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Mark Armstrong of Longreads posts his top essays and articles over at Mother Jones each week, and this time around I’m his “Featured Longreader.” Here’s some of what I’ve been reading recently:

A Disney trip with kids meets lots of furtive weed smoking in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Rough Guide to Disney World. “It was a double hallucination,” he says. “You were hallucinating inside of Walter Disney’s hallucination. That’s what he wanted.” Already an official #longreads pick, I know, but: it’s so, so good and only gets better as it goes.

I’ve also been revisiting Eudora Welty’s fiction in preparation for a Granta event [held at the New School last night]. “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “Petrified Man” are two of her most beloved stories, and with good reason: they’re funny and relentless and so accurately and minutely observed. Returning to them, I realized what an influence she must have had on Dorothy Allison (whose Bastard Out of Carolina, a #longlongread, I also recommend). Then I confirmed it. “I was seduced by Eudora Welty,” Allison wrote in 2005, though “I had every reason to distrust her, as I had distrusted Faulkner—both of them products of the middle-class South I disdained.”

To round out this unexpectedly southern round-up, for anyone who missed it last week, I recommend my friend Anna Holmes’ essay on the female Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement. One, a factory worker and mother of two traveling after a miscarriage, refused to give up her seat to a white couple and kicked a deputy in the groin when he tried to make her.

I spend so little time around here these days, I forgot to mention my inclusion in Paper Magazine’s Lit It Crowd. I love the photo; all my companions — Thessaly LaForce, Sadie Stein, Emma Straub, and Hamish Robertson — look dead sexy (which they are), while I’m off to the side, hands folded, gazing skyward and seemingly clucking like a delighted schoolmarm/auntie.

It’s a group, Lorin Stein said, “lousy with Parisians”: Thessaly and Sadie are editors and writers at The Paris Review Daily, and Emma and I are contributors. News of Thessaly’s upcoming departure for the Iowa Writers Workshop and that The New Yorker’s Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn will be taking over prompted The New York Observer’s Kat Stoeffel to note the Paper feature, in “Les Filles du Blog,” and to observe that “Although many intellectual and literary magazines have come under scrutiny lately for a lack of female bylines,&rd

Obviously I’m thrilled to be included in the Times’ (UK) list of “Forty bloggers who really count.” As is my nature, I also feel anxious and unworthy, but at a certain point (which came for me a long time ago) it is tacky and seems disingenuous to say so. Feel free to call me on that.

This month marks eight years since I started blogging. When I began, not long before this photo was taken, I figured the whole endeavor would quickly and unceremoniously go the way of my first website, which I set up in 1995, decorated with little New Yorker drawings, and abandoned to disappear along with everything else on the Alachua Freenet.

If you’d told me in 2002 that I would keep at this for so long or that so many people would know about this site or care what I had to say, I probably would’ve reacted the way I did to two boys in elementary school who said I was pretty: decided you were mocking me and head-butted you to the ground, shouting, “Why do you have to be such a jerk?”
 

I’m grateful to all of you who’ve visited this site through its many permutations. Even now, every six months or so, I find myself re-evaluating and changing what I do here.

This year I’ve posted more sporadically, read fewer new books, and written far less book criticism, so as to finish the novel that, as the Times notes, has yet to materialize. (The list compilers were very kind about the delay, actually. I wonder sometimes: John Steinbeck aside, has anyone in the history of letters ever whinged so publicly and at such length about writing a book that does not even exist?)
 

I find myself focusing — here, at Twitter, and elsewhere — ever more unapologetically on the strange assortment of writers and cultural phenomena that interest me. In the last six months, I’ve obsessed over Muriel Spark and day jobs, begun writing an intermittent column on Christian fundamentalism, tried to explain my reasons for writing a novel rather than a memoir, outed myself — at NPR, no less — as a hypochondriac with a disorder of the humors, and discovered that the archives of my great-great aunt (and self-given namesake) are held by the State of Mississippi.

Which is to say: If my perspective and voice are the strengths of this site, they are also its limitations.
 

The truth is that, nowadays, there are so many excellent sites keeping up with book news, interviewing authors, reviewing novels, and commenting on publishing, my own appetite for participating in generalized literary talk has dwindled. I read other sites as widely as ever, though, and I’ve been interested to observe the evolution of book blogs.

Whether you’re just stopping by or are a regular reader, I’d like to direct you to some other bookish venues that you might enjoy (and want to send copies of your books to, sinc

A couple months ago I saw a girl press onto the subway, give the boy next to her a once-over, and casually tilt her iPhone — accidentally on purpose — so he could see what she was listening to. After a couple tries, it worked. By the time we reached Jay Street, they were talking about music.

As I told Motoko Rich when we spoke last week about book covers in an electronic world, I figure the same kind of thing will be possible with ebooks eventually. The gadgets will develop so that readers can signal their preferences to strangers, or people will find workarounds. True, at this age, I don’t particularly care whether strangers around me know what I’m reading* — this site more than satisfies whatever urge I have to broadcast my literary preferences — but to my college-age self, lurking near boys in coffee shops, it would have been important.

In today’s New York Times, you can read Rich’s consideration of what ebooks mean for cover art and for the social aspects of reading.
 

* Although I admit I’m just as happy not to have fellow subway passengers know when I’m reading Sarah Palin or extreme Christian fundamentalists on my iPhone.

An unexpected development: National Review Online approves of Love is a Four-Letter Word, the anthology in which my Narrative essay appeared. Interestingly, the reviewer seems to view the book as a sort of unwitting corrective to Sex and the City — a show I endured about a half-episode of during its entire run.

Michael Taeckens, editor of the anthology, wrote to tell fellow contributor D.E. Rasso and me the good news. Our conversation is below.
 

MT: This totally made my day! I only wish the book had been printed in hardback so that the paperback edition could include a blurb…

DER: “Yet the distaste that Love is a Four-Letter Word evokes is actually to its credit…” That should be on a fucking gold label on the front of the book. That’s better than Oprah’s Book Club.

MT: I’m envisioning a new promo campaign built entirely around this blurb. Bumper stickers, posters, visors, T shirts… I should also see if Penguin will fork out for a full-page TBR ad — large black text on a white background, small image of book in lower right corner.

DER: Also, I feel like this woman really, really gets me: “Perhaps part of the reason these women fail to find commitment-free sex liberating is that they continue to harbor desires for monogamous love, marriage, and children.”

MN: Yeah, she’s just seen right through to your innermost soul. I love that I’m “self-identified feminist Maud Newton.” And also that she gets the point of my essay — “[i]t’s hardly surprising, then, that this pair formed a dysfunctional match” — without understanding that it was intended to be the point of the essay.

DER: I feel like there’s no conservative scorn worse than “self-identified feminist,” unless “Pagan” or “childless” were somehow thrown in there.

MN: Don’t forget “homosexual” and “transsexual”! (Perspectives “pointedly included.”) Is “unwed mother” out of vogue now?

DER: Michael, how about you, Maud, and I pool our mad money and put that ad in the NRO ourselves. Because I want to keep magazines alive.

MT: Dana, I love your idea of running an ad in the National Review. Maybe we could use a picture of Sarah Palin?

MN: Can we use this shot (pictured above), substituting Love is a Four-Letter Word for Palin’s PDA? Or for the copy of Mein Kampf she’s crushing beneath her platforms? Not to be confused with the Bible in her pocket.

DER: I just realized that the reviewer a) has written only two articles for NRO, both of them about “dating” books and b) is an “assistant to the editor.” So does that mean she’s a secretary who gets tasked with reading the garbage no one else wants to review, in between fetching coffee and drycleaning and working on finding a husband? (Why isn’t she a stay-at-home mom at this point, I might add?) It almost makes me feel sorry for her.

MN: Also, isn’t the treating-people-as-objects analysis kind of the province of feminazis? Methinks the Mrs. credentials need to be burnished with a bit more care.

MT: I think “assistan

In honor of the appearance of Love is a Four-Letter Word,* The Week invited me to contribute this week’s “best books” list.

It’s devoted to “doomed love,” and a reader says it’s available now.

Instead of focusing on autobiographical stories, I chose first-person works of fiction** that (mostly) take the form of confessions: Lolita, Les Liaisons dangereuses, The Black Prince, The Book of Night Women, The End of the Affair, and My Name Is Rose, “in which the narrator strives in a frank, unsentimental journal to reconcile her two selves: the dutiful wife and the yearning, philandering creative soul.”
 

My Name is Rose was written by the remarkable Theodora Keogh, who, despite being wildly talented, and the granddaughter and namesake of Theodore Roosevelt, died in obscurity last year — nearly a half-century after (apparently) laying down her pen.

It was difficult to choose between My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart (which Brooks Peters aptly describes as a “marvelously atmospheric novel about a young boy and girl living in the Hamptons. Abandoned by their high-flying, distracted parents, they create their own universe amid the sand dunes and privet hedges of the East End”); The Double Door was also a possibility. But the biting, relentlessly frank Rose is my favorite of Keogh’s novels. I’ll have to explain why some other time.
 

The image above is a caricature of the author, by her then-husband Tom Keogh, that appeared with seven more of his drawings in the very first issue of The Paris Review, in 1953. You can see another one bleeding through slightly from the next page.

Many thanks to Paris Review Managing Editor Caitlin Roper, who verified the sketch’s existence and scanned it for me.
 

* There’s more good press for the anthology in Bookpage and Elle.”

**

Later this month and a couple times in the weeks following I’ll be reading from “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” my contribution to Love is a Four-Letter Word.

Today at Paper Cuts, Gregory Cowles calls the anthology “pretty irresistible.” A “lot of it has to do with the tone,” he says. “[T]he usual regret, shame and pain are leavened here with a generous tablespoon of wry humor.”

The launch party is July 29 at Housing Works, and I’m appearing alongside Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Amanda Stern, and Wendy McClure. The very funny Dan Kennedy hosts.

Anthology editor and contributor Michael Taeckens has staggered more events through the end of the summer. Writers reading at those include my pal D.E. Rasso (see Susan Toepfer’s praise) and Michelle Greene, Josh Kilmer-Purcell, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Jami Attenberg, Taeckens himself, and more.

A favorable Publisher’s Weekly review of Michael Taeckens’ forthcoming Love is a Four-Letter Word mentions contributions by Amanda Stern, George Singleton, Josh Kilmer-Purcell, Patty Van Norman, Lynda Barry, Emily Flake, and me.

Other contributors include Junot Díaz, Kate Christensen, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Gary Shteyngart, D.E. Rasso, Wendy McClure, Dan Kennedy, Brock Clarke, Pasha Malla, Michael Taeckens, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Margaret Sartor, Michelle Green, Jami Attenberg, George Singleton, Dave White, and Wendy Brenner.
 

While I’m mentioning positive notices: New Yorker Book Bench contributor Andrea Walker made me equal parts giddy and anxious a couple weeks ago when she called my novel excerpt — “When the Flock Changed” — funny and moving.

(Anxious because there’s still plenty of tinkering to be done on the rest of the book.)