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What Is Moral Injury? (11/24)
Ian Fritz's memoir, What the Taliban Told Me, chronicles the author's difficulties processing his role in events that resulted in death and injury to others. Not officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Fritz discusses a category of non-physical harm that military experts denote as "moral injury,"...
How to Read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (11/24)
In Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's novel But the Girl, the main character and first-person narrator is writing her PhD thesis on the work of Sylvia Plath. Plath is an iconic writer whose poetry is considered canonical by many but who is also sometimes dismissed as being a mere preoccupation for disillusioned teenage girls and young women. It seems ...
Nasser's Expulsion of the Jews from Egypt (11/24)
Throughout Roman Year, André Aciman repeatedly and explicitly references the political policies of President Gamal Abdel Nasser as responsible for his Jewish family's refugee status in Rome for the period of the memoir's titular year. The number of Jews in Egypt is estimated to have been 75,000 to 80,000 at its height in 1948. From ...
The 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis (11/24)
Patriot by Alexei Navalny covers the Russian opposition leader's life from his childhood in the USSR in the 1980s to his final days in an Arctic penal colony in 2024. One important moment in the development of his political consciousness that he outlines in his memoir is the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, an event which eventually ...
Unnamed Press (11/24)
Maureen Sun's The Sisters K was published by Los Angeles-based independent publisher Unnamed Press. Founded in 2014 by Chris Heiser and Olivia Taylor Smith, Unnamed Press was intended to be a publisher for international voices and translated literature but has since moved into domestic fare. The Press declares itself 'committed to ...
Books About Native Residential School Experiences (11/24)
Recent years have seen increased awareness of the ongoing trauma created by historical residential schools for Native children in North America, which were operated by government bodies and churches beginning in approximately the mid-1800s, and lasting until the 1960s in the United States and the 1990s in Canada. Hundreds of thousands of ...
Barikamà: An Italian Workers' Co-operative (11/24)
A radish farm worker in Celina Baljeet Basra's Happy relays a tale of injustice at his previous job: a group of exploited immigrants, an attack, and an uprising. This story is one we might imagine to be derived from a compilation of worker mistreatments, but the specifics are based on a true story of immigrant fruit pickers in Rosarno, in...
The History of the Everglades (11/24)
For thousands of years, the southern half of Florida was one of the most vibrant, unique ecosystems on Earth, composed of water flowing over land, interspersed with plant and animal life in a massive mosaic of wetlands. What came to be known as the Everglades was formed by fresh water spilling out from Lake Okeechobee and flowing slowly ...
Novels Set on Vacations (11/24)
Weike Wang's
Rental House takes place during a couple's two vacations — one to Cape Cod and the other to the Catskills. Here are a few other novels in which vacations are equally illuminating about the characters' personalities and relationship dynamics.
Cape Cod:
Sandwich (2024) by Catherine Newman: Cape Cod is thick with ...
Why Is Insomnia on the Rise? (11/24)
Each of the five protagonists in M. L. Rio's novella
Graveyard Shift struggles, in some form, with lack of sleep.
Insomnia, which is a persistent difficulty in getting adequate quality sleep, can have a significant negative impact on both our physical and mental health, with effects including anxiety, depression, memory problems, a ...
Radio Astronomy and the Big Bang (11/24)
The narrator of The Avian Hourglass wants to be a radio astronomer, a revelation that caused me to realize that I don't actually know anything about that kind of astronomy. (For a moment I thought it was astronomy done over the radio so you wouldn't get to actually see anything cool.) I've since learned that radio astronomy is the use of ...
Protesting Operation Alert (11/24)
Alice McDermott's novel about the humanitarian efforts of American corporate wives living in Vietnam in the early '60s, Absolution, takes a detour to New York City in the previous decade, where Tricia, the protagonist, and her radicalized friend Stella participate in sit-ins against the compulsory Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
In ...
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) Navy (11/24)
The plot of Mark Helprin's novel The Oceans and the Stars imagines the United States at war with Iran. At one point the heroes of the book end up in the Indian Ocean searching for an Iranian vessel, ultimately battling a force the US captain refers to as the NEDSA, the naval arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (Sepah-e Pasdaran-e ...
The 2023 Spiel des Jahres: Dorfromantik (11/24)
In his section on European games in Around the World in Eighty Games, Marcus du Sautoy discusses the Spiel des Jahres ('Game of the Year'), the most prestigious award in tabletop gaming, awarded annually since 1979 by a jury of journalists who write about games. The Spiel des Jahres carries no cash prize, but certainly the winners (which ...
Primary Sources: Stories of Palestinian Life (11/24)
Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message implores readers to consider listening to marginalized people speak on their own experiences. This seems uncontroversial until Coates sheds light on his findings that a startling amount of what the average American knows about Palestine does not come from Palestinians themselves. In the spirit of Coates' body...
Traian Popovici: The Man Who Saved Jews in Czernowitz (11/24)
The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold tells the story of Frederieke 'Rieke' Teitler, a young Jewish girl trying to survive the atrocities of Nazi-controlled Romania. Throughout the war, many of Rieke's friends are deported to Transnistria, a small country to the east where Jews were sent to live in camps and ghettos. Rieke and her family, ...
The Ghanaian Tradition of Day Names (11/24)
There are many different tribes and cultural influences in Ghana; therefore, Ghanaian culture shouldn't be assumed to be a monolith. However, the tradition of naming children after the day they are born is a common practice in the country. It originates from the Akan people — the largest ethnic group in Ghana, making up 47.3% of the...
Buffalo Bill and His Wild West Show (11/24)
In Maylis de Kerangal's new short story collection, Canoes, a woman moves from Paris to Golden, Colorado, a mining town in the foothills of the Rockies. At the top of Lookout Mountain, overlooking Golden, Buffalo Bill is buried—which surprises the woman, who thought Buffalo Bill was a fictional character.
Who was Buffalo Bill...
Writers' Experiences with Aphasia (11/24)
In
Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, a combination of popular science and memoir, linguist Julie Sedivy shares that one of her worst fears is that an illness or injury will cause her to
develop aphasia, a type of disorder that impacts a person's ability to use both spoken and written language. After this confession, she goes on to ...
Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project (11/24)
Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.
Ringelblum was born in ...
Graphic Memoirs Exploring Physical and Mental Health Struggles (10/24)
In her graphic memoir Something, Not Nothing, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt chronicles her partner's declining health, her eventual death, and the immense grief that followed. The medium of graphic memoir—in which the author documents their experiences using a combination of text and artwork—can be particularly powerful when used ...
Revenge Westerns (10/24)
Revenge is an arduous task, and tales of retribution are especially suited for the western setting. In the popular imagination, the American West is lawless and brutal, besotted with everyday bloodshed, and so revenge seems like an appropriate goal. Nearly every writer of westerns has a vigilante or two somewhere in their lineup. It's a ...
Sharks in the Water: German U-boats in World War I (10/24)
Douglas Brunt’s The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel tells the story of Rudolf Diesel, the German inventor of the internal combustion engine. After the Industrial Revolution, industry had become king, and Diesel’s groundbreaking invention produced more power, used cheaper fuel and didn’t require a team of laborers to ...
Sun Yat-sen (10/24)
In the novel The House of Doors, Lesley Hamlyn volunteers as a translator for Sun Yat-sen's political movement in Penang, Malaysia. Sun Yat-sen is one of the foremost figures in Chinese political history. By leading China from an empire to a republic, he also became an important inspiration to other independence movements of twentieth-...
Bolivia's Cerro Rico and the Mining God El Tío (10/24)
During the height of the Spanish colonization of Latin America in the 16th and early 17th centuries, conquistadors forced enslaved workers to extract vast amounts of silver from mines in Cerro Rico ('rich hill' in Spanish) near the city of Potosí (in what is now Bolivia), which once held the largest silver deposits on Earth. As many ...
The MANIAC Computer (10/24)
The title of Benjamin Labatut's novel The MANIAC refers to the computer—the fastest of its kind at the time—developed by the Hungarian American physicist John von Neumann. During the Second World War, von Neumann was a consultant on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he focused on the detailed mathematical ...
Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (10/24)
Both the first hospital and the first medical school in the United States were founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, landing it the nickname 'City of Medicine.' Therefore, it seems only natural that it also became home to the first school in the world dedicated to providing women with a full formal education in the field, allowing them ...
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (10/24)
The emotional crisis faced by the protagonists of Jen Ferguson's Those Pink Mountain Nights stems from the disappearance of a mother and daughter from a First Nations community in Alberta, Canada. Although the book keeps its focus tight, on the intimate stories of a handful of teens, the characters occasionally reference the larger issue ...
Music Therapy and Autism Spectrum Disorder (10/24)
In The Schubert Treatment, musician Claire Oppert shares her experiences with the healing power of music. A classically trained cellist, Oppert was inspired by the work of her physician family members to begin playing music in nursing homes and medical facilities. One of these facilities was the Adam Shelton Center in Saint-Denis, France,...
The Meiji Restoration Era (1868–1889) (10/24)
Fictionalized events during Emperor Meiji's ascent to power set the scene for Danielle Trussoni's The Puzzle Box, including the titular puzzle box at the heart of this thriller. The Meiji Restoration era (1868–1889) is widely recognized as laying the foundation for modernizing Japan, and The Puzzle Box references Japan's first ...
Movies and Romantic Idealization (10/24)
Movies are great escapism, and why shouldn't they be? An art form in its own right, rich in imagery and metaphor, the cinema offers many lessons that can be learned about ourselves and others just by watching someone else's drama play out on screen.
But while movies can be healing in the right circumstances, and have been proven to aid...
Amaterasu Ōmikami (10/24)
In Yoko Tawada's novels Scattered All Over the Earth and Suggested in the Stars, characters retell stories from the Kojiki, translated as 'Records of Ancient Matters' or 'Records of Ancient Things.' The Kojiki is the oldest text from Japan, written mostly for the purpose of establishing a clear line of descent from the Shinto gods and the...
The French East India Companies (10/24)
In David Diop's novel
Beyond the Door of No Return, French botanist Michel Adanson journeys across 18
th-century Senegal to discover the fate of a woman who was kidnapped. At the time of the story, much of the area was either directly or indirectly under the control of the French East India Company, a less-known competitor to
the ...
Bringing Them Home: The Use of DNA to Identify Remains at the Dozier School for Boys (10/24)
The Reformatory, the newest novel by celebrated author Tananarive Due, tells the horrific story of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. Once the country's largest reform school, Dozier supposedly intended to rehabilitate its students into productive citizens, but instead the boys were terrorized and tortured, and some were even ...
George Orwell and 1984 (10/24)
Sandra Newman's novel Julia is based on George Orwell's classic work of fiction 1984, retold from the point of view of the protagonist's lover. Who, though, was George Orwell, and how did 1984 come to be?
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Bengal, India. His father, Richard, was employed in the India ...
The Fram: Polar Ship (10/24)
Helen Czerski's book The Blue Machine explains how Earth's oceanic system functions, including some discussion of the work that went into discovering that information. A few expeditions that contributed greatly were those of the Norwegian ship the Fram, which explored the Arctic and Antarctic oceans in the late 19th and early 20th ...
Jian Bing (10/24)
In C Pam Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey, which takes place in a fictional near-future of worsening climate change and severely reduced biodiversity, the main character chooses to work as an elite chef for a wealthy employer on an isolated mountain in Italy rather than give up access to the ingredients she loves that are rapidly vanishing ...
The Carville National Leprosarium (09/24)
King of the Armadillos by Wendy Chin-Tanner takes place partly in a federal institute in Louisiana where young protagonist Victor Chin is sent to be treated for Hansen's disease — commonly known as leprosy — in the 1950s.
This inpatient center, often referred to simply as Carville, was built on the site of an abandoned ...
Free People of Color and Their Roles in the American Slave Trade (09/24)
In Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend, one of Annis's enslavers is a woman. Typically, when people think about enslavers and those perpetuating slavery as a system, they often think about white men. Some may find it surprising that women played a significant role in the slave trade, too. Furthermore, white people were not the only ones who ...
Author Homes in Massachusetts (09/24)
One of the topics explored in Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel is Herman Melville's home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Arrowhead, which he went into significant debt to purchase but where he spent what seem to have been the happiest and most productive years of his life. Dayswork additionally mentions the homes of Nathaniel ...
The Beginnings of British Ballet (09/24)
Lucy Ashe's The Dance of the Dolls is populated by historical figures whose presence in the fictional narrative enmeshes the story within the real history of British ballet. Long associated with the royal courts of France and Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, the art form only became established in Britain in the early 20th century. ...
Monarch Butterfly Habitat Restoration on Roadsides and Beyond (09/24)
As Ben Goldfarb notes in Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, we're in the midst of an insect apocalypse. It's largely agreed now that our planet is experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, and insect species are among the most imperiled.
Habitat loss is a critical component, driven by road construction ...
The United Fruit Company: The Scourge of Central and South America (09/24)
In Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, ...
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (09/24)
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead is largely based on Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) wrote 15 novels during his career, the eighth of which he ponderously dubbed The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone ...
The World of Food Delivery App Work (09/24)
One story in Jamel Brinkley's collection Witness is about a woman who keeps receiving friendly notes from the same food delivery person and drafts long, personal letters in reply. In her letters, Gloria, a room service server at a hotel, reflects that food delivery apps are responsible for eliminating jobs like hers, but expresses ...
American Entertainers Visiting the Vietnam Warfront (09/24)
In California Golden, Mindy has a transformative experience touring Vietnam during the war that makes her question her chosen career in show business. The Vietnam War was a transformative experience for America in the 1960s, impacting virtually everyone in some way. While the involvement of the United States in Vietnam was a profoundly ...
Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone Energy Accumulator (09/24)
In Edan Lepucki's novel Time's Mouth, one of the time travelers enhances their power using an obscure invention by a Viennese psychologist, Wilhelm Reich.
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was born in what is now Ukraine to Jewish parents, both of whom died when Reich was a child. After enlisting in the Austrian army during World War I, he ...
Ted Bundy and the Myth of the Charming Serial Killer (09/24)
Jessica Knoll's Bright Young Women, a fictionalized take on the crimes of Ted Bundy, portrays its Bundy-inspired killer as an unimpressive man sensationalized as a charming genius. This echoes real-life critiques of the way Bundy has been cast by the media and law enforcement over the years.
Bundy was one of the twentieth century's ...
1940 U.S. Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie (09/24)
The Golden Gate by Amy Chua begins with the murder of Walter Wilkinson, who is a fictionalized version of Wendell Willkie, a Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkinson and Willkie both died in 1944, but their cause of death was vastly different — Willkie died of a heart attack instead of ...
The Civil Rights Movement in Maine (09/24)
Rachel Eliza Griffiths' debut novel Promise is set in Maine at a time when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was spreading to that state. Racial tensions were rising as white folks who resented calls for equality began viewing the presence of Blacks, no matter how few, as a threat to their existence.
Although racism...
