Book gift guide

Sex, satire, fashion, food & literature: Nice and naughty books for everyone onyour list

The Story of O by Pauline Réage
Marie Lu's Legend series
Hugo Ortega’s Street Food of Mexico
Photo by Penny de los Santos
Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington
Building Stories by Chris Ware
America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't by Stephen Colbert

With less than a week left for holiday shopping, we at CultureMap would like to offer a happy medium between street brawls in Target and Neiman Marcus and just giving up and throwing gift cards at loved ones. How about a nice book?

The well-selected, gifted book literally and sometimes literarily tells a story to the receiver and has the ability to send many messages. I love you. I know you so well. I understand what you like. Please stop trying to force me to read 50 Shades of Grey.

So with a little help from our favorite independent bookstores, here is the CultureMap definitive, but completely random, book gift guide.

Contemporary literary reader

For the contemporary literary reader with shelves of signed copies and tales of meeting authors, pick up Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue. Chabon will be in Houston Jan. 28 for the first Inprint reading of the new year, so the book, a pen, and event ticket might be the perfect choice for this reader.

Movie lover

For the movie lover who’s just not into books, let him know Hollywood is with a gift basket filled with The Life of Pi, Cloud Atlas, Les Misérables (the book turned musical, turned movie), Anna Karenina, Jack Reacher, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and The Hobbit. Do readers' imaginations project at a 48-frames-a-second or 24?

Teen reader

If instead you’re shopping for a teen reader who wants to get into the next big series before the rest of the world flocks to the obligatory movie, Blue Willow Bookshop’s Valerie Koehler suggests the Legend series by Marie Lu, who used to call Sugar Land home.

“Post apocalyptic novels are still very hot this year. In this one, the main character is a teen who is slated to become an assassin and things turn treacherous when she is sent to kill a boy who may or may not have killed her brother. Lots of action which appeals to all teens,” says Koehler.

Food lover

Need a gift for a foodie who always buys locally? Try a cookbook by a favorite local chef. Hugo Ortega’s Street Food of Mexico is not only filled with his favorite recipes, but he includes personal stories to savor with each dish.

Fashionista

If that fashionista in your life loves the behind-the-scenes drama of the industry as much as the clothes, find some sophisticated gift wrap for Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington, the woman who managed to steal the spotlight from Anna Wintour in not one but two documentaries about Vogue.

Hipster satire-lover

Give the gift of historical irony to your favorite hipster satire-lover by pairing Stephen Colbert’s latest, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't, with some ancient school Gulliver’s Travels because if Jonathan Swift were alive today, he’d no doubt have his own Super PAC.

Bibliophile

For the bibliophile who refuses to buy an e-reader and is looking for validation, Brazos Bookstore manager Jeremy Ellis recommends Chris Ware’s Building Stories: “An oversized box of 27 different booklets, each with a different format and point-of-view. This is a book to wade through rather than read start to finish. An eEdition would not be the same.”

Lovable luddite

And if that lovable luddite reader is raising little ones, Valerie Koehler recommends In My Den by Sara Gillingham because you can’t download the felt finger puppet that comes with the board book and then poke it through a Kindle.

Future forecaster

For the gambler, baseball stats lover, and fortune-teller in your life, let them know that the future can sometimes be forecast with The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don't, the new book by this nation’s recently chosen math-nerd-in-chief, Nate Silver.

An alternative to 50 Shades of Grey

And finally for that sweet, budding-sadist friend who won’t stop insisting you have to read 50 Shades of Grey, Brazos Bookstore recommends The Story of O by Pauline Reage.

Written in 1954, “The novel, originally published in French, is described as a story of love and submission. It won the French literary prize that year and has been in print ever since,” says Ellis, who also suggests Exit to Eden, Anne Rice’s S&M romance written under her pseudonym Anne Rampling.

If those suggestions don’t send the message, throw a hardback copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer your best friend's head. Carrie Fisher would approve.

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Movie Review

Camp Miasma puts a comedic twist on the classic slasher movie

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing the slasher subgenre that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death — a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask — may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference — Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard — to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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