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Jan 16, 2025 | 
mentalfloss.com | Joy Lanzendorfer
The novel, which turns 100 this year, was so successful that it allowed Woolf to put in a bathroom she called “Mrs. Dalloway’s closet.”Mrs. Dalloway, published May 14, 1925, is Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece. The novel follows socialite Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party and receives a visit from an old suitor. With this simple plot, Woolf explores the subjective experience of the mind, as memory, emotion, and outside social forces flood in and out of the character’s day.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
memoirland.substack.com | Emily Berry |Gabrielle Bellot |AJ Romriell |Joy Lanzendorfer
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals:Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Year of the Cat,” by .
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
mentalfloss.com | Joy Lanzendorfer
A lewd drawing contained in an early printing could have destroyed the book’s chances—and Twain’s reputation. On its surface, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a straightforward story about a boy and a freedom-seeking enslaved man floating down the Mississippi River. But underneath, the book—which was published in the U.S. on February 18, 1885—is a subversive confrontation of slavery and racism. It remains one of the most loved, and most banned, books in American history.
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Jul 13, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Joy Lanzendorfer
For 37 years, the young woman remained nameless. She was known only as “Buckskin girl” for the leather poncho she wore when she was found, strangled, in an Ohio ditch in 1981. That was until almost four decades later, when two women in California took up her case.
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Jul 3, 2024 | 
altaonline.com | Joy Lanzendorfer
Last year, a rare endangered horse named Ollie was born. Following his brother, Kurt, delivered in 2020, Ollie became the newest Przewalski’s (pronounced “sheh-vahl-skees”) horse at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. This was noteworthy on its own. Although herds of this wild equine—known for its stocky body, zebralike mane, and ocher coat—once roamed throughout Europe and central Asia, by 1969 their numbers had dwindled so low that they were declared extinct in the wild.
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Oct 15, 2023 | 
rsn.org | Joy Lanzendorfer
Amid Reagan’s late-sixties crackdown on the California counterculture, a jury was tasked with deciding whether Lenore Kandel’s psychedelic sex poems had “redeeming social importance.”On November 15, 1966, five police officers entered the Psychedelic Shop, in San Francisco, and purchased a thin volume of poetry, “The Love Book,” for a dollar. This sequence of erotic poems celebrating a woman’s sexual pleasure was by the Beat poet Lenore Kandel.
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Oct 13, 2023 | 
newyorker.com | Joy Lanzendorfer
Even as these arrests were happening, people were puzzled by the decision to target “The Love Book.” Although Kandel used plenty of four-letter words—a cycle of poems was titled “To Fuck with Love”—there was more salacious material around San Francisco. But Kandel was the victim of bad timing. Much like today’s challenged books—such as “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe, or “Lawn Boy,” by Jonathan Evison—her work contains elements that some conservative factions felt threatened mainstream morality.
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Aug 16, 2023 | 
msn.com | Joy Lanzendorfer
The Grapes of Wrath is John Steinbeck’s award-winning political novel about the Great Depression. It follows the Joad family as they’re forced to leave their Oklahoma farm and go west to California for work. The book, which was released on April 14, 1939, humanized the “Okies,” captured history as it was happening, and earned its author so much personal trouble that he started carrying a gun for protection. Find out more about the classic below. 1.
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Jun 26, 2023 | 
altaonline.com | Joy Lanzendorfer
For over a decade, the diarist Anaïs Nin led a double life, married to two different men on separate coasts of the United States. One husband was a wealthy filmmaker and banker in New York City, who provided Nin with a cosmopolitan lifestyle full of friends and luxuries. The other husband was a handsome forest ranger 20 years Nin’s junior, with whom she had passionate trysts in a mountainside cabin in Sierra Madre, California. Neither man knew about the other.
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Mar 27, 2023 | 
altaonline.com | Joy Lanzendorfer
The attempted murder happened on an ordinary spring day at the in 1914. The novelist Alice MacGowan went to get something to eat from the cooler on the back porch of her home overlooking the bay. When she took a bite of leftover chili con carne, something tasted off. Assuming it was spoiled, she spat it out. Also in the cooler was an unfamiliar tin of marshmallows. MacGowan thought it was a gift from a friend who didn’t want to disturb her while she was working.
