PR: Lauren Cook

Lauren Cook (@cow_eye_lashes) is a naturalist and the author of I Love Shopping and Sex Goblin.

Lauren Cook (@cow_eye_lashes) is a naturalist and the author of I Love Shopping (Glo Worm Press, 2019; Nightboat Books, 2025) and Sex Goblin (Nightboat Books, 2024). He is from upstate New York.

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1. The last thing you finished reading

   P.E.A.C.E. by Chariot Wish

2. The last thing you abandoned reading

   Blue Money by Carolyn See

3. Next on your list

   The Hephaestus Plague by Thomas Page

4. Something on your list but you never begin

   Dostoevsky

   

5. Something in which you have no interest

   Pop non-fiction

6. Something you reread

   The First Bad Man by Miranda July

7. Something you never forget

   Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England by Tom Wessels

8. Conditions in which you read best

   Food courts, in the morning at home, or in bed midday

   Vacation

9. Conditions in which you read most often

   When waiting for something, when I’m supposed to be doing a different task, when it is slow at work

10. Conditions in which you cannot read

    When music is playing with words or people are talking and I can make out what they’re saying

    Moving vehicles

    

11. A favourite bookstore or place you acquire books

    Bolerium Books in San Francisco although I haven’t been in years

    Goodwill bins

12. A favourite genre, form, theme

    Erotica

13. A favourite title

    Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny by Holly Madison

14. A favourite book cover

    Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch by Diane Wakoski and The Women Who Hate Me by Dorothy Allison

    

15. A favourite recent read

    The Mad Man by Samuel R. Delany

16. A favourite nostalgia read

    Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

17. A favourite greatest of all time, personal canon read

    Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany

    

18. Do your books tend toward any condition

    Purse battered

19. Do you have any books that are prized possessions

    1970 edition of the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, the Frank O’Hara poetry book I press all my four-leaf clovers in

20. A text that surprised you

    Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest by Will Fellows

21. A text that altered you somehow

    Wank: The Tapes: A Novel by Lars Eighner

22. Open up a text and copy a line at random

    “The broken compass is the fruit of my inaction.”

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