I mean, these are the best, right? If for some reason you haven't read these, here's the plot: A small girl and her daemon (her soul and permanent sidekick) befriend a polar bear and travel the world to save it from extinction. The movie did not do the first book an ounce of justice. It's been 5 or 6 years since I last reread these, and it's about to be a million degrees outside, so here I go! See you again in 933 pages!

😎🍦🍹 4th of JUly beach read alert!!!! As a massive Oxbridge-phile (I mean, I learned a *lot* from the cynical old communists at my undergrad, but we had neither sherry nor ghosts, and were absolutely the poorer for it, what is a life of the mind without unlimited sherry?!?), PGDIP satisfied in a big way. And as a lover of all things ridiculous, it's set in the 80s, perhaps the most ridiculous of decades. Fun and compulsively readable.

🎉🍾🚨🚨! #littens, I know you love #giveaways, and my friend Elizabeth Cline (who wrote the *amazing* Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion) is giving away two copies of I'll Eat When I'm Dead over on insta. Like, comment or tag a friend to enter yourselves! Open through June 13. @DivineDiana give it another shot!!
Find it here: https://instagram.com/p/BVAbYhnluNd/

📖 🖤: been savouring #touchthenovel a few chapters at a time this week. broadly, it centers on a trend forecaster searching for intimacy in a world where we lose more of it each time we pick up our phones; it's also a hilarious and welcome reprieve from the pacific trash vortex of the news. do yourself a flavor and pick it up!

🎉🍾🥂giveaway alert! over on instagram, illustrator Marisa Marchetto is giving away two hardback copies of IEWID! all you have to is tag a friend who might love it in the comments! if you're on insta, won't you enter?? (Also follow her because she's AMAZING!)
https://instagram.com/p/BUr0gqZjLib/

oh man, BUY THIS BOOK. It felt like a grown up version of the Adrian Mole books--isolated weirdo living in a council flat slowly makes friends--and I read it in one sitting. It's beautiful and funny and sad and deserves every ounce of praise being heaped upon it. All character development, low on plot, heavy on the feels.

I had pretty high hopes for this -- I loved Doree's writing at Jezebel! -- and so it was a bummer to see "satire" that's nothing more than description of *actual New York* and a truckload of passive voice (dear god the passive voice!!). HOWEVER, some elements, like the reporter investigating sexual harassment as she's being sexually harassed by her own boss, I thought were completely brilliant. I'd call it a solid paperback buy.

Congrats to @Julsmarshall , who won my "aaah my novel is in PEOPLE holy cow!" giveaway! (Put everyone in a random name generator!) Send your address to babsqueries at gmail and the name you'd like it made out to, & I'll get this out to you asap!

🎊🎉YOU GUYS my debut novel is in PEOPLE !!! 🍾🎉😭 I'm flipping out. My agent is flipping out; my publicist is drinking champagne; my editor is texting me from a bar where her book club just bought her shots. And SO I'm gonna celebrate by giving away one signed hardback to you sweet #littens! Tag a friend (or 20) in a comment to enter you both and I'll pick one at random. Open though Monday midnight est, does that sound cool? Tag away!! #giveaway

my debut novel came out on Tuesday -- and this is the AMAZING CAKE that charm city cakes made to celebrate it! It was delicious (and satisfying) to ritually consume my book with our nearest and dearest last night. In stores now, littens!

hey #littens! my debut novel comes out Tuesday and if you're in Baltimore, THERE WILL BE CAKE on Wednesday at the wonderful bird in hand in Charles Village. short and sweet from 7.30-8.30! All are welcome. 🎉😂🎂

"...the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again--because genies don't go back in bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women aren't going to surrender. It's a war, but I don't believe we're losing it, even if we won't win it anytime soon either; rather, some battles are won, some are engaged, and some women are doing really well while others suffer. And things continue to change..."

Grabbed this off a take shelf at Penguin last week after a meeting and ... You know what, I totally loved this, mostly because jeebus h. christo , can this woman aim the arrow of descriptive realism. I would read her descriptions of a train bathroom, of a McDonalds parking lot in Iowa, of a Forever21, literally anything. Is there more focus on, um, discharge than I would vote for? Sure. & the eyes wide shut sex is a lil dated. Nonetheless: 😳👍👍

🐣📯 in honor of Easter, the giveaway of ARCs of my debut novel has risen again on goodreads! Running for the next two weeks. #littens, would love to know what you think! 😘 enter here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/232249-i-ll-eat-when-i-m-dead

I'm HUGELY enjoying this. Best anecdotes so far involve a German engineers disbelief at an airbnb hq celebration for *a dogs birthday* and the fact that Uber is called Uber because that it's the founder's favorite word for what is cool: as in, this cup of coffee is *so uber.* & just like the everything store, I'm totally wowed by stone's reporting.

🍾🎉🥂🌟First finished copy just arrived!!! 🌟🥂🎉🍾

"...just because we are post doesn't automatically mean we are feminists. There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is radically imbued with its agenda."

Though I'm a decade late reading this, I bought it 2 mins after finishing #therulesdonotapply! Enjoying so far, tho it's probably less timely in 2017 than 2005

👋 hey #littens! 🌟🌟🌟🌟there is a #goodreads #giveaway going for galleys of my debut novel, I'LL EAT WHEN I'M DEAD, which has received rave reviews from #Kirkus, #Booklist (to be posted soon but I promise it's awesome), Red, RT, and was just named a top 10 book for May by #netgalley. Won't you enter and let me know what you think?!! Happy Sunday, all!! 🌟🌟🌟🌟

🌞🌸🌺🗑 it's beach weather here in Baltimore and I'm spring cleaning like my life depends on it (certainly my sanity does, I feel like our house grew mold over the winter!!). Behold the only part of my office that stays tidy, because it's so pretty that even at my most slovenly I can't bear to mess it up. & my beloved copy of words into type is smack in the middle of the shelf rainbow 🌈 🙃

🌟🎉Hey #littens! For all of you with NetGalley logins, I'm so delighted to share that my debut novel, I'LL EAT WHEN I'M DEAD, was chosen as one of their top 10 books for May!! 🙌🌈🥂⚡️It's a murder mystery set at a fashion magazine, and if I may say so, it's grade-A escapism. Get over to netgalley and request it if you're interested!!! (Pictured is the U.K. Arc cover) #feministpulpfiction 🌟⚡️

Writing was the solution to every problem -- emotional, financial, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: "You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man." And it made me feel good, like there was a reason for me.

Tonight is the first press event for #eatwhenimdead at a speakeasy in Chinatown! Pictured are all the goody bags they're putting together over at GCP. Getting my makeup done in an hour and will be asking for "sophisticated villain", b/c go big or go home, right?! Wish me luck, you guys! I will certainly be dropping how much I love love love litsy into basically every conversation. (& I'll be putting snippets on insta if u want to peep the party!)

Holed up at the Standard in advance of tonight's biennial opener at the Whitney, which feels like the exact right place to read this memoir by the fmr EIC of French Vogue: both hotel and book are full of crazy European people wearing fur. 50 pages in, the name dropping is heavy and the clothes are consistently insane, as Joan begins her career in what I can only imagine as an all-suede gypsy Noh play turban-topped business pajama. More details TK!

Celebrating #internationalwomensday by blowing off everything and sitting in a coffee shop alllllll dayyy reading the delightful sequel to Starstruck -- it's an old-Hollywood YA series about teenage starlets and is basically baby Judy garland fanfiction, so you know I love it. Here's to a day with books and a day without women!

hey #littens! the US jacket of my novel was finished this week and sent off to the printer with only a few small changes, and the back has an awesome variety of blurbs from anthropologists, mystery writers, feminists, and generally badass women whose work intersects in one way or another with my own. What do you think?!?

Another entry in my favorite subgenre: books about depressed women with too much money ( #BADWWTMM ), Choco $$ delivers the tale of partying heiress Babs Ballantyne, as told by her unfortunate bystander of a daughter. It definitely hews a little close to revisionist revenge autobiography instead of, you know, fiction, and in that sense it's tragic, but still... a tragedy that I couldn't put down.

I read this in a single night and it was completely fun and distracting. Required some suspension of disbelief but that wasn't a chore. Weirdly enough, I found a sentence from my own book in it (total coincidence since mine isn't out til may!), which is the first time that's happened to me but probably not the last, and so I was delighted that women everywhere are into men who make "eye contact that is steady but not invasive."

Neely, your basic triple threat egomaniac monster, is first to climb aboard the doll train to crazytown. Naive babe Jennifer & sweet dull Anne follow. They're up, they're down, and they are all a-holes: "Tomorrow she can buy another wig," one of them sneers after throwing a wig in a toilet, while another writes "sorry I couldn't stick around for your wedding" in a suicide note. The ultimate camp train wreck, this book never stops being hilarious.

I opened this with my coffee and subsequently spent the entire morning wrapped up in the warm spell of this book. "...despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver," she writes in the introduction, both so true and so truthfully expressed. ❤️ this book.

This doesn't come out until may, but I've been savoring the galley and am completely loving it. The writing is deliberate, the characters are odd and finely drawn, and the setting involves my absolute favorite type of character: the depressed rich woman!! If contemporary California noir is your bag, add this one to the list.

The book itself is incredibly well-written, and diligently researched, but I can't recommend it because it's honestly too depressing. Sure: it is a through portrait of winner-take-all hypercapitalist ambition, if that is what moves you, but for the rest of us it's kind of horrifying to realize just how much control one entity can gain in 20 years, & how deliberate my dependence on Amazon is. 😱x1000. Did anybody have a different takeaway?

A widowed lady with her own successful business who dreams of owning a patisserie + an independently wealthy oxford don who got buff while wrongly imprisoned * the social conventions of 19th century England = a ridiculously fun and sexy romance. Happy pub day to @EloisaJames and congrats!! This book is such a delight.

Ranking number two on my list of top 3 Susanns, this book is constructed entirely out of chain smoking, hamburgers, intramuscular shots of speed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, eyelashes, and LSD. It has a bizarre, utterly cringeworthy train wreck of an ending, yet, even on my third read was impossible to put down. In short: it is capital e Entertainment. Next time you see it in a used bookstore, pick it up and read it drunk in the tub.

That's the spirit.

😲 loving this crazy bundle of @EloisaJames swag that just appeared on my doorstep! #happilyeverafterguaranteed, indeed. Thank you, team Eloisa!

another difficult day in the world held at bay by another salve to my wounds from this beautiful book

Ok. So: The conclusion of this book has the "dashing" central character surrendering to his deep seated mommy issues (seriously! It's literally the plot!) but, the clothes are amazing, the drugs are billed as vitamins and the real estate is consistently nuts. Ranks 3rd out of my top 3 susanns--if you need a weirdo pickmeup this week, consider it. I wish, for the record, that there was a "so bad it's good" @Litsy button!

My first #blameitonlitsy post (am I using that right?) thanks to an amazing recommendation from @theshrinkette . Poetry is a balm, always and forever, but this one is particularly special.

that new box of galleys feeling 🍾❤😂

Garner's Modern English Usage, a grammar, usage and style guide that's half encyclopedia half dictionary all lexicon, is one of my favorite tools for writing. It's a joy to turn to any page and see what path it takes you down; Garner is both sly and pedantic. Physically it is a real doorstopper but !! worth the shelf space and then some.

Equal parts riveting and moving; cahalan's writing is electric enough to cut right through the trauma of what happened to her. So highly recommended!

Disrupted is observant, trenchant, sad, timely and absolutely hilarious.