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The Creative Partnership of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (07/26)
Writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris have established themselves as leading names in the UK and beyond when it comes to writing about nature. Their work aims to foster reverence for the world around us and inspire us to defend it.
The seed of their first collaboration was planted when Oxford University Press removed several...
Chrysanthemums and Their Symbolism in Chinese Culture (07/26)
In Tom Lin's Babylon, South Dakota, Saul and Mei migrate from China to America with only some gold and a packet of chrysanthemum seeds. Once rooted in the soil, the flowers become almost a character in the story, taking over the land, refusing to be cut down or pruned, and surviving even the harshest of winters.
It was in China that ...
Bimetallism and the Free Silver Movement (07/26)
In his book of economic history 1873, Liaquat Ahamed connects much of the modern world to the events of 1873, which saw a stock market crash after years of frenzied speculation and, in the aftermath, the first international financial crisis. What made the crisis so impactful was not simply the bursting of the bubble but the Western ...
Celebrities Who Went Broke (07/26)
One of the main characters in Pool House is a celebrity actress who lists her lavish home on a short-term rental site to make ends meet. She had purchased it at the height of her fame and landed in hot water when the roles stopped coming. In real life, too, many well-known stars have spent beyond their means and gone from unimaginable ...
How the Poconos Became the Honeymoon Capital of the World (07/26)
Much of Ethan Joella's novel The Top of the World is set in the mid-1970s at the Red Maple Inn, a fictional couples-only resort in the Pocono Mountains. Located in northeast Pennsylvania, the Poconos are a rugged wilderness area that stretches some 2400 square miles. Today, it's an exceptionally popular vacation spot; at just two ...
Mansions of the Gilded Age (07/26)
In The Door in Penrose Forest, the Penrose in question, lending his name to the forest, the city near it, and the ruined mansion at the heart of the intrigue, was Cornelius Penrose, a robber baron from the Gilded Age who used his vast fortune to enrich the area surrounding Penrose (then called Williamsville) before a massive flood ...
Queer Spies and Secret Agents (07/26)
In 2012, queer audiences the world over celebrated a bisexual James Bond reveal in
Skyfall—when he is sexily threatened by a villain played by Javier Bardem, Daniel Craig's Bond retorts, 'What makes you think this is my first time?' The homoerotic scene proved popular among viewers, although the studio had previously
tried to cut ...
Art Therapy (07/26)
In The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue by Zoulfa Katouh, art becomes more than a creative outlet for Jihad. As she struggles with the death of her mother and the challenges of being a visibly Muslim teenager, art allows her to express emotions that often feel too overwhelming to say aloud. With elements of magical realism, Jihad's drawings ...
The Human Pace of "Hakuna Matata" (07/26)
In the early 1990s, when director Roger Allers went to Kenya, he heard the phrase 'hakuna matata' from one of the safari guides. Upon his return, he told lyricist Tim Rice about the breeziness of the phrase and Rice anchored
it in a quirky song for the movie
The Lion King, as a turn in the plot from grief to humor. Audiences of
The Lion ...
A Mad Eden Reading List (07/26)
In Mad Eden, Morgan Thomas constructs a story that is nonlinear, circuitous, and sometimes downright diversionary, thinking outside the narrative box. One of Ro's most charming qualities as a narrator is their tendency toward reference and allusion—to poems, books, scientific studies, and more. Below I explore some of the references...
New Journalism (07/26)
In 1963, Jimmy Breslin chronicled the death of John F. Kennedy from the point of view of the man who dug his grave. Instead of joining the big names in journalism in awaiting statements of grief from world leaders, he went to the cemetery where the US president was to be buried in order to write '
It's an Honor,' a piece that told the ...
The Nation of Islam (07/26)
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—...
Painter Agnes Martin (07/26)
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 ...
Famous Literary Descents into Hell (07/26)
R.F. Kuang's Katabasis is part of a long lineage of stories about traveling into the underworld; in fact, the novel's title is the Ancient Greek name for these stories. These are journeys that test the hero, reshape their understanding of life, and force them to confront questions of mortality and meaning; the hero's descents are never ...
The Golden Age of Adult Films (07/26)
Allie Rowbottom's novel
Lovers XXX is set in early 1980s Los Angeles against the backdrop of the adult film industry, during the waning days of what has since been called the 'golden age' of adult cinema. For a brief time, from the early 1970s through the early 1980s, hardcore porn films achieved a kind of cachet, earning splashy red-...
Nicky Calma, aka Tita Aida (07/26)
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 ...
The Nineteenth-Century Ordnance Survey of Ireland (06/26)
In the early nineteenth century, Ireland was newly under British rule due to the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished Ireland's parliament, and led the British government to have an interest in recording Irish tenement valuations for taxation purposes. In 1824, a historic ordnance survey commenced—Ireland was about to become ...
Chernozem: The National Soil of Ukraine (06/26)
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 ...
The Angels of Mons (06/26)
Daniel Kraus's novel Angel Down is set on a WWI battlefield in France. After a particularly brutal shelling, Private Cyril Bagger is sent along with a small group of others to "take care of" someone shrieking nonstop in No Man's Land. Instead of a wounded comrade, however, he discovers what appears to be an angel. One of...
Novels About Reality Television (06/26)
Aisling Rawle's debut novel The Compound takes place on an unnamed reality competition television show, where contestants live together, compete in challenges to earn rewards, and gradually get banished until only one remains to win the grand prize. As it borrows recognizable elements from popular reality shows like Survivor and Love ...
Books About Magical Portals (06/26)
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 ...
Books About MFA Programs (06/26)
Seduction Theory is framed as a student's creative writing MFA (Master of Fine Arts) thesis, and the book's main characters are instructors in the program. MFA programs can serve as uniquely effective settings for stories. Many authors have been through them themselves, and can portray the experience in an authentic way. The often-...
Spotlight on a Banned Author: Maia Kobabe (06/26)
When speaking about book bans, it rarely takes long for the 2019 graphic memoir
Gender Queer to enter the conversation. Its author Maia Kobabe, who is also the first contributing author to
Banned Together, never imagined that writing a memoir about eir experience growing up and coming out as nonbinary and asexual would lead to national ...
Two People, One Body: The Science Behind Conjoined Twins (06/26)
Christina Baker Kilne's latest novel, The Foursome, is a fictionalized version of the story of Sarah Yates, one of two sisters who married one of the original 'Siamese twins,' Chang and Eng Bunker. As the wife of a conjoined twin, Sarah must navigate not only the emotional complexities of her marriage but also the complications of a ...
Doppelgängers (06/26)
Isabel Waidner's novel As If focuses on two men who look uncannily like one another. Doppelgängers—unrelated people who look near-identical—have been a subject of fascination for centuries, and remain one today.
The word doppelgänger comes from German folklore, and translates to "double goer." It ...
Dave Eggers, the Artist (06/26)
The protagonist of Dave Eggers's novel Contrapposto is Cricket Dibb, a talented young man who wants a career as an artist. Throughout the book he relays his sheer bliss in creating a work of art he knows is good. In spite of his ability, he runs into roadblocks; galleries won't hang his work because they don't feel it's ...
Transgender Support Organizations Serving Rural America (06/26)
In Emily St. James's debut novel, Woodworking, the protagonist, Erica, must travel more than an hour each way, from Mitchell to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to attend a support group for transgender people. The group is small—seven people is 'a good turnout'—but it's there, and over the course of the book, the group's existence ...
Samantha Allen's Reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Puck (06/26)
One of the most interesting choices in Samantha Allen's Puck is to not only turn Puck and Robyn into two separate characters, but a romantic pairing. It is almost like an inside joke about the original text between the author and readers, many of whom will know that in the source material, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck and...
No Planet B (06/26)
The title of Earth 7 raises the question, right away, of more than one Earth. 'Earth 7' is not another planet, however; in the book, that name refers to a collection of Earth 'traces,' the preserved genetic materials of various Earth lifeforms. The people of Mars are intent on collecting these traces, so they might be able to mimic Earth-...
Tree Women of Mythology (06/26)
In We Could Be Anyone, one of the main characters, Lola, is turning into a tree, and she references instances from mythology where this happened to a female character. It's a surprisingly common phenomenon when looking at myths of various cultures. It is often specified what kind of tree a woman becomes, but it's generally unclear whether...
The Tibetan Book of the Dead (06/26)
In Ann Patchett's novel Whistler, a pivotal scene occurs between the primary character, Daphne Fuller, and her former stepfather, Eddie. In it, they discuss Eddie's beliefs about the afterlife, which he says he formed in part by reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the English title for a ...
The Role of the Golem in Jewish Folklore (06/26)
In her debut novel, Odessa, author Gabrielle Sher reimagines the legend of the golem to explore historical persecution of Jews, as well as notions of power and control. In traditional Jewish folklore, a golem is a being formed of earth or clay, given life by its creator using ritualistic incantations and scripture.
The word 'golem' comes...
Books About the Korean War and Its Aftermath (06/26)
Eve J. Chung's historical novel The Young Will Remember explores the history of the Korean War through the perspective of a Chinese American journalist who finds herself in North Korean territory after a plane crash. Falling between World War II and the Vietnam War, both of which were heavily publicized in American media, the Korean War ...
The Rise of Prediction Markets (06/26)
Perhaps no current event better embodies Prophecy's concerns about prediction, Big Tech, and ethics than the rise of prediction markets. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi have raked in billions of dollars with the idea of placing bets on the future, from the outcome of football matches to the front lines of war. What are they, and how ...
The Life and Death of Elizabeth Barton (06/26)
Born in the early 1500s in Kent, England, Elizabeth Barton was known throughout her short life by various sobriquets: while her supporters called her the 'Nun of Kent' and the 'Holy Maid of Kent' both during and after her life, her detractors labeled her the 'Mad Maid of Kent' after she confessed to having fabricated her visions. But what...
The Double-Slit Experiment (06/26)
Something I found especially compelling while reading Entangled States by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan was the way it questions rigid categories, both in physics and in how we understand people and the world around us. The double-slit experiment captures this beautifully: matter and light behave as both waves and particles, resisting any ...
Short Stories in The New Yorker (06/26)
Four stories from Sarah Braunstein's
Baby in a Box were first published in
The New Yorker, a magazine with a 101-year history of showcasing excellent short fiction from the likes of John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and William Trevor.
While short stories can be difficult to ...
The Korean American Immigrant Experience (06/26)
Korean immigration to the US occurred in three waves: first from 1903-1949, second from 1950-1964, and third from 1965 on. The first wave was mostly comprised of laborers who were brought in from Korea to Hawaii to work on pineapple and sugar plantations. The second wave began after Korea's liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 and ...
Red Lines and Anticipatory Obedience (06/26)
In Ali Smith's Gliff, two children living in a sinister surveillance state in the not-too-distant future return home to find a line of red paint circling their house. In this dystopian society where all-pervasive technology tracks and controls every aspect of people's lives, these red painted lines are used to flag those who have been ...
The Pulaski (06/26)
In Hotshot: A Life on Fire, author River Selby states more than once that their favorite firefighting tool is a Pulaski. The implement is similar to an axe one might use for chopping wood, but it terminates in a two-sided head, with an axe blade on one side and an adze or mattock on the other. (An adze is similar to a hoe, with the ...
Edgar Allan Poe's Marriage to Virginia Clemm (06/26)
Edgar Allan Poe looms over
Fox—quite literally, in fact. Mr. Fox has a large bronze bust of Poe with a raven on his shoulder, a prize for winning a poetry contest, displayed in his office. But even beyond the bust, Poe recurs throughout the narrative. Not only does
Fox become a detective story,
a form Poe invented, Mr. Fox idealizes...
Memoirs about Mothers (06/26)
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 Evolution of Alcoholics Anonymous (06/26)
Wally Lamb's novel The River Is Waiting centers on the experiences of Corby Ledbetter, who is responsible for an unthinkable accident while intoxicated. Addicted to alcohol and lorazepam (an anti-anxiety medication in the benzodiazepine family), Ledbetter begins attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings to help him remain clean and ...
Romance Novels with Complex Themes (06/26)
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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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