At Words Without Borders, I review Always Coca-Cola by debut author Alexandra Chreiteh, a surprising, disturbing and mordantly funny novel about what it’s like to be an obedient young woman in contemporary Beirut.

Permit me to set the scene: Britain, spring of 2011. Her Majesty’s subjects were enjoying the warmest April for 350 years while psyching themselves up for the looming nuptials of Kate and Wills, little aware that in an office in Wapping, the Sun’s Gary O’Shea—single-handedly playing Woodward and Bernstein’s roles in the historic proceedings—was preparing to eclipse Royal Wedding fever with the bombshell that “lovestruck” Imogen had been “romping” in a “string of luxury hotels” with a “married Premier League star,” sometimes—and sports fans are cautioned to reach for the smelling salts for this next bit—just before key games.

My profile of one of Britain’s most famous sportsmen — containing, of course, absolutely nothing about sport, but plenty about getting eaten alive by the media.

Readers of a prudish disposition—and I know there are many of you—will be relieved to hear that in each month’s portrait, Amy’s modesty is fully maintained with bits of lace or fabric; as she often mentions, elegance and refinement are her bywords. “I didn’t do it because I wanted to get them out all the time,” she has said of her decision to acquire silicone implants, “I just thought it would be nice to show a little bit of cleavage…I love modeling underwear and bikinis but the classy side.” (Whether posing for a tabloid newspaper with nothing but crystals between oneself and a chilly draft quite qualifies as classy is a gray area into which your columnist demurs to wade, especially since the malevolent octogenarian Countesses who ran her Swiss finishing school neglected to cover The Etiquette of Vajazzle Display.)

Explaining British TV show “The Only Way Is Essex” and its breakout star Amy Childs took me into some dicey territory.

What with the sex scandals, the fondness for classical allusions, and the irrepressible wisecracking, Mayor Bloomberg’s London counterpart is what you might politely call a politico in the European tradition—so naturally it’s time for him to take his rightful place alongside Jordan et al in my Awl guide to the most important UK celebs.

Dora’s own doctorly ambitions were thwarted by her father, who was of the firm opinion that studying medicine ‘would ruin her eyes, her looks, her reproductive health and any prospect of a settled future’, so she’s only too pleased that her duties for Dr Kemble extend well beyond typing and filing. In her first week she’s posing as the ‘alley murder’ victim while the doctor tears at her blouse to see ‘whether the assailant was left- or right-handed’, attending a ‘morbid anatomy demonstration’ on a man hideously ravaged by tertiary syphilis, and sitting in the public gallery of the ‘charm bracelet murder’ trial, where Dr Kemble is giving evidence in the case of another dead blonde, this one older and, as the defence counsel damningly establishes, ‘fond of society’.

From my Fiction Uncovered review of Louise Levene’s Ghastly Business, a hilarious and wildly original novel set in London between the wars.

It's Jordan's World, We Just Live In It →

All of which sordidness brings us vis-à-vis with a question of such pressing national import, one hopes that a special parliamentary committee is as we speak convening to address it: why oh why does adorable, salt of the earth Coleen, now 25 and the mother of baby Kai, stay married to the faithless Wayne, said to possess all the charm of a root canal and by popular consent no oil painting?

     — In which I offer a very rich footballer’s wife some unsolicited advice.

Don't You Wish You Looked Just Like Cheryl Tweedy? →

My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner, a witty and charming memoir by Israeli author Meir Shalev, commemorates one indomitable woman’s fight against dirt in the promised land. (It’s also the second book I’ve reviewed in as many weeks that goes inside the mind of a horse, an opaque message from the universe if ever there was one.)

In Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s new novella, The Truth About Marie, a narrator who’s unreliable, avowedly omniscient, and endowed with a preternatural gift for language is buffeted by fate, and his own mind, between Tokyo, Paris, and Tuscany. I loved it.

In which I ponder a question for the ages: who is Kerry Katona? →

Once a model and muse to Vivienne Westwood, Sara Stockbridge now writes enchanting historical fiction. (Photo from Christina Lindsay’s interview with Stockbridge at the LOVE magazine blog.)

My Words Without Borders Review of "The Hypnotist" →

Chilling suspense + umlauts = literary pb&j

Will the French sex scandal-strewn fallout of DSK’s rape charge have any effect on America’s embarrassingly obvious crush on Paris? As I contend at The Awl, not if the publishing industry has any say in the matter.

Just when you and Anna Chapman thought that female spies couldn’t achieve greater cultural relevance, one of history’s most famous honey-trap victims is back in the headlines. Please follow me to The Awl, so I can tell you all about it.