Live Nude Girl

Collects essays about the years the author spent as a professional nude model.

A “eye-opening, gritty, and compelling” memoir by one of New York City’s last Times Square peep show girls (The Paris Review Online). In 2006, Gotham City Video was among the last of its kind where, breathing in a cocktail of Pine-Sol and Windex, a man paid $40 to watch a girl strip naked behind glass. These fantasy lands, left over from the days when 42nd Street was the center of vice, eventually disappeared from the rapidly gentrifying city, their stories lost forever. Not those of tenderloin grinder, Sheila McCelar. Pulling back the curtain on the little-documented world of the peeps, her “ribald . . . memorable and highly relevant” (The Daily Beast) reflection is “both a eulogy and a paean to the freaks and misfits who have long given their souls to the city” (Matthew Gallaway, author of The Metropolis Case). A late bloomer from small-town Michigan, Sheila arrived in New York as a struggling actress and soon found herself adrift. Borderline homeless, and crashing with friends, she finally got steady work that paid the rent—as a stripper along the triple-x stretch of Eighth Avenue. When Times Square seeped into her blood, she ended up staying much longer than she imagined. The story she tells is not just of her own coming-of-age, it’s a “sharp, sweetly personal . . . fascinating and honest” narrative of modern life on the fringes of society in New York City (Mark Jacobson, author of Pale Horse Rider).

Live Nude Elf chronicles Reverend Jen's two-year stint as sex columnist for nerve.com; she details her “sexperiments,” ranging from harrowing (working as a live nude girl at “Wiggles”) to embarrassing (fellatio school) to transcendent (reaching a mystical state through tantric sex). Along the way there is transvestitism, female ejaculation, opium smoking, and heartbreak. In the Rev's “art star” world, where a young bisexual boy named Orion has sex with a jar of mayonnaise, the more mundane acts of romance—kissing, buying dinner for a lover, and just making eye contact in the sack—become rare and subversive. The experiments, orgies, balloon fetish parties, a stint as the “lube girl” on a porn set, the “lab partners,” and the late nights begin to wear on the Reverend, who craves normalcy, and the columns change their tone: Jen takes care of a friend’s baby, navigates yuppie bars trying to snag a millionaire hubby, and dates a silver fox, “someone older, distinguished, wealthy, and simply grooving with the eternal now.” After a decade of New York City affairs, Jen unexpectedly falls in love and must decide: Does the life required of an artist and a sex columnist preclude her from monogamous romantic love?

A “eye-opening, gritty, and compelling” memoir by one of New York City’s last Times Square peep show girls (The Paris Review Online). In 2006, Gotham City Video was among the last of its kind where, breathing in a cocktail of Pine-Sol and Windex, a man paid $40 to watch a girl strip naked behind glass. These fantasy lands, left over from the days when 42nd Street was the center of vice, eventually disappeared from the rapidly gentrifying city, their stories lost forever. Not those of tenderloin grinder, Sheila McCelar. Pulling back the curtain on the little-documented world of the peeps, her “ribald . . . memorable and highly relevant” (The Daily Beast) reflection is “both a eulogy and a paean to the freaks and misfits who have long given their souls to the city” (Matthew Gallaway, author of The Metropolis Case). A late bloomer from small-town Michigan, Sheila arrived in New York as a struggling actress and soon found herself adrift. Borderline homeless, and crashing with friends, she finally got steady work that paid the rent—as a stripper along the triple-x stretch of Eighth Avenue. When Times Square seeped into her blood, she ended up staying much longer than she imagined. The story she tells is not just of her own coming-of-age, it’s a “sharp, sweetly personal . . . fascinating and honest” narrative of modern life on the fringes of society in New York City (Mark Jacobson, author of Pale Horse Rider).

This daring field guide profiles the 100 best strip clubs, topless bars, and exotic entertainment centers across North America. Side bars detail information on etiquette (such as tipping practices), types of dances, dancers, and strip club lingo. 100 photos.

A New York Times Bestseller Award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales crisscrossed the country talking to more than two hundred girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen about their experiences online and off. They are coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media: Instagram, Whisper, Vine, Youtube, Kik, Ask.fm, Tinder. Provocative, explosive, and urgent, American Girls will ignite much-needed conversation about how we can help our daughters and sons negotiate the new social and sexual norms that govern their lives.

Adored by its fans, deplored by its critics, Oprah's Book Club has been at the center of arguments about cultural authority and literary taste since it began in 1996. Reading with Oprah explores the club's revolutionary fusion of books, television, and commerce and tells the engaging and in-depth story of the OBC phenomenon. Kathleen Rooney combines extensive research with a dynamic voice to reveal the club's far-reaching cultural impact and its role as crucible for the clash between "high" and "low" literary taste. Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book covers the club from its inception in 1996, through the Jonathan Franzen contretemps, the surprising suspension in 2002, and, after the club's return in 2003, the progression from "great books" to memoir. New material includes an extensive look at the James Frey scandal and Oprah's turn to contemporary fiction, including The Road and Middlesex. Through close examination of Winfrey's picks and personal interviews with book club authors and readers, Rooney demonstrates how the club that Barbara Kingsolver calls "one of the best possible uses of a television set" has, according to Wally Lamb, "gotten people of all ages to read, to read more, and to read widely."

Live Nude Elf chronicles Reverend Jen's two-year stint as sex columnist for nerve.com; she details her “sexperiments,” ranging from harrowing (working as a live nude girl at “Wiggles”) to embarrassing (fellatio school) to transcendent (reaching a mystical state through tantric sex). Along the way there is transvestitism, female ejaculation, opium smoking, and heartbreak. In the Rev's “art star” world, where a young bisexual boy named Orion has sex with a jar of mayonnaise, the more mundane acts of romance—kissing, buying dinner for a lover, and just making eye contact in the sack—become rare and subversive. The experiments, orgies, balloon fetish parties, a stint as the “lube girl” on a porn set, the “lab partners,” and the late nights begin to wear on the Reverend, who craves normalcy, and the columns change their tone: Jen takes care of a friend’s baby, navigates yuppie bars trying to snag a millionaire hubby, and dates a silver fox, “someone older, distinguished, wealthy, and simply grooving with the eternal now.” After a decade of New York City affairs, Jen unexpectedly falls in love and must decide: Does the life required of an artist and a sex columnist preclude her from monogamous romantic love?