This Book - Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello - and Podcast - "Quasi-Covered" - Will Change Your Life.

We had the great pleasure of not only reading Chicago author Gina Frangello's fantastic short story collection Slut Lullabies this week, but sitting down with Gina for the latest edition of This Podcast Will Change Your Life, which for those of you tracking these kinds of things is Episode Twenty-Four in the series. We would add that we conducted this podcast on the north side of Chicago and we are adding this because in so many ways we were both far from home, even though Gina grew-up in Chicago. We mention this because the stories in Slut Lullabies are very much about place, the places you come from, the places you are trying to get to and the places you actually end-up, all of which are constantly clashing for the characters in these stories. That said, these stories are about more than place, they are also about women, and more than any stories we've read recently, about the violence directed towards women every day and how matter of fact this violence is treated by these women. In fact, the women in these stories have come to expect violence merely because they are women and that's the way it is in the world we live in, a reality as crushing and sad as we expect to encounter in any book, anywhere, any time soon.