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...a beyond the book article for
Tom Lake
In Ann Patchett's novel
Tom Lake, the main character fondly remembers starring in a production of Thornton Wilder's
Our Town. This is Wilder's best-known play, which debuted in 1938 to mixed reviews but earned him a Pulitzer Prize that same year, making him the only writer to have received the award in both fiction and drama.
Born in ...
King Solomon's Mines, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, is referenced throughout Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's African gothic historical fiction work
The Creation of Half-Broken People.
After Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) had returned to England from a stint as an administrator in South Africa, his brother suggested a wager: he would...
In Jo Harkin's new novel
The Pretender, Lambert Simnel—a long-shot hopeful for the English throne—is taken to raise an army in the English Pale in Ireland, the last Tudor stronghold on the island. A small area encompassing the counties around Dublin, the Pale is intimately tied to the history of Ireland and the beginnings ...
In the 1960s and 1970s, the term 'Native American' was popularized. It became the politically correct way to refer to the hundreds of tribes that make up the Native population in the United States, often replacing 'Indian.' But many Indigenous people resent the classification of Native American because it was a name given to them by white...
BJ, one of the characters in Ocean Vuong's
The Emperor of Gladness, aspires to become a professional wrestler for World Wrestling Entertainment — more commonly known as the WWE.
Merriam-Webster defines professional wrestling as 'a form of athletic theater where performers engage in staged mock combat, emphasizing entertainment ...
...a beyond the book article for
Isola
Allegra Goodman's novel
Isola concerns Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval (born c. 1515), a French noblewoman who was marooned on a deserted island with her lover while on a voyage to New France (Canada). Marguerite was eventually rescued and upon her return to France was treated as a celebrity; her tale became widely known very quickly....
May, the matriarch of Rachel Khong's
Real Americans, is born into a poor rural Chinese family in the 1950s. Her fate is foretold by her mother's life: wake before dawn to cook breakfast, clean up after the men in the family, head to the rice paddies and toil until the time to head home to cook supper, rinse and repeat. It is backbreaking....
For those living in the dystopian world of Soyoung Park's
Snowglobe, the main source of entertainment is reality television shot within a climate-controlled dome. The lives of the actors on these shows are on 24-hour display to be consumed obsessively by the fans in the icy world beyond the dome's barrier. Every detail of the stars' lives...
Artificial intelligence grabbed the headlines in November 2022 when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world (GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer). A large language model (LLM) designed to interact informally with a human interlocutor, ChatGPT has since released three more generations on the foundation model, with GPT-4's ...
The fictional heroine of Leigh Bardugo's novel
The Familiar interacts with several characters based on people who really did live in Spain during the 16th century. One of these is a young woman based on the figure Lucrecia de León, also known as 'Lucrecia the Dreamer.' Like the main character Luzia, Lucrecia comes under government ...
Joe Mungo Reed's novel
Terrestrial History begins with a fusion scientist named Hannah, who has retreated to her cottage in the Scottish Western Isles to finish a review of 'computing challenges in confinement models.' Upon reading this, I realized I had no idea what it meant to be a fusion scientist, what a 'confinement model' would be...
Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, which follows a group of formerly enslaved people who build a self-sustaining community on a mountainous plot of land in the Carolinas during the Reconstruction era, is based on a real-life historical place known as the Kingdom of the Happy Land. Perkins-Valdez stumbled upon the kingdom's history online...
Amy Carlson, the leader of the Love Has Won cult, claimed to have been many different figures in past lives—Jesus, Cleopatra, and Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few—but one of her most eyebrow-raising claims was that she was once the Queen of Lemuria, an ancient, hyper-advanced kingdom that originated the human race before ...
In
Say Hello to My Little Friend, main character Izzy Reyes traveled by raft from Cuba to the United States in 2003 at age seven with his mother, who drowned during the trip. It is mentioned in the novel that his Tia Teresa exploits the sympathy of teachers who note the similarity of the circumstances between Izzy's journey and that of ...
The titular 'novel' from Torrey Peters' book
Stag Dance takes place in an illegal logging camp in early 1900s Montana. During a cold and lonely winter, the lumberjacks there hold a dance, with some men designating themselves as women by placing a triangle of fabric between their legs, showing that they wish to be courted by the others. ...
We may think of Sicily today as merely an extension of the Italian mainland, but the island has its own unique history that dates back thousands of years and reflects the cultural, political, and economic influence of numerous civilizations.
Because of its convenient location in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily has long been...
While it's impossible to determine for sure how ancient Greeks sounded, Ferdia Lennon asserts that, despite what one hears and reads in many works depicting this era, they didn't echo the tones of Oxford scholars. In his novel
Glorious Exploits, set in 5th century BCE Sicily, the narrator Lampo converses in a contemporary Hiberno-English,...
The main horror of
Eat the Ones You Love comes from a ravenous orchid that can only be truly satisfied by human meat. It's a myth that some orchid species consume meat, but other carnivorous plants do exist. There are more than 600 known species that survive on insects and other animals; carnivory is such an efficient adaptation that it ...
'The setting is a character in itself' is a moth-eaten critical insight about any book (or film, or TV show), but
I Cheerfully Refuse stops just short of literally making Lake Superior a character. As the protagonist Rainy sails across the largest of the Great Lakes, he describes it as 'a three-hundred-mile fetch of malevolent spirit,' ...
...a beyond the book article for
Twist
Much of Colum McCann's novel
Twist takes place on a cable repair ship sent to locate and fix a breakage in the underwater cables conveying the globe's digital information pathways.
For many of us, perhaps because of the metaphorical terms used for internet storage and connection, such as
cyberspace and
the cloud, when we ...
Suzanne Cope's Women of War details the efforts of four female resistance fighters in Italy during World War II, but it also highlights the efforts of countless unnamed women who supported revolutionary efforts. For those interested in learning more about the role of women in resistance movements, the following books explore stories ...
Anne Curzan, author of
Says Who?, has some compelling bona fides when it comes to remarking upon English grammar and usage. Not only is she a linguistics professor, she was also for many years a member of the illustrious (and somewhat mysterious)
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Usage Panel. If you, like me, own a copy...
...a beyond the book article for
Hot Air
The novel
Hot Air begins with a hot air balloon falling from the sky into a backyard pool. Hot air balloons have a long history dating back to the eighteenth century, significantly predating the airplane. The hot air balloon was invented by French paper manufacturers (and brothers) Joseph Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, who were ...
Rationally, we all know death is coming, but how many truly believe it? Most people only accept the inevitability when forced to by accident or terminal illness. Ironically, such a diagnosis can lend a new lease on life, as it did for Rod Nordland, author of
Waiting for the Monsoon. Rereading E.M. Forster's
Howards End recently, I came ...
In her novel
Vanishing World, Sayaka Murata presents an alternate version of the present, in which most children are conceived either via artificial insemination or using newly available artificial wombs, which are sack-like external devices strapped to the body of a parent that allows them to carry a child without undertaking the risks ...
As popular social media websites, like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter (now X), have grown in the past two decades, their popularity and ubiquity have given rise to a whole new type of career: the 'content creator' or 'influencer.' According to a
2023 study, an estimated 27 million people in the US, or 14% of people aged 16 to 54,...
In Vanessa Le's debut YA novel
The Last Bloodcarver, her heroine, Nhika, is the titular protagonist: a person with the power to alter anatomy with a single touch, able to travel through a body's bloodstream, and cure it, wound it, or end its life altogether. Bloodcarvers can also feed on blood and proteins from other humans and animals to...
If you think about internet influencers, you might first consider your favorite cookbook blogger, Instagram fashion icon, or YouTube content creator. But, as Sophie Gilbert notes in a chapter on the rise of reality television in her book
Girl on Girl, the very first person who might stake a claim to that title is a woman who, back in 1996...
