Books

Sarah Silverman's memoir does all the things that shouldn't work: she's sparse on emotion, prolific with excruciating details, and even explains some of her jokes. Yet somehow, like her comedy, it's so wrong it's just right.

The title of this sardonic essay collection refers to the phrase coined by Tina Fey during a Saturday Night Live monologue defending Hillary Clinton. That Helena Andrews is black adds a spin to the catchphrase; it resonates with her sense of what it's like to be boxed into a stereotypical category.

Mary Murphy grows up in a small town in the midst of an economic downturn as the daughter of a reluctant young mother who was impregnated by her alcoholic boyfriend on prom night.

Born in Tehran on the cusp of the Iranian Revolution, Roxana Shirazi is raised in a traditional household, which starts to fall apart when her father abandons the family. At a young age, she begins to feel sexual urges that do not jibe with her mother’s reminders of a woman’s place within Muslim traditions.

I thought I could’ve saved Karen Carpenter’s life had we been friends. But after slogging through this biography, I can’t imagine being friends with the woman Randy Schmidt depicts.

“The juicer was a machine that gave an electric shock and with it came the clanging of the 13 brass bells attached to it.” So begins the reader’s journey into the dark, macabre, neo-Victorian world of Dame Darcy’s Meatcake comics.

In this action-packed mystery novel capturing the terror of Nazi rule in 1930s Germany, journalist Hannah Vogel finds herself in dire straits, to say the least.

Piper Kerman, a Smith-educated, self-described boho, WASPy ex-lesbian, got mixed up with the wrong crowd after college. Enthralled by the flashy lifestyle of her then-girlfriend, Kerman took transatlantic flights to deliver large sums of cash for an African drug lord. Her criminal career didn't last long, and she quickly turned her life around.

The stated purpose of this cookbook is to show people how to cook good meals on a budget, but the title is misleading. Food blogger turned author Amy McCoy, head of the Rhode Island Slow Food Network, advises her readers to buy humanely raised meat and then exhorts them to "always be on the lookout for 99 cents/lb. chicken"-impossible; free-range chicken is never that cheap.

If, as Andy Warhol said, "buying is much more American than thinking," then fashion journalist Avis Cardella is one of the most American women you'll ever meet.