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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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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&...
