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    Claire Fallon

    Claire Fallon

    Books and Culture Writer, HuffPost

  • Netflix's Sterile Reality Hits Were Made For A World In Quarantine

    With slick, clinical looks and distanced concepts, "Too Hot to Handle," "Love Is Blind" and "The Circle" ushered us into an era of peak anxiety about touch and intimacy.

  • ‘Normal People’ Is The Prestige Show Teen Romance Fans Deserve

    Hulu's adaptation of Sally Rooney's bestselling novel elevates familiar tropes and uses them to break (and then unbreak) your heart.

  • Please Stop Writing 'Why I Left New York' Pandemic Essays

    Feeling guilty about fleeing the city for greener pastures is not a sufficient reason to write a personal essay.

  • Was This Decade The Beginning Of The End Of The Great White Male Writer?

    In the 2010s, the publishing industry finally wrestled with its problems with diversity.

  • We’re All Scabs Now

    Amid the rise of a new labor movement, the classic insult is going mainstream.

  • A New Domestic Drama For Virginia Woolf Fans

    In Julia Pierpont’s poignant debut novel, every choice made after this moment further fractures a broken family’s future into seemingly infinite possible paths. The husband, Jack, has promised his wife, Deb, he’d end a fling with a much younger girl. The arrival of the box, and its discovery by confused Kay, 11, and furious Simon, 15, blows up the couple’s tenuous truce and sets the family spinning.

  • 15 Beach Reads To Bask In This Summer

    The perfect beach read is in the eye of the beholder. For some, getting lost in a faraway fantasy world or suspenseful thriller appeals, and reduces the risk of dozing off, book firmly planted on face. Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith For many of us, being at a beach in the summer can feel weirdly like hanging out with a bunch of strangers in our underwear.

  • Movie Posters Reimagined As Paintings Are Even Better Than The Originals

    When creating book and album covers, designers have free reign to work in photography, collage, or illustration. When it comes to movie posters, however, there’s a fairly standard template: glossy photos, usually featuring the lead or leads. Faye Moorhouse, a British illustrator, didn’t appreciate this homogeneity.

  • Take It Off! The Fine Art Of Getting Naked In A Clothed World

    Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist’s Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World details Mark Haskell Smith’s journalistic experimentation in the world of social naturism, with a healthy dose of historical background on the movement mixed in. In The Nakeds, a novel by Lisa Glatt, the titular nakeds are Nina Teller, a divorcée with a daughter who’s in perpetual recovery after a devastating car injury, and Azeem, Nina’s second husband. Azeem, an Arab grad student, studies sexuality, and in 1970s California, he’s primed to take advantage of the sexual revolution, first by introducing Nina to a nudist club, The Elysium.

  • 16 Fascinating Things We Learned About Christian Grey From 'Grey'

    Like Jean Rhys, author of the classic Jane Eyre spinoff Wide Sargasso Sea, E.L. James has tasked herself with the job of writing an entire novel explaining the vantage point of a misunderstood character: Christian Grey, the wealthy, dominant protagonist of her own Fifty Shades franchise. Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian has been on shelves for less than a week, and it’s already sold over a million copies. Aside from that, Christian’s inner monologue mostly consists of clichéd pep talk (“Showtime, Grey”).

  • Kaitlyn Has Sex Like A Single Girl, And Everyone Freaks Out

    Despite its bizarre dating rituals, low success rate, and questionable racial and gender politics, the stable of shows is, if anything, more popular than ever. Do people love "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette," or do they love to hate it? In this week's Here To Make Friends podcast, hosts Claire Fallon, Culture Writer, and Emma Gray, Senior Women’s Editor, recap the seventh episode of "The Bachelorette," Season 11.

  • 7 Book Franchises We Really Need To Say Goodbye To

    Annoyed Stieg Larsson died before finishing his Millennium series? Fans of Sherlock Holmes know this practice is hardly new. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off his popular fictional detective just to free himself from the public’s insatiable demand for more Holmes, but the demand proved stronger.

  • Buying And Selling Art Isn't All About Money To Curators For A Cause

    Curators for a Cause, a new organization co-founded by Monica Watkins, Jaci Berkopec and Erica Simone, is doing its part to counteract the wealth obsession of the art world. “We created CFAC for the purpose of utilizing art through various media and business efforts in order to create positive social change, while developing funds for our philanthropic platforms and partner charity organizations,” Simone told The Huffington Post via email. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • This New Book Captures The Struggles And Joys Of The Immigrant Experience

    “When his trouble really started, I missed it,” remembers the narrator of “A Contract Overseas,” one of the nine deceptively quiet stories in Mia Alvar’s debut collection, In the Country. A college student who dreams of being a published novelist, the character is supported by her brother, Andoy, a hopeless romantic who’s left his pregnant girlfriend, mother and sister in the Philippines while he rakes in the dramatically higher salary a chauffeur can command in Saudi Arabia. Always an observant scribbler, Alvar begins to write fiction -- that is, fictionalized accounts of her brother’s experience overseas, with his generous Saudi boss and fellow Filipino workers.

  • Why 'Bachelorette' Villain Nick V. Should Get More Respect

    Nick Viall, if you’re proper -- a last name that surely destined him for villainhood from the start. My TV romance with Nick started the moment I stumbled across his photo as I skimmed through the contestant bios prior to Andi Dorfman’s season of "The Bachelorette." “It’s you!” I squeaked, pointing at Nick as my wavy-haired, boyishly scruffy boyfriend, Greg, wrinkled his nose. Nick was my boyfriend’s TV doppelgänger, and already the frontrunner for my final rose vote.

  • Yet Another 'Bachelorette' Contestant Slut-Shamed Kaitlyn

    Despite its bizarre dating rituals, low success rate, and questionable racial and gender politics, the stable of shows is, if anything, more popular than ever. Do people love "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette," or do they love to hate it? In this week's Here To Make Friends podcast, hosts Claire Fallon, Culture Writer, and Emma Gray, Senior Women’s Editor, recap the third episode of "The Bachelorette," Season 11.

  • Jules Feiffer Never Loved His Illustrations For 'The Phantom Tollbooth'

    Few books have become so universally beloved as Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer's children's novel The Phantom Tollbooth. In an age of collectible cover redesigns and repackagings, the original bright cerulean cover with Feiffer's scratchy drawing of Milo and Tock reigns largely uncontested, familiar to generations of young readers. A new retrospective on his artwork, Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer, by Martha Fay, sheds light on his ambivalence toward perhaps his most famous illustrations.

  • 3 Questionable Pieces Of Dating Advice From Aziz Ansari's 'Modern Romance'

    Aziz Ansari, known to many as the dapper Tom Haverford on "Parks and Recreation," and known to still more as a brilliant, subversive comedian, wants you to find love. Aziz explains in the introduction that he’s never had interest in writing a humor book because he “thought stand-up was the best medium for [him].” Instead, he developed an obsession with the modern dating landscape and decided to write a book about that, collaborating with a sociologist Eric Klinenberg to conduct an enormous amount of research on dating and relationships. Modern Romance compiles numerous anecdotes from his stand-up, their focus groups, and a subreddit they set up, as well as studies and conversations with prominent psychologists and relationship experts.

  • 'Future Library' Reminds Us How Connected Books And The Environment Really Are

    When we imagine libraries 100 years from now, many of us might picture sterile environments more like computer labs than book depositories -- or even cloud-based apps from which we’ll be able to access digital books without moving from our seats. For artist Katie Paterson, books remain inextricably bound with the earth and the paper they’re printed on. This relationship inspired her project "Future Library," in which she's commissioning authors to help write 100 works to be kept in the trust for 100 years.

  • Wild Animals And The Forest Meet In Digitally Merged Photographs

    Norwegian artist Andreas Lie’s merged photographs look deceptively simple: the outlines of wolves and bears encompassing misty photographs of woody landscapes. The two photographs -- a wild animal and a wild landscape -- have been matched and blended with such subtlety that it’s difficult to tell where the fur ends and the leaves begin. “I am a digital artist,” he clarified in an email to The Huffington Post, explaining that he uses stock photographs that fit his concept, then overlays them in Photoshop.