Recent Articles
In Alice Winn's brilliant World War I novel,
In Memoriam, the main characters often quote poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). Among others cited is one of his best-known works:
In Memoriam A.H.H.
The subject of the poem is Arthur Henry Hallam, whom Tennyson met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829. The two young men were ...
...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 ...
Rachel Lyon's novel
Fruit of the Dead is based on the story of Demeter and Persephone from Greek mythology. In the original story, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, is devastated when her daughter Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, who intends to make her his wife. Demeter's grief is so great that it affects the ...
The Crimean War of 1853–1856 pitted the Russian Empire against an alliance of British, French, Turkish and Sardinian troops on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. Britain entered the war in March 1854 to protect its trading interests with Turkey, while France saw an opportunity for revenge against the Russians after Napoleon'...
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 ...
While Chernobyl may be the first incident that comes to mind when someone thinks about nuclear disasters in the 20th century, this event actually had a precursor in the USSR: the 'Kyshtym disaster' of 1957. Basing her novel
The Half Life of Valery K on this event, author Natasha Pulley's fictional 'City 40' is modeled on Chelyabinsk-40, ...
In
The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland, the character Sally grows increasingly disgusted by the way men's actions on the night of the 1811 Richmond theater fire are glorified in the local media, while women's experiences go completely unnoticed.
As far back as Biblical times, women in much of the world have been underrepresented ...
In the novella "Eve in Hollywood," in Amor Towles's
Table for Two, Eve Ross becomes close friends with the actress Olivia de Havilland. It is 1938, and De Havilland's popular new film
The Adventures of Robin Hood has just been released. All is not well in paradise, however, for the young star falls prey to blackmailers, ...
In February 1959, Billie Holiday sang the anti-lynching song she popularized, 'Strange Fruit,' on the London television show
Chelsea at Nine. She was battling liver disease because of a prodigious vodka and gin addiction. It was rare for Billie to sing 'Strange Fruit' when she was this physically fragile.
'She just needed a reason to ...
Unsurprisingly, stories featuring the circumstances of child or teenage protagonists during World War II tend to appear prominently in the category of young adult literature, with classics like Lois Lowry's
Number the Stars existing as staples of historical fiction in schools and libraries all over. But as is the case with Jennifer Rosner...
In Max Wallace's absorbing biography of Helen Keller,
After the Miracle, the author illuminates Keller's often overlooked dedication to the fight for civil rights. Through her lifetime, she was involved with a wide number of causes and organizations, from joining the Socialist Party to campaigning against U.S. involvement in World War I, ...
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...
Hampton Sides' book
The Wide Wide Sea records the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook and relays some of the exploits of his crew aboard the HMS
Resolution. One of Cook's key decisions concerned an alcoholic drink known as "grog."
During the Age of Exploration—the 15
th to 18
th centuries—Royal Navy...
Jacquelin Winspear's heroine, Elinor White, was a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) during the Second World War, one of several British organizations in which women enlisted to aid the war effort.
When war broke out in 1939, millions of men left the workforce in Great Britain to enlist, leaving behind their wives, sisters...
James McLaughlin's
Panther Gap includes beautiful descriptions of the nature surrounding the novel's titular location in remote Colorado. Our First Impressions reviewers were taken with these landscape depictions, prompting some to imagine being or going there themselves. Luckily, this is possible…sort of.
In a recent ...
Neely, the main character in Mindy McGinnis's
Under This Red Rock, experiences auditory hallucinations (AHs). Since an early age, Neely has heard people clapping for her, children laughing and playing, and the voice of a young girl asking for water. She's developed techniques for managing her symptoms, but she still suffers emotionally ...
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel describes a cutting-edge scientific endeavor to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction by combining its DNA with that of a modern Asian elephant and growing the resulting embryo in an elephant's (or an artificial) womb. The animal that is born will not be genetically identical to a wooly mammoth, ...
In
Biography of X, author Catherine Lacey imagines a world in which Russian-born anarchist and progressive activist Emma Goldman had a legitimate political career in the United States, serving as governor of Illinois and then chief of staff to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this capacity, Goldman ushered in profound systemic ...
...a beyond the book article for
James
Percival Everett's
James is a reimagining of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved companion Jim. This kind of reconfiguration is a common source of inspiration for authors, as one can see in the following list of books that similarly provide new points of view on classic works of literature.
Beautiful ...
Becoming Madam Secretary by Stephanie Dray narrates the life of Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first woman to serve in the US Cabinet. Perkins was a tireless supporter of workers' rights and is credited with drafting and lobbying support for some of the most critical parts of the New ...
Few plants have impacted world history as profoundly as
Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. Jessica J. Lee, in her book
Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, describes how tea is integral to both seemingly disparate halves of her family tree—her Welsh paternal grandparents and her Taiwanese maternal family all loved tea and ...
Darcie Little Badger's second young adult book,
A Snake Falls to Earth, contains cultural elements from the Lipan Apache tribe, of which both the author and the book's main character, Nina, are members. The book references the animal people who appear in the Lipan Apache creation story, and it is inspired by traditional Indigenous ...
In Danielle Trussoni's
The Puzzle Master, protagonist Mike Brink was once on his way to a promising football career until an injury fundamentally changed the way his brain worked, leading him away from the gridiron and into MIT. As Trussoni mentions in a brief author's note, Brink's diagnosis—acquired savant syndrome—is a real...
...a beyond the book article for
Clear
In
Clear, the third novel from Carys Davies, an impoverished presbyterian minister reluctantly takes part in the Highland Clearances, a series of mass evictions that took place in the north of Scotland between 1750 and 1850, driven in part by the restructuring of British society during the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of the ...
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...
Strike the Zither tells the story of Zephyr, a brilliant strategist working to help warlordess Xin Ren gain the throne of the realm. As she outsmarts foes human and supernatural alike, Zephyr must acknowledge her fate and decide how far she's willing to go to see Ren on the throne.
Zither is a tale of strong females fighting for their...
'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
Big Time
A portacath is a medical device used to assist with the treatment of ongoing conditions, most commonly cancer. It is composed of two key parts: the portal, which is a small chamber usually made of silicon that is placed just beneath the skin on a patient's chest; and the catheter, which is a flexible, hollow tube that is threaded into...
From the 17th century on, Johannes Kepler, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs were just a few artists who contributed to a burgeoning awakening of the collective imagination, melding scientific and cosmic theories with myth and character, shaping something entirely new — science fiction.
...
In
Under Alien Skies, Dr. Philip Plait takes readers on a tour of the universe, including discussing what it might be like to live on planets in a variety of different star systems. A major factor to consider for this thought exercise is the mass of the star or stars involved, and what point they are at in their life cycles.
Stars are...
