September Links Roundup

Featuring a travel writing resource, a pasta recipe, and a disco-era dark comedy

Hello and welcome to the September links roundup!

We’ve had a nice fall where I live in Colorado, and so I’ve been trying to enjoy being outside when it is not too hot or too cold (and ignore the fact that the days are getting slightly shorter).

Since next month kicks off the fourth quarter of the year and feels like a countdown to the holidays, I’ve been thinking about writing goals I want to check off by the end of the year (like finishing the holiday-related ideas I thought of last year and then ran out of time to write).

I’m also trying to get ahead of some holiday planning and thought I was being smart last year by buying a bunch of extra holiday stamps so I wouldn’t have to do it again this year. But guess who can’t find the holiday stamps she bought now? Let me know if you have ideas on where to look.

In the meantime, this month I’ve got some funny stuff and a book rec from humor writer Lisa Borders, whose new disco-era novel is out next week.

-JV

• Internet humor: The news continues to be a lot. But threads like this breaking news post have been making me laugh.

• Funny viewing: If you are looking for a middle-aged dramedy, I enjoyed The Four Seasons on Netflix. Things that also made me laugh this month: The latest season of Fisk on Netflix and watching the new Naked Gun movie with my middle schoolers.

• Short humor: I also appreciated Juliana Gray’s “Escape Room Challenge: Your European Airbnb” — especially the laundry part. European Airbnb washer/dryers continue to be an enigma to me.

• Recipe: This month, I made this one-pan pasta recipe, and I thought it had good flavor, and my kids liked it. As some of the commenters noted, it did feel like there was a lot of liquid, but I think that actually helped it reheat well as leftovers. But you could also try reducing the liquid a bit.

• Travel writing resource: I attended the recent TravMedia video session about writing for National Geographic and then realized that recordings of their sessions are also posted online. If you are interested in travel writing, these are a good resource. Find them here (scroll down to “Watch Again”).

• Flash submissions: The Substack publication In a Flash posted their upcoming submission call for October here.

• Book publishing: This article about the current state of publishing has been making the rounds and has some interesting insights on the topic that I hadn’t heard before.

This month’s funny guest rec comes from Lisa Borders, who you may know from her humor pieces like this Signs That You Are a Gen-Xer Going Through Menopause.

Lisa’s novel, Last Night at the Disco, comes out next week.

Tell us about your book.

Last Night at the Disco is a dark comedy set in, you guessed it, the disco era. It’s 1977, and twenty-six-year-old Lynda Boyle is desperate for fame and a way out of New Jersey. After failing to make her mark as an East Village poet, she begins rubbing elbows with stars at Studio 54 and discovers a new path to glory through two local musicians, Johnny Engel and Aura Lockhart. Lynda believes she alone can transform them into rock ‘n’ roll legends.

Fast forward four decades: Lynda is in hiding after a series of events forces her to flee the tri-state area. When she sees Aura inducting Johnny into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Lynda’s rage ignites. Determined to reclaim her narrative, she sets out to tell her story and secure her rightful place in music history. If she settles a few other scores along the way, that’s just a bonus. [Editor’s note — you can also read an excerpt from Lisa’s book here.]

What is a funny book you recommend?

I love a good satire, especially one where the characters feel real while being comedically heightened. Porochista Khakpour’s Tehrangeles is set in 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and focuses on the Iranian-American Milani family, particularly the family’s four daughters, who’ve grown up wealthy in Los Angeles. As lockdown destroys their social lives, not to mention their chances of landing a reality TV show, the Milanis unravel in ways very specific to their individual personalities.

Tehrangeles announced itself to me as the kind of book I love from the first pages, when one of the Milani sisters, Roxanna, discussed getting her birth certificate altered so she could have a “zodiac reassignment,” and her sister Mina, the bookish and pragmatic heart of the novel, described the concept as “absurd at best and transphobic-adjacent at worst.”

Mina helps ground the reader as her sisters are swayed by the various subcultures they find online, and Roxanna fears a long-kept secret will be revealed. Through it all, Khakpour makes serious points about the pandemic, racism, and the American Dream, while mining the girls’ bubble of wealth and privilege for laughs.

Thanks, Lisa! Learn more about Lisa here:

Lisa Borders is a novelist, humorist and essayist. Her third novel, Last Night at the Disco – a dark comedy that Publishers Weekly calls “hilarious” – will be published in October 2025. She is the author of two previous novels, The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, the latter chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award and a 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards honoree.

A frequent humor contributor at McSweeney’s, she has published essays in Cognoscenti, The Rumpus, Past Ten and Post Road, and received a 2025 Massachusetts Cultural Council grant. She lives outside of Boston with her partner and two rescue cats. Follow her on Instagram at lisakborders, or visit https://www.lisaborders.com/

• Humor Advent Calendar: I’m happy to report that one of my McSweeney’s humor pieces is a part of this year’s McSweeney’s Advent Calendar. Get it for the person who could use some comic relief over the holidays.

• Yahoo Creators: This month, I also started contributing to Yahoo Creators, and you can find my pieces here. If you are curious to learn more about the program, there is an FAQ here (I just applied via the link that they list).

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Thanks for reading Humor Me, a newsletter featuring funny stuff and writing tips. In case you’re new here, I’m a humor writer and freelancer whose work has appeared in New Yorker Shouts, McSweeney’s, Real Simple, and more. Find out more about me at julievick.com.

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