Love Like Cosima

My friends are getting divorced for all the wrong reasons. What do I do?

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The Sandman

Is there a book that can make my sister stop acting like an automaton?

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The Pram in the Hall

Will having a child ruin my career as an artist?

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Down One Woman

If my best friend is also my lover -- why do I feel so alone?

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Bridging the Gap

Parents and the planets they live on.

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Worlds Colliding

What if you and the person you love have nothing in common?

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The Human Stain

When the ideals of activism meet the realities of unpleasant people.

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Envy's Appetite

My friend wants me to suffer like she does.

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Alone Again, Naturally

Is coming home to an empty apartment depressing? Or delightful?

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Psyche's Sister

Criticism of their unconventional living arrangment threatens one couple's happiness.

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Another Country, Another Name

When it feels like time to leave it all behind.

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Isabel's Choice

The only thing worse than watching a relationship die is watching one that won't.

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Leaving the Mountain

Traveling the world can have surprising local impacts.

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Uprooting Daphne

How to move on after a breakup? Jessa Crispin answers, with help from a Greek myth and a subversive modern writer.

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A Bouquet of Thorns

Not everyone’s in a Valentine’s mood. Some recommended reading for romantic dissenters.

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Getting a Grip

When life becomes frighteningly unrecognizable, is it better to cling to the familiar -- or let go?

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Where the Girls Are

In search of female friends.

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Despair and William James

Is there an upside to the "ache of disappointment"?

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"I Place Myself Among the Imports"

In the first installment of an ongoing feature, Jessa Crispin draws on her library to advise readers on their dilemmas.

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About the Columnist
Jessa Crispin is the editor and founder of Bookslut.com. She is the books columnist for The Smart Set and has written for assorted publications, some of which are still in business. She has lived in Kansas, Texas, Chicago, and Ireland, and her personal library currently resides in Berlin.

May 24: Joseph Brodsky was born on this day in 1940 in Leningrad. Brodsky's constitutional skepticism was not compatible with the official Soviet alternatives, and by age twenty-five he was in prison, wrapped in cold, wet sheets as…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

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Books, CDs, DVDs to know about now
She Left Me the Gun

Emma Brockes' mother Paula escaped from South Africa with a smuggled pistol and a dark secret.  A daughter unravels her family's covert past -- and a suspenseful legal drama -- in this hard-boiled memoir of survival.

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Expand your memory, puzzle-solving skills, and sense of metaphysical wonder with philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's tasting menu of user-friendly neuroscience and poetic lingual pursuits.

When the Devil Drives

Thespian-turned-P.I. Jasmine Sharp searches for a missing actress and veteran detective Catherine MacLeod tries to solve the case of a murdered one. Their paths intertwine amid the Scottish theater community with uproarious and gory results.