Goodreads Announces List of Top Books of 2015

Tags: books, goodreads

The readers have spoken and they loved Go Set A Watchman. The voting readers of Goodreads, the free website where readers share their reviews and recommendations with other bibliophiles, picked Lee’s prequel to To Kill a Mockingbird as the best fiction book of 2015. Readers cast more than 3 million votes for their favorites in 20 categories for the annual …

The sound of “Jingle Bells” playing on the mall’s loud speakers followed me as I fought my way through the hoards of shoppers. The music put me in the Christmas spirit and I started humming along as I walked. This was my first visit since the new mall had opened and foolish me, I’d hoped to avoid the crowds. But …

Telenova Gets 2-Episode Preview!

Tags: eva longoria, telenova

Based on an idea by Eva Longoria, Telenovela is, a sometimes very funny and stylized single camera half-hour comedy that is about a lot more than it lets on – which is pretty good for Big 4 TV in a season that has seen very little of such smart laughs. With a 2-episode preview on December 7 right after The Voice before moving to …

The Best of My Three Lovers

Tags: lover, true romance

I listened to the howling wind and watched the snow fall around me and waited for death. I had neither the strength nor the will to go on. I had no reason to live. I had destroyed my life years ago when I married Lawrence Williams. Now, I had come to this wilderness searching for the one man who held …

The Danish Girl: Portrait of a Lady

Tags: danish girl

A year after Eddie Redmayne proved his incredible capacity for reinvention in The Theory of Everything, the freckle-faced Brit pulls off the ultimate identity overhaul as The Danish Girl, portraying gender-reassignment trailblazer Lili Elbe, nee Einar Wegener, who was one of the first to make a “sex change” via surgery. Based on David Ebershoff’s bestselling novel, The Danish Girl, directed by Tom Hooper, …

Carol Wins Big at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards

Tags: carol, cate blanchett

The New York Film Critics Circle has named Carol as its best picture of 2015. The Todd Haynes-directed film — which stars Cate Blanchett as a housewife who meets and begins an affair with a shop clerk and aspiring photographer (Rooney Mara) in 1950s New York — won four awards from the critics organization. The NYFCC consists of 30 film …

Raise Your Glass to Fiction’s Worst Sex Scenes

Tags: fiction, sex

By Katherine Sharma One of my favorite “literary” awards, the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, has announced this year’s winner! The award was established back in 1998 by the British Literary Review’s then-editor Auberon Waugh, with the hope of discouraging authors from penning laughably bad fictional sex scenes. It just underscores the challenge of writing erotic and emotionally resonant sexual descriptions that …

A Moveable Feast Resonates With Humanity

Tags: hemingway, paris

In the days since the terrorist attacks in Paris, something unexpected has happened. A half-century old book by an American writer has gone to the top of the bestseller list in France. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway has suddenly found a new voice in today’s times. “Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when …

Where Did The Passion Go?

Tags: intimacy, sex

By Mary Cope When you’re caught up in the throes of a new relationship the passion between the sheets is intoxicating. That primal, barely controllable, impetuous passion sets the pleasure centers of your brain on fire and you think to yourself, this is awesome! So why, more often than not, does this desire and sexual intensity eventually stop? Once the relationship is …

You think Grant can handle Black Friday?” “Are you kidding? Just look at him,” directed my sister, Merryn, to the couch where the men were watching the Lions’ game. “At six-foot-four, he’ll be heads and shoulders over the crowds. Not to mention, he has the strength to push his way through to the bargains.” For my family, Thanksgiving was a …