Recent Articles
One of the overarching themes in Abraham Verghese's
The Covenant of Water is faith, in all its various guises. For the character Big Ammachi and her family, it is their proud history as Saint Thomas Christians that sustains them in their bleakest hours.
The novel refers to the legend of Saint Thomas, one of the twelve disciples of ...
...a beyond the book article for
Change
In addition to being a novelist, Édouard Louis, author of
Change, is a scholar of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Louis's scholarly work has explicitly informed his novels, which are about the violence and indignity of poverty, the racism and homophobia of his working-class childhood, and the difficult act of moving between ...
...a beyond the book article for
Endling
In
Endling, Maria Reva centers Ukrainian identity, whether her focus is on romance tours or the snail conservation efforts of one of the central 'brides' named Yeva. Through Yeva's work, we learn about the topography and life forms that shape Ukraine. One detail that stuck with me was the discussion of chernozem, the rich black soil that ...
In
The Dry Season, Melissa Febos seeks out stories of creative women who might serve as models for the kind of artistic life she hopes to pursue following a period of self-enforced celibacy. One of these forebears is the abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. In Martin, Febos encounters a creative visionary whose own inspiration ...
...a beyond the book article for
The Slip
A central element of
The Slip by Lucas Schaefer is Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas, which serves as a hub connecting the story's characters. The gym, attracting individuals from diverse backgrounds, illustrates a universal appeal: boxing is a sport that can be found in every city across the nation and in many countries ...
One of the many questions about the art world probed by Hari Kunzru in his new novel
Blue Ruin is the notion of provenance in the context of a working relationship between a well-known artist and his paid assistant. Does an assistant's creative output in any way belong to them? Or does it belong solely to the artist for whom they work...
Carvell Wallace's debut memoir,
Another Word for Love, explores how spirituality and embracing his queer identity helped him heal from childhood trauma. The journalist and podcaster is known for co-writing basketball player Andre Iguodala's 2019 memoir
The Sixth Man and for his Peabody Award–nominated podcast series
Finding ...
Eve J. Chung's debut novel
Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Chung has spoken about how she was motivated to write the book by her maternal grandmother's experiences of that period of history.
However...
In
Women and Children First, the debut novel from Alina Grabowski, teenager Lucy Anderson has epilepsy, a neurological disorder involving recurring seizures. Lucy has to deal not only with her distress at experiencing the seizures themselves but also with the stigma associated with the condition.
Epilepsy is one of the most common...
Fredrik Backman's new novel,
My Friends, repeatedly quotes 'The Summer Day,' a well-known poem by poet Mary Oliver (1936-2019).
Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a small, rural town less than 20 miles southeast of Cleveland. Her upbringing was 'chaotic' and she experienced sexual abuse at a young age, eventually finding ...
In
Awake in the Floating City, Bo is an artist who supports herself by working as a caregiver to home-bound elderly clients. Remaining in one's own home, often living alone and having caregiver help, is referred to as 'aging in place,' and is frequently preferable to living in a nursing home or assisted living facility; according to the ...
The night terrors began when Davis Freeman was five years old, after his mother died of lymphoma. While he lay in the dark, his body felt like straw. His screams, catastrophic and haunting, echoed throughout the house, prompting Davis's father, the Reverend, to sprint into his room to comfort him. To tell him it was okay. To dry his tears...
A main character in Charlotte McConaghy's novel
Wild Dark Shore is employed as a caretaker for an isolated seed bank. The author has stated that the facility is based on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.
A seed bank's main ...
In her novel
Remember Us, author Jacqueline Woodson draws from her own experiences growing up in 1970s New York. Her protagonist's hometown of Bushwick is plagued by housefires, landing it the callous nickname 'The Matchbox.'
Bushwick wasn't the only community affected by numerous fires at the time. Records show that by mid-1974, the ...
After Michael Deagler's protagonist Dennis Monk in
Early Sobrieties is ejected from his parent's house in suburban Bucks County, he drifts, as many former small-town and suburban kids do, to the nearest big city. As much as
Early Sobrieties is a book about new starts to life, it is also an ode to South Philadelphia, which officially ...
In
America, América, historian Greg Grandin references two major intellectual works of history and philosophy that influenced the worldviews of peoples in the Americas and in Europe. These two books offer much in the way of understanding the evolution of both the United States and Latin America in relation to one another and are ...
Ireland has an undeniably rich literary history across a wide range of fiction, drama, and poetry—this abundant legacy includes a number of noteworthy pieces of queer fiction and memoir. One of the latest entries into this catalog is poet Seán Hewitt's debut novel
Open, Heaven, a gay coming-of-age story that centers on ...
The coastal California setting of
The Witches of Bellinas is often beset by fierce and powerful winds. As the strong gusts rage, Mia, Bellinas's unofficial matriarch, explains to main character Tansy that wind has often been associated with magic. She gives the example of a peculiar, and largely forgotten, bit of history.
Hundreds...
Ghost Girl, Banana takes place partly in Hong Kong in the summer of 1997, a setting intentionally chosen by the author for symbolic reasons, representing the inner conflict of the main character who is of Hong Kong descent but grew up in the UK, raised by her English father. This was the summer Hong Kong was 'returned' to the rule of the ...
In Megan Giddings' novel
Meet Me at the Crossroads, magical doors appear around the world, offering an entry into another dimension. The modern portal fantasy genre, where a magical entryway leads to another world, dates back to classic works like
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and
Alice in Wonderland. But as novelist and ...
Jess Walter, the author of
So Far Gone, is based in Washington, a state that has produced a number of well-known writers. Below we feature a small selection of Washington State authors and books.
Many of
Sherman Alexie's early works are set on the Spokane Reservation, where he grew up. His linked short story collection,
The Lone ...
In
These Heathens, set in 1960, 17-year-old Doris Steele visits a friend of her former teacher, who lives in the Collier Heights area in Atlanta, Georgia. Collier Heights was established in 1952 as an all-Black neighborhood, at a time when redlining meant that Black Georgians were significantly restricted in terms of housing. They were ...
Zoe Schlanger's popular science book
The Light Eaters goes in-depth on several remarkable plants, one of which is the climbing vine
Boquila trifoliolata. This woody vine, found in the temperate rainforests of Chile and Argentina, has a unique strategy for hiding from herbivores—in order to blend in, it changes the shape of its ...
The Accidentals is a collection of short stories by Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel, translated from Spanish to English by Rosalind Harvey. Nettel's novel
Still Born, also translated by Harvey, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
Here are some more examples of contemporary Mexican literature in translation worth ...
In many ways, Emily Henry's
Great Big Beautiful Life is about the complex bond between mothers and daughters that prompts mothers to act in strange, counterintuitive ways. While the novel is quite unabashedly a romance, thoroughly embracing the genre's tropes, it is much more than a happy, breezy read with a satisfying end. Going against ...
Thomas Levenson begins
So Very Small, his history of the development of germ theory, with an account of the Great Plague that struck London in 1665. Although this was the last major outbreak to hit England,
Yersinia pestis, the bacterium which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, has survived—and indeed thrived—well into the ...
In Caro de Robertis' work of transcribed oral history,
So Many Stars, one of the interviewees is Nicky Calma. She shares the story of how, along with others at the Filipino Task Force on AIDS, she created the drag persona of Tita Aida in order to educate the people in her community about HIV/AIDS.
Born in 1967 to a Catholic family in ...
In her book
Murderland, Caroline Fraser examines the lead-crime hypothesis, the theory that children exposed to high levels of lead have neurological changes that lead to increased aggressiveness in adulthood. Ted Bundy serves as Fraser's example of a child exposed to high levels of lead who proceeded to live a life of very violent crime....
In 1925, a few months after the publication of
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from T.S. Eliot in which the poet—already renowned for
The Waste Land—described the novel as 'the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.' Fitzgerald received the praise with enthusiasm, especially since...
Author V.E. Schwab is known for bestselling fantasy novels like
Vicious (2013), in which college roommates study the darker side of gaining superpowers,
A Darker Shade of Magic (2015), where a smuggler's deal goes awry while they travel through parallel worlds, and
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020), in which an immortal woman is ...
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