All posts tagged: frenemy

Glam Girl and Frenemy Horror is the Vibe This Season

[ad_1] Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone. Toxic rivalries between women. The fascination and obsession with youth and beauty at the expense of everything else. While we’re at it, we could also throw in Coralie Fargeat’s new horror film The Substance in the mix. It’s all anyone’s talking about right now. Glam girl frenemy horror is the vibe for Halloween 2024. You heard it here. This list is a good reminder of just how popular and widely read the romance and mystery/thriller genres are: they consistently make up the majority of the most read list, despite both genres often going underrepresented in literary coverage. Breaking news: it turns out people want to read exciting, fast-moving books — like thrillers — and heartwarming and/or sexy books — like romance. Comic book sales—and comic book readership—get bigger every year. And yet if you look at a list of “where to start with …

How to Know Your Frenemy

[ad_1] Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. There are many different kinds of friends. Aristotle distinguished among friendships based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Michel de Montaigne wrote about true friendship, which “grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by its practice.” In this column, I have written about the difference between real friends and deal friends. And then there is the frenemy. This portmanteau of friend and enemy first appeared as long ago as the late 19th century. It signifies a discordant relationship in which someone appears to be your friend or has a superficially friendly demeanor toward you but behaves in ways that real friends wouldn’t and shouldn’t. Perhaps the frenemy undermines you, manipulates your feelings, gaslights you, or says mean things about you behind your back. Identifying frenemies isn’t always easy, because the behavior can be designed to go undetected, or perhaps to be so …