Judy Blume Mashups

Are You There, God?  It’s Me, Holden Caulfield*

A tender, seminal book about how Holden Caulfield sees the whole world beyond his purview and reads Feministing and understands that reproductive rights are one of the major issues of our time.  Just kidding — Holden does none of these things.  Everything is phony, didn’t you hear?  Even menstruation!  Periods are phony, everyone!  It’s part of the crumby gay agenda!

OH MY GOSH HOLDEN, YOU ARE NOT THAT PRECIOUS, JUST FUCKING CALL JANE ALREADY.

Here’s to You, Miss Havisham

A spinster with a penchant for the flute, teeth-grinding, and having a veils for every occasion, Miss Havisham has never had much luck in love.  After being spurned by her first beau — Jeremy “Dragon” Kravitz, the hunkiest boy in ninth grade — Miss H retreats into the comfort of her spacious home to wallow.  What will become of these tales of a seventh-grade recluse?  Will her sister Jessica’s acne ever clear up so she can get a job, and why is this not covered under legislation from the Department of Labor?  And will Miss H read up on Judith Butler while she is homeschooled and embrace her fierceness?  Or will she doomed to read Cosmo after Cosmo before she is consumed by a few wayward embers from her fireplace?

Summer Sisters, My Sister

Set on Martha’s Vineyard, Summer Sisters, My Sister is a dazzling coming-of-age story about BFFs, doilies, and lesbian hysteria a la Weir Mitchell. Sure to give sexually-confused teenagers at Jewish sleep-away camp at least one or two Sapphic tendencies, and a profound love of bedposts.  This lucid bildungsroman pairs well with that Lifetime movie starring Christina Ricci about nursery rhymes and axes.

Otherwise Known as Shogun Warrior Poet the Great

This barbarian-turned-sensitive-samurai-slay-machine was simply looking for an education when he enrolled at an all-American big 10 school.  But rival frat leaders and doe-eyed sorority nymphettes soon pull this tender, bloodthirsty butcher between two worlds: Should he honor his namesake and study for finals? Or will he join his brethren in venerated, time-honored tradition—total liver obliteration over a four-year pukespiral of hangovers, gonorrhea, and student debt? A stunning 17-part saga of lust, millennial angst, and Eastern feminist theory, all posing that most essential human question, “Can bros just read poetry together?”

Tales of a Fourth Grade Something, Bitch

Toni Morrison’s autobiographical triumph traces her childhood in the Depression-era Midwest through to her total domination of fudging everything in the galactic fudging empire. She won the Nobel Prize, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and won a fudging GRAMMY for a bananas-ly epic children’s spoken word album that’s actually called “Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?” TELL US TONI.  WHO HAS THE GAME? We beseech thee! A world without Toni is like a world with no Bey surprise album. A world without Toni is like a world where 16-year-olds only read dead white male authors in 7th period English.

Starring Jonathan Franzen as Himself

Jonathan Franzen’s autobiographical triumph (says Franzen) traces his musings on the little people from high upon his perch of literary sovereignty, throwing German coins at us if we do not sleep with him. Critics** are already raving (literally, stark-raving mad), summing up the novel as such: “FRANZEN FRANZEN FRANZEN birdwatching FRANZEN FRANZEN FRANZEN misogyny FRANZEN FRANZEN my ego is a flesh-eating bacteria and I’m melting into a pool of self-congratulatory social critique.”

Just as Long as We’re Together on the Western Front

You will die alone.  Probably from mustard gas.

*Permission to use this title granted by writer Elyssa Goodman, who came up with it over brunch in Park Slope, while one of the authors of this article was probably very, very hungover, and somewhere in Manhattan, the other was probably very, very drunk.

**Not including little known critics like the New York Times, which is currently running its third feature on Franzen since Monday.