Villa Coco
Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer, it’s a perfect summer read that’s both a Tuscan coming of age romp and a poetic look at how the choices of youth define adulthood. I laughed, I cried, I spent time on google Earth exploring off-the-beaten-track Italian villages. Buona!
Little Fish (beach sandwich)
One of the only restaurants worth the parking/heat slog of Melrose Hill. The menu is an absolutely divine trek through the culinary imagination of power couple Ana Sonenshein and Niki Vahle. The “beach sandwich” is the apex dish with its very own narrative - stuck on the beach with a smattering of bites, you pull this sandwich together and enter nirvana.
The Hounding
If The Virgin Suicides and The Crucible birthed a pitch perfect gothic novel. The plotting is sharp, the characters rich, and the flashes of female-directed rage are spine-tinglingly apt. I’ve handed this book out to friends like a party favor, it’s just that delicious. Stomp the floor, ring the bell! This should be your next read.
Furious (Hulu)
This show is explosively good! At first I wasn’t keen to watch based off the trite and depressing logline (women can be serial killers, too) but the series is decidedly more nuanced. A complex study of how violence infects and breeds, the female performances are unexpected and delightfully bold. Lola Petticrew (Say Nothing) is a pixie power house as the winged avenger murdering the men who wronged her. Emmy Rossum and Quincy Tyler Bernstein bring a dogged humor and grit to the FBI agents on her tail. Creator Liz Meriwether (The Dropout, Dying for Sex) continues to prove that women do, in fact, contain all the multitudes. When Rihanna’s 2011 banger “We Found Love” becomes Petticrew’s avenging anthem, you know you’re in the right hands. Picked up for season 2!
