Shakespeare's Shorts: Lee Matalone, novelist

HEY! We made a thing: it’s the Virtual Book Tour Quarantine edition of F***ing Shakespeare, we’re calling SHAKESPEARE’S SHORTS!

We wanted to get out there and see what’s happening in the land of books — talk with authors who have books out now, right this second, when it’s very hard to be out in the world with a new book because you can’t actually be out in the world. One of those people who is all dressed up with a fancy new book, and nowhere to go, is the incredible Lee Matalone. Her new book, Home Making, is a sucker punch of gorgeousness. I was able to dip in a read a bit of it, and loved LOVED the opening (in fact, I have a deep connection to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where some of this novel takes place, as my grandparents lived at the foot of the Appalachian Trail in the Blue Ridge of North GA — so in a way, this felt a little bit like home for me, too).

Author of Home Making, Lee Matalone, makes her F***ing Shakespeare debut to read from and talk about her debut novel.

Order her new “novelette” here.

Also read her fantastically unsettling “short little weird stories” (her own words!) here.

Honorable mentions from Lee:

• Solmaz Sharif’s Look

• Alison Roman’s cookbook, Nothing Fancy

• Benjamin Moser’s pulitzer prize winning Sontag biography

• St. Augustine’s Confessions

• Garbage reality TV, LOVE ISLAND (Can I say how ridiculously gleeful it makes me to see Love Island directly following Confessions? Just me? )