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Harm Reduction (06/23)
In The Forgotten Girls, journalist Monica Potts revisits her declining Arkansas hometown and her childhood best friend Darci, who is locked in a struggle with drug addiction that traditional interventions—stigmatization, directing the victim to God for help—have failed to cure. While Darci's struggle involves a pattern of ...
Fiction by Indian Diaspora Authors (06/23)
Sindya Bhanoo, author of the story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, writes about South Indian immigrant and diaspora communities and the connections people in them maintain (or lose) with family in India. Bhanoo, who lives in Texas, was born to immigrant parents in the United States. The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world ...
Nicolae Ceauşescu (1918-1989) (06/23)
Ruta Sepetys's young adult novel I Must Betray You tells the story of Cristian Florescu, a Romanian teenager living at the pinnacle of the country's communist era in 1989. Cristian is blackmailed into being an informant for the Securitate, the government's secret police, forcing him to grapple with his guilt at betraying those he cares ...
Au Pair Exchanges (05/23)
The novel The Caretakers centers on several young women who are au pairs in France, living there on special visas that allow them to stay with a family, take language classes and immerse themselves for a year in Parisian social life.
The term 'au pair' refers to a (usually young) person who lives with a family in a foreign country in ...
Winston Churchill in TV and Film (05/23)
Countless movies about Winston Churchill have been made in the decades since World War II, with different actors playing the starring role to varying degrees of success. What are some of the most — and least — memorable of these cinematic depictions, and what effect did these films have in perpetuating the Churchill legend?
...
Young Adult Novels Exploring Sexual Abuse Against Boys (05/23)
Despite its prevalence, sexual assault remains a largely taboo subject, particularly in cases where men and boys are victims. Toxic masculinity and societal pressure push many to suffer in silence, afraid of being perceived as 'weak' and the repercussions this could have throughout their lives. The mental impact of this decision is ...
Muskiiki: The Four Sacred Ojibwe Medicines (05/23)
In Firekeeper's Daughter, Daunis is interested in how her fellow Ojibwe tribe members use medicinal herbs. She chooses to study pre-med courses and plant biology at college so that she may go on to study ethnobotany through an indigenous lens, and also learns directly from her tribe's Elders.
Traditional medicine is an important part ...
The Rising Threat of Hurricanes (05/23)
In Michael Farris Smith's novel Salvage This World, society is slowly breaking under the pressure of near-constant hurricanes. In real terms, it is already clear that storms have become increasingly powerful in recent years as a result of climate change. What will only become clear with time is whether this is the 'new normal' or if this ...
The U.S. Dakota War of 1862 (05/23)
Much of Susanna Moore's
The Lost Wife is set during the five-week conflict in Minnesota that came to be known as the U.S.-Dakota War. According to the University of Minnesota's
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 'The conflict can be viewed as one of the genocidal efforts to forcibly remove the Dakota from Minnesota.'
Starting ...
Women Homesteaders of the West (05/23)
Where Coyotes Howl is set in the young and growing town of Wallace, Wyoming in 1916, following a couple named Ellen and Charlie's path as they set out to build a ranch on the High Plains. Author Sandra Dallas provides a slice-of-life picture of homesteading and ranching in Wyoming through the various characters. Many of Ellen's friends ...
The Therapeutic Value of Walt Whitman's Poetry (05/23)
Ann Napolitano's novel Hello Beautiful is the story of four sisters contending with life and loss, love, death and forgiveness, and finding different ways to cope with hardship. The characters go through mental and physical rehabilitation and therapy, and make a string of rash decisions as they try to find a way to deal with the ups and ...
Denmark: A Brief Overview (05/23)
Amulya Malladi's A Death in Denmark takes place in the country of Denmark in the north of Europe, which is comprised of the Jutland peninsula and an archipelago of over 400 islands. To the south, Denmark shares a border with Germany. On its west side, it is separated from the United Kingdom by the North Sea. The Baltic Sea and Sweden lie ...
The Life and Literature of Tullia D'Aragona (05/23)
As Naoíse Mac Sweeney explains in her book The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, the fusing of Greco-Roman roots into a common 'Western' narrative took off during the Renaissance, and some of the most illustrative examples of this process came from an unlikely source—a female poet and courtesan named Tullia D'Aragona.
...
Books and Movies Inspired by Strangers on a Train (05/23)
If the premise of Nora Murphy's
The Favor — two unconnected strangers conduct revenge by proxy in what should be a perfect crime — sounds familiar, that might be because of its parallels to the plot of a classic book and film.
Strangers on a Train might be best known as a
1951 noir film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but ...
The Electra Complex (05/23)
We have all heard of the Oedipus complex, right? Its origin is in Greek mythology, where Oedipus, King of Thebes, unknowingly kills his own father and marries his mother. Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of the complex, which posits that a young boy has a subconscious sexual desire toward his mother and anger or jealousy toward his ...
Kate Meyrick (05/23)
In an Author's Note in her novel Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson reveals that the real-life inspiration for her character Nellie Coker was Kate Meyrick, the impresario known as the 'Queen of Nightclubs.' Much like Atkinson's character, 'Ma' Meyrick built an empire of sorts during the Jazz Age, owning and operating a string of clubs in ...
Bonding Over Shared Trauma (05/23)
In Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach, main characters Sally and Billy form an unbreakable bond after they both witness the death of Sally's older sister Kathy, who is Billy's girlfriend. Research on shared traumatic experiences shows a clear pattern in which people who have endured the same trauma often have a strong ...
Small Aircraft Transport in Alaska (05/23)
Small airplanes are a common form of transport in Leigh Newman's collection of short stories, Nobody Gets Out Alive, set primarily in Alaska. Several of the stories take place on a lake where homes boast 'seaplane docks.' Alaska is a vast, sparsely populated region where it's estimated that around 80% of communities exist beyond the reach...
Short Story Writing: Practice for Publishing Novels? (05/23)
Maggie Shipstead was known as a novelist before releasing her first short story collection, You Have a Friend in 10A. A number of its stories date back 10 or more years, though, some having been written while she was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. The individual stories originally ...
The Oakland Police Department Trafficks a Teenager (05/23)
As she explains in her Author's Note, Leila Mottley based Nightcrawling loosely on real events involving a teenage sex worker who was sexually exploited for months by members of the Oakland Police Department. The girl is known as Celeste Guap in court documents. According to her, she began 'dating' Officer Brendan O'Brien in February of ...
Brujería: Latin American Witchcraft Past and Present (05/23)
In Lorraine Avila's The Making of Yolanda la Bruja, Yolanda's mother and grandmother guide her as she becomes fully absorbed in her family's traditional religious practices. While she's lighting candles, reading tarot cards and immersing herself in her grandmother's bath mixes, Yolanda's rituals celebrate her spirituality and bruja ...
Germany's War Children (05/23)
In Fatherland, New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger chronicles his quest to understand his maternal grandfather's Nazi past—a past shrouded in mystery despite the fact that Bilger's mother, born in 1935, was old enough at the time to have memories of World War II and her father's role in it.
She remembered her father wearing ...
How Drug Cartels Became a Potent Force in Mexico (05/23)
One of the main areas of focus in Blood Gun Money is the role of drug cartels in criminal activity in Mexico. In particular, two organizations are cited multiple times: Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel. Both are known for the number of enemies they've dispatched and their brutal methods of doing so. As stated in the book, guns, many of ...
Sterilization or Genocide? Eugenics in North Carolina (05/23)
In The Unfit Heiress, Audrey Clare Farley sets the case of San Francisco socialite Ann Cooper Hewitt against the backdrop of the American eugenics movement. In the age of eugenics, which lasted approximately from the 1920s to the 1940s, 30 states embraced laws allowing involuntary sterilization. North Carolina was one of the worst, partly...
Palimpsests (04/23)
The heroine of V.E. Schwab's novel, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, often takes notice of what she refers to as 'palimpsests,' which she defines as instances where the past is blotted out and written over by the present.
The word palimpsest comes from the Greek palimpsestos, meaning 'scraped again.' Strictly speaking, the term ...
Semiramis, Queen of Assyria (04/23)
Among the many fascinating anecdotes presented in David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, one stood out to me. This was the myth of Semiramis (also known as Sammu-ramat), a woman of low stature who rose to become queen of the empire of Assyria. Graeber and Wengrow mention her in a chapter discussing role reversals, using...
Fictional Pandemics (04/23)
Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility features a character Mandel seems to have based loosely on herself: an author named Olive Llewellyn who is famous for writing a novel about a pandemic. Pandemics are a common trope in novels, particularly in the speculative or science fiction genre, with authors considering different imagined ...
Cover Art for Young Adult Fantasy Novels (04/23)
The cover of the young adult fantasy novel Nightbirds by Kate J. Armstrong reliably hints at the promise and magic of the story that lies within while also seeking to differentiate itself in a saturated market. Not only is the artwork attractively rendered, but it shows the emotion and supernatural abilities of the character Matilde with ...
Evacuating Children from London During World War II (04/23)
During World War II, the constant threat of German bombs falling on London and other key cities forced many English families to make an incredibly painful choice: whether to keep their children with them in this dangerous area or to separate from them, sending them away to places where they could hopefully live more safely and normally. ...
The Bribri (04/23)
Like brothers Max and Jay, the protagonists of her debut young adult novel Saints of the Household, author Ari Tison is Bribri American, descended from an Indigenous group native to the Talamanca region of Costa Rica. The characters' grandfather was raised among the Bribri people and their matriarchal society. His gentle, loving nature ...
Sybil Neville-Rolfe (1885-1955) (04/23)
Dr. Agnes Vogel, The Foundling's complicated eugenicist arch-villain, has many real analogues in history. As the eugenics movement bloomed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women played an instrumental role in how its ideas took shape. In Britain, Sybil Neville-Rolfe (née Sybil Burney) was the founder of the Eugenics ...
Tawaifs (04/23)
Aamina Ahmad's debut novel, The Return of Faraz Ali, takes place in 1968 in Lahore's red-light district, and several of the characters are tawaifs — sex workers.
'Tawaif' comes from the Urdu word 'tauf,' which means to go round and round. While the term is considered derogatory now, originally it was one of respect for a highly-...
Joan Didion's "On Self-Respect," and Social Media Culture (04/23)
For a moment, I can pretend I am a professor, like Joan Didion-obsessed NYU English professor Nick Harrison in Grant Ginder's
Let's Not Do That Again, as he discusses her 1961 essay '
On Self-Respect' with his undergraduate class. For a moment, I can pretend that in the high evening before one of my part-time jobs, I am not 23, sitting in ...
Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (04/23)
In Take My Hand, the protagonist Civil Townsend works at a family planning center in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973. She visits a Black family and administers birth control shots to two sisters, ages 11 and 13, at the behest of her supervisor, a man who later orders the girls to be sterilized. This story is based on the real-life ...
The Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme (04/23)
In Lianne Dillsworth's novel Theatre of Marvels, a settlement plan resembling the Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme comes to represent the possibility of a fresh start, freedom and community for the story's heroine, Zillah, and fellow Black people living in Victorian Britain who are struggling to feel like they belong.
Located on the ...
Gambling Addiction (04/23)
In Julie Clark's
The Lies I Tell, main character Kat's boyfriend Scott struggles with a gambling addiction, which affects the two of them and their relationship. When asked in an
interview what she wanted readers to take away from Scott's gambling problem, Clark stated, 'I want readers to see the complexity and heartache of loving an ...
The 1970 Great Bhola Cyclone (04/23)
In The Vortex, Scott Carney and Jason Miklian explore the environmental and societal impacts the 1970 Great Bhola Cyclone had upon South Asia, specifically what was East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The tropical storm began brewing in the Bay of Bengal on November 8, 1970, gaining strength to eventually achieve winds of up to 140 mph when ...
Young Adult Novels Written in Verse (04/23)
Novels written in verse for a young adult audience can be an excellent way to encourage reluctant readers of poetry to embrace the unique power of the form. While retaining a focus on character and narrative, the loose approach to structure and hints of more experimental language can increase the pace and heighten the emotional intensity ...
Social Media Addiction (04/23)
In The Candy House, the allure of social media, with its illusions of security, comfort and happiness are frequently described in terms similar to those related to addiction. Egan presents characters who struggle with substance abuse and deal with their isolation by withdrawing into the social media platform Own Your Unconscious.
While...
Religious Sectarianism in Glasgow: Then and Now (04/23)
One theme of Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo is the quotidian experience of violence. In part, this violence comes from warring sectarian gangs, whose vicious rivalry wreaks havoc in Glasgow's East End. Enmity between Protestants and Catholics has a long history in Glasgow, as well as Scotland more generally. It can be traced back to the ...
Trauma and the Brain (04/23)
Rape survivor Erika Krouse rarely dreams. She has lost memories. She has trouble remembering what happened the prior week but knows in spectacular detail how it felt to be raped when she was a child by someone her mother loved. A heartbreaking passage in her memoir Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation explains, 'It's ...
The Story of Tunnel 29 (04/23)
Wherever borders and barriers exist, resistance and the desire to escape will also be found. In The Berlin Exchange, Joseph Kanon's Cold War espionage thriller, the Berlin Wall looms as a formidable barricade. The book is set in 1963; only months earlier, the miraculous story of Tunnel 29 — so called because of the number of people ...
Studebaker and the Land Cruiser (04/23)
In The Lincoln Highway, the main characters undertake a would-be cross-country road trip in Emmett Watson's pride and joy, a 1948 powder-blue Studebaker Land Cruiser.
The Studebaker company, now known as a long-lasting and iconic automotive manufacturer, was founded in South Bend, Indiana in 1852. The Studebaker family had emigrated ...
Colonialism's Ecological Damage in Cyprus (03/23)
In Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees, Kostas, one of the protagonists, can be described as having an intimate love affair with nature. The other characters, including Kostas's daughter, are often puzzled by his eccentric passion for the Earth and the creatures we share it with. Kostas grew up on the island of Cyprus, and he ...
The Spanish Civil War (03/23)
Several of the women highlighted in Judith Mackrell's The Correspondents started their journalistic careers covering the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
Spain had been in political turmoil for many years before the war; while the country was still officially a monarchy, a 1923 coup had placed Miguel Primo de Rivera in charge of the ...
Chinese Handscrolls (03/23)
The family at the center of Peach Blossom Spring carries a handscroll with them as they flee their home in the Hunan Province of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The scroll illustrates a fable, the significance of which grows and changes for main character Renshu over the course of his life. The handscroll has been a form of art...
The Music and Writing of Sasha LaPointe (03/23)
Sasha LaPointe, the author of
Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, is an established musician, poet and writer of nonfiction who holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. According to
her website, she draws inspiration from her Indigenous background (from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian tribes...
Naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes (03/23)
In Unlikely Animals, Clive Starling pals around with a hallucination of Ernest Harold Baynes, a real-life figure sometimes called the American Dr. Dolittle. Through his deep reverence for animals, Baynes helped save bison in America, educated the public about songbirds and befriended all manner of creatures.
Born in Calcutta in 1868 ...
The Soviet Atomic Bomb Project (03/23)
In Atomic Anna, the protagonist Anna Berkova is the Soviet Union's top nuclear scientist. Collaborating with famed German chemist Otto Hahn at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, Anna helps discover nuclear fission, the reaction which serves as the basis for nuclear power. As World War II begins, Anna escapes Germany and...
The Origins of Female Protagonists in Children's Literature (03/23)
Bridget (known as Biddy), the protagonist of H. G. Parry's The Magician's Daughter, grows up on the magical, hidden island of Hy-Brasil, with only her father, the mage Rowan O'Connell, and his familiar, a rabbit named Hutchincroft. She is greatly influenced by the stories of heroines she reads about in her father's library...
