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Gang Violence in Dublin, Ireland (05/26)
Djamel White's debut novel All Them Dogs follows gangster Tony Ward, who returns to Dublin after years away, and reintegrates himself into the crime scene that raised him. It's one of many novels set in Dublin's gangland, and the prominence of Irish crime novels can be seen as a reflection of a familiar cultural landscape for the books' ...
Books About Family Businesses (05/26)
Family businesses provide fruitful ground for writers. The interpersonal dynamics at play are uniquely high-stakes, and there's a lot of room for things to go fascinatingly wrong. Returns and Exchanges by Kayla Rae Whitaker focuses on a family that owns a chain of discount stores. Here are five other books that use fact and fiction to ...
The Intelligence of Crows (05/26)
In Palaces of the Crow, four children escaping war in a Lithuanian forest are aided and protected by a flock of intelligent crows. While the actions of the birds in the story are remarkable, they're really not that far off the mark from what modern crows can accomplish.
There are two types of crows in the European region where the ...
The Bortle Scale (05/26)
While Megan Eaves-Egenes travels the world in search of the night sky in Nightfaring, the encroaching threat of light pollution looms over the proceedings. It's hard for it not to: as she explains in the first chapter, the light from LEDs can travel '30 to 40 kilometers (about 20 to 25 miles),' while 'the cumulative skyglow from a big ...
Veronica Roth: A Case Study in How Authors' Drafts Change (05/26)
Veronica Roth's latest novel,
Seek the Traitor's Son, is a dystopian fantasy featuring extensive character development, a mysterious prophecy, and deep explorations of grief and guilt. Roth is an old hand at writing dystopian novels: she began drafting the dystopian YA novel
Divergent in the early 2000s when she was a senior at ...
How Plants Use Chemicals to Communicate (05/26)
The smell of cut grass is a ubiquitous scent of summer, but did you know it's actually a cry for help? What we smell is a volatile organic compound (VOC) released by grass blades to signal that they're under attack. This is just one manifestation of how plants use chemical signals to communicate, and humans have only recently begun to ...
The Life of a Hungarian Diplomat in the 1980s (05/26)
In Fran Fabriczki's debut novel Porcupines, Sonia's father is a retired diplomat. His job deeply influenced her family's lifestyle, as they divided their time between their home country, Hungary, and the United States, specifically Washington, DC, where he was posted. Part of the story takes place during the 1980s in Budapest, the capital...
Hot Air Balloons (05/26)
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 ...
Jennicam and the Rise of a Life Lived Online (05/26)
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...
Goya's Black Paintings (05/26)
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 ...
Carnivorous Plants: How They Trap and Eat Their Prey (05/26)
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 Heist of the Century: The Antwerp Diamond Heist (05/26)
It's been called the heist of the century, despite happening only three years after the turn of the millennium. At the start of the business day on February 17, 2003, police were called to the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) by frantic jewel traders claiming their highly secure vault had been breached. Investigators found the ...
Korean Language Loss Under Japanese Colonialism and Beyond (05/26)
In Susan Choi's Flashlight, main character Seok, later referred to as Serk, spends his childhood with his Korean family in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. He attends a Japanese school, where he speaks and learns to write Japanese. He believes he is Japanese until the occupation ends, leading to a humorous and emotionally ...
Weddings in Contemporary Literature (05/26)
In Anne Tyler's Three Days in June, main character Gail Baines must deal with the chaos of her daughter's wedding while facing career disappointment and job loss. As weddings are landmark events in many people's lives and may reflect (or challenge) traditional family values, they can make for rich and meaningful story settings, and ...
Oil, Gas, and the Environment: The Good, the Bad, and the Alternatives (05/26)
Oil and gas companies make the fuels that power our trips, deliver our groceries, keep the lights on in our houses and factories, and keep our hospitals running. However, they're also the largest contributor by far to pollution. They heat up the planet, dirty our air and seas, and ultimately destroy beyond repair our only home, the Earth....
MLMs and Moms (05/26)
In the novel Mothers and Other Strangers, Sydney, an expectant mother without a successful career, is involved with a multi-level marketing company. She's recruited by her own mother, who found her way to the company while seeking meaning and community. The book's portrayal of how these companies work—and who they target&...
Harris Tweed (05/26)
The protagonists of Douglas Stuart's novel, John of John, are John and Cal Macleod, a father and son who live on a croft (a small, rural family homestead used for subsistence farming) on the remote Isle of Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. In addition to raising sheep, the men are among the many individuals on the islands who weave ...
Free Will on Stage and Screen (05/26)
Artie struggles throughout The Things We Never Say with the concept of free will. He wrestles not just with the idea that he may or may not have control over his life, but also with what it actually means. Has he earned the good things he has in life or done things to justify the struggles he's faced—or is it all just random ...
The Pandemic-Era National Park Boom (05/26)
If Bo Burnham's Inside captured the feeling of pandemic-induced isolation in 2020, Lindy West's memoir Adult Braces taps into the one that possessed many Americans the year after: the urge to get out of the house.
As she describes herself setting out on a cross-country odyssey in 2021, West explains her need to escape—a need ...
Colossal Cave Adventure (05/26)
In Portia Elan's debut novel Homebound, protagonist Becks and her late uncle share a love of coding computer games, and because Becks's story takes place in 1983, these look pretty different from the video games we know today. Known as teletype games, these early computer games involved no graphics; instead, they were more like a ...
Mauritian Literature in English Translation (05/26)
Mauritius is an African island nation found in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Its location between the African and Asian continents and its colonial history mean the country is today home to a variety of cultures, giving rise to a vibrant literary scene with works written in several different languages.
Though some key titles ...
Judith Clark and the 1981 Brink's Truck Robbery (05/26)
The Hill is very loosely based on author Harriet Clark's experiences as a girl visiting her mother, Judith Clark, in prison. Judith Clark's crime was driving a getaway car during the robbery of a Brink's truck that was making deliveries to banks. One guard and two police officers were killed. In the novel, Suzanna's mother went to ...
Social Media Influencing: A New Type of Career (05/26)
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,...
Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought (05/26)
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 ...
Fathers. Gay Sons. Silence. (05/26)
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 Silent Generation in The Usual Desire to Kill (05/26)
In 1951, Time magazine described the youth of the era in the following terms: 'The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not ...
Reimagining the Classics from a New Perspective (05/26)
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 ...
Could Artificial Wombs Become a Reality? (04/26)
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 ...
Body Horror Fiction About Women (04/26)
In Kim Samek's short story collection I Am the Ghost Here, several stories fall into the realm of 'body horror.' The phrase refers to books or movies featuring the transformation or mutilation of the human body. The term was coined by Philip Brophy in a 1983 article on horror films. Although the concept might seem unique to cinema, it can...
Community Land Trusts and Housing Affordability (04/26)
Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, the community organizer at the heart of Abigail Savitch-Lew's debut novel Livonia Chow Mein, knows she's landed on a solution to the skyrocketing real estate prices and rampant speculation that are displacing Black and Brown folks in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. Now if only she can get the decision-makers...
Anna Darvulia: Killer, Healer, or Victim? (04/26)
One thing that quickly becomes clear in Shelley Puhak's The Blood Countess is that Elizabeth Bathory, accused of being a serial killer, wasn't alone in whatever her activities were. She had a mysterious confidant, Anna Darvulia—to some, a sadistic torturer; to others, a skilled midwife and healer caught in political and patriarchal ...
The Lewinsky/Clinton Scandal (04/26)
In Dear Monica Lewinsky, a fictionalized, supernaturally powerful version of Lewinsky helps a woman experiencing shame and confusion about a past sexual experience with a much older man. In real life, Lewinsky is an activist committed to fighting the shaming of women—and this career path is the direct result of her own trauma.
...
Poitiers, France (04/26)
In Marie NDiaye's The Witch, main character Lucie's husband, Pierrot, leaves Lucie and their two daughters—initially to visit his mother in the suburbs of the city of Poitiers, though it ends up being a longer absence. Poitiers is a university town (home to the University of Poitiers) in west-central France in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine...
Futoko (Non-Attendance) and Free Schools in Japan (04/26)
In the United States, the 'model minority' is a stereotype linked to Asian immigrants and diaspora. The myth speaks to a commitment to academic excellence while simultaneously diminishing experiences of discrimination. The stereotype and those who believe in it cherry-pick a racial group seen as embracing assimilation and pit them against...
The Ballet Giselle (04/26)
City of Night Birds centers on a performance of Giselle, which a world-famous ballerina is going to perform as her first foray back to the stage after a forced hiatus. Giselle is a romantic ballet in two acts that tells the story of a German peasant girl from the countryside. Giselle falls in love with a nobleman, Albrecht, who has ...
Objectum Sexuality (04/26)
Linda, the narrator of Sky Daddy, is sexually and romantically attracted to commercial airplanes. This phenomenon could be viewed as a subset of objectum sexuality (OS) — defined as romantic or sexual attraction to an object — although Linda insists that her interest in planes is different from 'the woman who married the ...
Books Featuring Actors as Characters (04/26)
The protagonist of Katie Kitamura's Audition is an actress, and sections of the novel reflect her thought process on performance, from the creation of her character to her considerations of a play's rhythms and structures. This plot device allows author Kitamura to contemplate themes that she and all novelists must also explore, ...
The Women's National Book Association (04/26)
In The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss talks about one of the few women in the book trade in the early 20th century: Madge Jenison, who opened The Sunwise Turn bookshop in Manhattan in 1916. A year later, she joined 20,000 other women in a protest for women's suffrage, marching with her fellow female booksellers....
Effects of the 2008 Financial Crisis on South Korea (04/26)
Che Yeun's debut novel, Tailbone, is set in Seoul, South Korea, during the 2008 global financial crisis. In it, the unnamed narrator observes how the crash impacts the women in her boarding house, all of whom are sex workers.
The international Great Recession was triggered in mid-September 2008, when the housing bubble in the United ...
The Real Walking Dead: The Practice of Corpse-Herding in China (04/26)
In Tesia Tsai's debut novel
Deathly Fates, Kang Siying is a ganshi priestess who reanimates corpses in order to guide them back to their home for burial. This fantastical premise is based off of the historical occupation of 'corpse-driving' or 'corpse-herding'—
gǎn shī—
a tradition that stretches back centuries in the ...
Claude Monet's Water Lilies Series (04/26)
Born in Paris in 1840, Claude Monet grew up in the town of Le Havre in Normandy. He was interested in art from a young age, studying at a Le Havre arts school under masters Jacques-François Ochard and Eugène Boudin, the latter of whom became his mentor and introduced him to "en plein air," or outdoor painting ...
The Jeju Uprising (04/26)
Han Kang's latest novel, We Do Not Part, delves into a dark part of Korean history known as the Jeju uprising, the Jeju massacre, or (in Korea) 'Jeju 4.3,' for the day it began. Jeju, Korea's largest island, located southwest of the Korean peninsula, is sometimes today called 'the Hawaii of Asia.' In the introduction to a recent article ...
The Submarine Cable System (04/26)
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 ...
Preventing Urban Bird Strikes (04/26)
Near the beginning of a section in María Ospina's novel Only a Little While Here that chronicles the southward migration of a scarlet tanager, the bird narrowly escapes a fate that dooms dozens of his fellow migrators. Traveling through the landscape of New York City on the way from Connecticut to the forests of Colombia, the tanager...
Agnes Martin's Relocation to New Mexico (04/26)
In
I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley, the protagonist is loosely inspired by the late
Agnes Martin, a famed abstract expressionist painter who spent a period of her life in New Mexico, during which the story is set. In 1967, Martin stopped painting and left New York City, then disappeared from public view for 18 months before reappearing in ...
Theme Cruises (04/26)
As fantastical as the Boy Talk cruise seems in
American Fantasy, it's roughly inspired by author Emma Straub's experiences aboard the annual
New Kids on the Block cruise. The energy and community her character Annie finds with the Talkers is something many theme cruise participants speak to as a core part of their experiences, ...
Classics of Queer Irish Literature (04/26)
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 Plow That Broke the Plains: A Dust Bowl Documentary (04/26)
One of the protagonists in The Antidote is Cleo Allfrey, a photographer dispatched by the Resettlement Administration to document life in Nebraska's Dust Bowl. She and others in the book mention a similar, real-world project: a documentary titled The Plow That Broke the Plains.
The Plow That Broke the Plains was a controversial, ...
