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Saint Thomas Christians (06/25)
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 ...
South Philadelphia Over the Years (06/25)
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 ...
Wind Knots (06/25)
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...
The Artist's Assistant (06/25)
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...
Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong (06/25)
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...
Reimagining The Great Gatsby (06/25)
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...
Classics of Queer Irish Literature (06/25)
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 ...
Romance Novels with Complex Themes (06/25)
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 ...
Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought (06/25)
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 ...
Contemporary Mexican Literature in Translation (06/25)
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 ...
Plague in the 21st Century (06/25)
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 ...
Mary Oliver and "The Summer Day" (06/25)
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 ...
Painter Agnes Martin (06/25)
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 ...
Fathers. Gay Sons. Silence. (06/25)
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...
The Promise and Peril of the Haber-Bosch Process (05/25)
As Ferris Jabr describes in Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, he and his spouse discovered an all-too-common problem when they tried to plant a new garden—ruined, lifeless soil. Despite our millions of acres of farmland, the intensity of modern agriculture, grazing, deforestation, and land disturbance have severely ...
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (05/25)
In The Corruption of Hollis Brown by K. Ancrum, Walt, a ghost who was born in approximately 1916, shares a body with Hollis, a teenage boy he possesses in order to survive. As the two are still working out how to exist as one person, communicating through their shared mind with tensions and resentments lingering between them, Walt peers ...
Cyanide Toxicity: How It Works (05/25)
Death in the Jungle tells the true story of Jim Jones, the preacher-turned-cult-leader who founded the infamous Jonestown settlement, a socialist community that became a site of mass murder. Jones was interested in 'revolutionary suicide' and asked Jonestown doctor Larry Schacht to find a method for it; Schacht began researching the use ...
Goya's Black Paintings (05/25)
In a key scene in Florence Knapp's novel
The Names, two characters are in an art gallery viewing an exhibition. The author writes:
'They stop in front of a hideous image, a painting on loan from a gallery in Madrid. It shows a naked man, frenzied and wild-eyed, consuming a smaller figure, its bloodied, headless body ...
Memoirs about Mothers (05/25)
Erika J. Simpson's
This Is Your Mother is an unconventional memoir about the author's mother Sallie Carol. Below we highlight some other recommended memoirs in which an author reflects on their relationship with their mother, often (but not always) after her death.
Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou: Angelou's seventh volume of ...
The Reality of Writing Workshops (05/25)
Several stories in Lori Ostlund's Are You Happy? follow characters who are either teachers or students in writing workshops. Writing workshops are intended to help students strengthen their writing process through guidance and feedback from professionals and within a community. Outsiders don't always get much insight into what these ...
The Nation of Islam (05/25)
Malcolm X rose to public prominence as one of the faces of the Nation of Islam, which is a Black nationalist and religious movement and organization. The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930 by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, although he was soon succeeded by Elijah Muhammad, who grew the small group into an influential nationwide movement—...
Self-help Cults (05/25)
Self-improvement is having a big moment. Life coaching is a multi-billion-dollar industry with more than 100,000 coaches practicing around the globe, self-help books are all over the bestseller lists, and "therapy talk" terms like "gaslighting" and "boundaries" are now firmly a part of the modern vernacular. ...
Alison Bechdel's Early Work: Dykes to Watch Out For (05/25)
Alison Bechdel's new graphic novel
Spent revisits several of the beloved characters that Bechdel made somewhat famous in her long-running comic strip
Dykes to Watch Out For. Though it was never published in mainstream publications, the strip was a mainstay in gay and lesbian publications for over 25 years.
Dykes to Watch Out For ...
Queens of Rock: Women in Geology (05/25)
In Caoilinn Hughes' The Alternatives, Olwen is a geologist profoundly concerned with the effects of climate change. As in other sciences, women remain underrepresented in geology, even though they have been very much part of its development over the centuries.
St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a scholar of precious stones, to ...
Olivia de Havilland and the Studio System (05/25)
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, ...
Librarians-Turned-Novelists (05/25)
Douglas Westerbeke, author of the debut novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World, did not start his career as an author. In fact, he is a librarian in Ohio, at one of the largest libraries in the United States. After spending the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, he decided to try his hand at ...
A Short History of the Cooking Show (05/25)
In Lessons In Chemistry, the main character is the reluctant host of a popular TV cooking show.
Gordon Ramsay, Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray are just a few of the many modern TV chefs who’ve become household names. Cooking shows are now not only daytime television staples; they're featured in the primetime lineup. Such was not ...
The Mommy Wars (05/25)
In It. Goes. So. Fast., Mary Louise Kelly shares her struggles to balance work and family life. Although for Kelly there was never a question of whether or not to give up work permanently in favor of parenting, the difficulty of finding the balance she seeks makes that question a perennial topic of interest—and conflict—among ...
Fan Culture and Parasocial Relationships (05/25)
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...
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) and Our Town (05/25)
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 ...
Lake Superior as Dystopian Setting (05/25)
'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 Brief History of Sicily (05/25)
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...
ChatGPT (05/25)
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 ...
Fusion Science as a Clean Energy Source (05/25)
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...
The Lost Continent of Lemuria (05/25)
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 ...
The Submarine Cable System (05/25)
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 ...
Could Artificial Wombs Become a Reality? (05/25)
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 ...
Jennicam and the Rise of a Life Lived Online (05/25)
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...
A Women in Resistance Reading List (05/25)
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 ...
Social Media Influencing: A New Type of Career (05/25)
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,...
"Native American" Is Complicated (05/25)
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...
How to Become a WWE Star (05/25)
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 ...
The Kingdom of the Happy Land (04/25)
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...
Queen Marguerite of Navarre (04/25)
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....
Hot Air Balloons (04/25)
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 ...
The Influence of King Solomon's Mines on The Creation of Half-Broken People (04/25)
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...
Carnivorous Plants: How They Trap and Eat Their Prey (04/25)
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 Pale in Ireland (04/25)
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 ...
Chinese Science During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) (04/25)
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....
Terminal Illness Memoirs (04/25)
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 ...
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