Emily Books Book Club

I've subscribed to Emily Books since the beginning, mostly just because Emily and Ruth have dynamite, dynamite taste, and it's like having a personal shopper for reasonably-obscure, fabulous reading. So we asked Emily if she would tell us a bit about how Emily Books came to be, and wheedled a discount code out of her (readers of The Toast can take 20% off purchases from Emily Books -- subscriptions or individual books -- by entering the code THETOAST at checkout.) This month's pick is King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes, a book of essays about prostitution, rape, femininity, and French-inflected black humor. Emily and I will discuss it together in a post at the end of the month. We're hoping you'll join in, but I'm the only one who's duty-bound to read it. - Ed.Almost two years ago, Ruth Curry and I opened Emily Books with No More Nice Girls, a essay collection by rock critic and radical utopian feminist Ellen Willis, as our first monthly pick. The book was out of print, so we got the non-exclusive rights to republish it as an ebook -- the first of many times we'd do this. Making out of print or hard to find books by women available as ebooks was one of the reasons we opened our store; we figured that if we wanted to read these books, other people would too. Luckily for us, and for the authors we chose, this has turned out to be true: we now have subscribers and customers all over the world. The incredible thing to me now is that, in October of 2011, we thought we might run out of books. There had to be a limit, we figured, to the number of brilliant, necessary books by women that had been forgotten or remained unsung or were only known by a small cult following. We figured we would be able to stay in business for a year, maybe, and then we'd have to figure out something else.