous world where magic seems possible.

Sally Diamond cannot understand why what she did was so strange. She was only doing what her father told her to do, to put him out with the rubbish when he died. Now Sally is the centre of attention, not only from the hungry media and worried police, but also a sinister voice from a past she has no memory of. As she begins to discover the horrors of her childhood, recluse Sally steps into the world for the first time, making new friends, finding independence, and learning that people don't always mean what they say. But when messages start arriving from a stranger who knows far more about her past than she knows herself, Sally's life will be thrown into chaos once again . . .

How do you get your dinner? That is the basic question of economics. It might seem easy, but it is actually very complicated. When Adam Smith proclaimed that all our actions were motivated by self-interest and the world turned because of financial gain he laid the foundations for 'economic man'. Selfish and cynical, 'economic man' has dominated our thinking ever since, the ugly rational heart of modern day capitalism. But every night Adam Smith's mother served him his dinner, not out of self-interest, but out of love. Even today, the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning and cooking is not part of our economic models. All over the world, there are economists who believe that if women are paid less, then that's because their labour is worth less. In this engaging, popular look at the mess we're in, Katrine Marçal charts the myth of 'economic man', from its origins at Adam Smith's dinner table to its adaptation by the Chicago School and finally its disastrous role in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love. Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed. With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a singular work - an essential book about building a life on your own terms, which inspires us to live and love more honestly.