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The Fall of Constantinople (10/22)
Parts of Anthony Doerr's novel
Cloud Cuckoo Land take place during the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE. Constantinople (now known as Istanbul) had long been an important trading hub by the time it was officially established by Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 330 CE. The ruler moved his government to the city, and it ...
Death in Venice: Book vs. Film (10/22)
Which is better — the book or the film? That question is often debated when a much-loved book is turned into a movie. Death in Venice — the novella written by Thomas Mann and published in 1912 — is perhaps the author's best-known work, not least because it was made into a film by the great Italian director Luchino ...
How Short Can Stories Get? (10/22)
Hey, wait! Where are you going? This isn't going to be a long article. I promise!
In fact, it may well be as short as a piece of flash fiction, which sounds like a creation for the age of Twitter, but actually goes much further back. At least as far back as around 600 BCE when many of the tales attributed to Aesop are believed to have ...
Birchbark Books (09/22)
Tookie, the protagonist of
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, works in a Minneapolis bookstore called
Birchbark Books, which is owned by Erdrich herself both in reality and this work of fiction. As is shown in the novel, where the author appears as a minor character, the store serves the local community and carries a wide selection of ...
Aphasia (09/22)
In Lean Fall Stand, the main character suffers a massive and debilitating stroke during a whiteout storm in Antarctica. After being rescued, he returns home to England to begin the long, arduous task of learning to speak again. The medical term for the loss of the ability to understand or express speech is aphasia. It is usually caused by...
Eleanor of Aquitaine (09/22)
In Lauren Groff's novel Matrix, the protagonist Marie (based on 12th century poet Marie de France) spends the majority of her life pining for Eleanor of Aquitaine. This real-life queen of France and England serves as Marie's foil and the source of considerable turmoil, as both women seek to hold and maintain power over their very ...
The Art and Political Imprisonment of Ai Weiwei (09/22)
Ai Weiwei is an influential creator, whose career has given rise to a great variety of works in many mediums. Accordingly, describing him merely as an artist does not do him justice, as he wears many hats, being a visual artist, architect, documentarian and writer. Ultimately, all of his work is underpinned with a strong thread of ...
Stave Churches (09/22)
It's no secret that Lars Mytting loves trees. He wrote a novel titled
The Sixteen Trees of the Somme (2017), and is known for his international bestseller
Norwegian Wood (2015), a nonfiction guide to sources of firewood that gives instructions on how to chop, stack and cure wood for burning. With
The Bell in the Lake, he continues with ...
The Brothers Karamazov (09/22)
The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang is a modern reimagining of the novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879) by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). The plot of Dostoevsky's book centers around a family of three brothers — Dmitri, Ivan and Alexei (aka Alyosha) — and the murder of their father, Fyodor Karamazov. As Dmitri ...
Imposter Syndrome (09/22)
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first identified '
imposter phenomenon,' popularly known as 'imposter syndrome,' in 1978. It is characterized by a belief that one's success is accidental. Clance and Imes' research was based on high achieving women who couldn't accept the success they had created and were frightened others ...
Movie Columnist Louella Parsons (09/22)
Louella Parsons (1881-1972) was a pioneer newspaperwoman, a famous movie columnist and, for many years, a principal purveyor of Hollywood gossip to the world. Nevertheless, according to Samantha Barbas, author of an extremely thorough
biography of Parsons, it was only in 1949 that she first veered into the realm of scandal by revealing ...
The Library War Service (09/22)
The War Librarian features quiet, bookish Emmaline Balakin, who, despite the dangers of World War I, chooses to set off on an adventure by serving as a volunteer librarian to American service members. Her new position sends her overseas to a frontline hospital in France where she must contend with surly officers, German bombers and social...
The Windrush Generation (09/22)
The protagonist of Mike Gayle's novel All the Lonely People is a member of the 'Windrush generation,' which refers to people from the Caribbean who emigrated to the United Kingdom between 1948 and 1971.
Facing a severe labor shortage after World War II, the British government began encouraging mass immigration from citizens of its ...
The Real-Life Work of Rabih Alameddine (09/22)
In The Wrong End of the Telescope, Rabih Alameddine creates a character that appears to be a stand-in for himself, described from the perspective of the novel's narrator, Mina. Mina paints the character as a friend of hers who has written essays about his experiences with refugees as well as fiction. The author's real-life work parallels ...
Harlem and the End of the Civil Rights Era (09/22)
Harlem, a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, was a crucial setting during the Civil Rights Era, which spanned approximately 1950 to 1964, arguably culminating with the passage of the controversial Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Great Migration in the early 20th century brought a considerable number of Black residents to the neighborhood, and...
Haitian Art (09/22)
In the back matter of What Storm, What Thunder, author Myriam J. A. Chancy cites paintings by Trinidadian artist LeRoy Clarke (who passed away in July 2021) as a major inspiration for her novel. Clarke created a cycle of nearly a hundred paintings about Haiti, many of them depicting the 2010 earthquake. Similarly, Chancy was moved to ...
Cassandra of Troy (09/22)
Like most stories and characters from Greek mythology, the exact origin of Cassandra of Troy is unknown, though she may have first appeared as a character in the Iliad, composed around the 8th century BCE, where she is described as 'the fairest of Priam's daughters' and 'fair as golden Venus' (in the English translation by Samuel Butler)....
Abdulrazak Gurnah (09/22)
Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Tanzanian-born British author of
Afterlives, is the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first Black writer to win it since Toni Morrison in 1993. He was
awarded the prize 'for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf ...
Holocaust Refugees and the British White Papers (09/22)
'To fight or flee?' This is a question the Polish resistance fighters must ask themselves in Judy Batalion's The Light of Days. As the German army advanced across Europe and persecution of the Jews intensified, those who chose to flee had to decide where to go. As their own countries were invaded, some European Jews emigrated to ...
Who Is Sallie Mae? A Brief History of Student Lending in America (09/22)
In 1972 the Student Loan Marketing Association, or Sallie Mae as it came to be known, was created as a government sponsored enterprise to provide and manage education loans in the United States.
The conditions for the student loan industry were established much earlier. At the beginning of the 20th century, most families would only be...
Suicide Among Combat Veterans (08/22)
War casts a long shadow, and no more so than when combat veterans return home carrying the heavy burden of physical and psychological wounds. As a result, one of the most urgent issues facing the United States military today is the epidemic of suicide among veterans. According to a
2021 article, since the terrorist attacks of September 11...
The Seven Sisters: How to Build an Old Girls' Network (08/22)
In Karin Tanabe's novel A Woman of Intelligence, some characters attend all-women's colleges. The narrator Katharina graduated from Vassar and another lead, Ava, graduated from Mount Holyoke. Katharina's occasional babysitter, Sarah Beach, studies at Barnard. These colleges and four other historically women's colleges — Bryn Mawr, ...
Eshu: The Yoruba God of Mischief (08/22)
Eshu (also spelled Esu, and also known as Elegba) is a powerful deity in the Ifa religion of the Yoruba people of Western Africa. He is an orisha, a figure that can be a representation of human or divine characteristics or concepts, as well as aspects of nature, such as rivers. A primordial orisha, Eshu represents mischief. However, he is...
The Life Changing Reality of Bionic Limbs (08/22)
The protagonist of Nnedi Okorafor's novel Noor has undergone a number of procedures and augmentations to reduce her physical discomfort and improve her standard of living. Born with missing and deformed limbs, and injured years later in a car accident, being fitted with sophisticated bionic limbs grants her the strength — both ...
Q&A with Jackie Polzin (08/22)
Jackie Polzin talks about her debut novel, Brood, and how her own experience caring for chickens contributed to it.
First of all, why chickens?
When I was 30, my partner and I got chickens. They were my first pets since childhood. I compensated by giving them a lot of attention, and that attention inspired the book. I knew I could ...
High and Common "Magick" in Past and Present Narratives (08/22)
Of all the commanding aspects of All of Us Villains, the concept of 'magick' arguably stands as the story's most significant. The residents of Ilvernath treat its existence much as they would electricity and running water, and in many ways are just as reliant on its practical applications as we in the real world are on our smartphones. An...
Mermaids and Water Spirits Around the World (08/22)
Simi, the main character in Natasha Bowen's Skin of the Sea, is a Mami Wata, a water deity from West African mythology who is described in the novel as having a mermaid form. While the red-headed Ariel of Disney fame might be the dominant image of what a mermaid looks like for many people, they come in many forms from all over the world, ...
Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon (08/22)
Located on the Mediterranean Sea, tiny Lebanon has the highest per capita population of Syrian refugees in the world, hosting an estimated 1.5 million who have fled from its war-torn neighbor. To put this in perspective, Lebanon is about half the size of Massachusetts with a population of just under eight million as of 2019. It has long ...
Franz Kafka and "The Hunter Gracchus" (08/22)
In Joy Williams'
Harrow, two characters discuss Franz Kafka's '
The Hunter Gracchus,' a short story written in 1917 and published posthumously in 1931, along with a document that was marked as a fragment, which appears to be an addendum to the story.
Franz Kafka was born into a well-to-do Jewish family on July 3, 1883 in Prague. He had ...
The Bolla in Albanian Folklore (08/22)
Pajtim Statovci's novel Bolla takes its name from a creature in Albanian folklore. The narrative is interspersed with a reimagined version of this feared monster's origins, with thematic parallels to his characters' lives that enhance the emotional impact of their story while commenting on the importance of storytelling as a means of ...
The Psychic Industry in the United States (08/22)
In Nan Fischer's novel Some of It Was Real, psychic-medium entertainer Sylvie Young comes under the scrutiny of Thomas Holmes, a reporter determined to expose her as a 'grief vampire' who takes advantage of people mourning loved ones. Whether or not you believe their claims of clairvoyance and communication with the dead are real or ...
The Swastika Before and After Nazism (08/22)
Ru Freeman uses the swastika symbol outside of its prevailing cultural narrative in the landscape of
Sleeping Alone's 'The Wake,' a story about a cult leader who believes he is an incarnation of Christ. He spends his last days in a modest New York City apartment with an ordinary family, in a room called 'the Swastika Room.' Freeman ...
Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (08/22)
The novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019), author of The Bluest Eye, Beloved and many other famous works, is often considered one of the greatest and most influential American writers. However, as Elaine Castillo draws attention to in How to Read Now, Morrison is known mostly for her novels and less for what is arguably one of the most ...
The Oregon Trail Video Game (08/22)
Before they became video game developers, the main characters in Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow were kids growing up in the 1980s, and like countless other Generation X kids, one of the first video games they fell in love with was The Oregon Trail. Many people of this age group probably remember hunting for deer ...
The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 (08/22)
In
Lightning Strike, William Kent Krueger includes an author's note about the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 (also known as Public Law 959 or the Adult Vocational Training Program), which features as a tragic backdrop to the overall story. According to Krueger, the program was 'the brainchild of a group of men appointed by President Harry ...
Nomadic Housing: Somalia and Beyond (08/22)
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that in 2020 there were more than
82 million people displaced from their homes due to human rights issues such as violence and persecution worldwide. And, for as long as humans have existed, people have lived as nomads in various parts of the world, including Somalia, as detailed in Shugri Said ...
The Spirituality and Symbolism of Buddhist Art (08/22)
In today's world, art therapy has become an increasingly popular option. According to the American Art Therapy Association (AATA), this experiential treatment 'is used to improve cognitive and sensorimotor functions, foster self-esteem and self-awareness, cultivate emotional resilience, promote insight, enhance social skills, reduce and ...
Young Adult Fantasy Novels Featuring Black Girls (08/22)
An exciting addition to young adult fantasy, Liselle Sambury's Blood Like Magic is a thrilling story of a Black teenage girl discovering her magical powers in a genre that has been disproportionately filled with white main characters for a long time. There are now plenty of fantastic young adult books out there where Black girls are no ...
Lewy Body Dementia (07/22)
In Matt Godman's novel,
Carolina Moonset, one of the main characters has Lewy Body Dementia (LBD), a degenerative condition similar to Alzheimer's disease.
According to the
National Institute of Health, 'Lewy body dementia (LBD) is a disease associated with abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein in the brain. These ...
San Francisco's Zen Hospice (07/22)
In an essay from Serious Face titled 'A House at the End of the World,' Jon Mooallem writes about Zen Hospice, a palliative care facility opened in San Francisco in 1986 by members of the local Zen Buddhist community who were heartsick seeing unhoused people dying on the streets. They had the idea to open a hospice that would offer them ...
Penobscot Indian Island Reservation (07/22)
Night of the Living Rez takes place on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine, home of the Penobscot Nation tribe of Native Americans, also known as the Panawahpskek Nation. Panawahpskek is the name for the Penobscot in Abenaki, the language used by these and other Indigenous Algonquin peoples in Maine and Quebec. The island ...
The Science of Forgiveness (07/22)
Could you forgive the person who murdered your beloved son?
Weeks after Debra Trice was convicted of the first-degree murder of Raymond Jones she received a letter. It was from Margaret Jones, Raymond's mother. Mrs. Jones wrote, '[Y]ou have my forgiveness. So, when you feel you cannot make it, look up and talk to God, Jehovah is his ...
The Canadian Shield (07/22)
In the acknowledgments at the end of her book, A Town Called Solace, author Mary Lawson writes, 'The town of Solace exists only in my imagination, but the setting is very real: the vast and beautiful area of lakes and rocks and forests known as the Canadian Shield, in Northern Ontario.'
A continental shield is a large expanse of land ...
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (07/22)
On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, having been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.
The Rosenbergs met in the Young Communist League in 1936 and married in 1939. Julius worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps as an engineer, and though Ethel (né...
Misogynistic Themes in Murder Ballads (07/22)
In The Killing Hills, which takes place in Kentucky, misogyny manifests in attitudes toward key female characters, notably the town sheriff. Additionally, the act of femicide is a central theme and a reminder of cultural aspects of female subjugation, including the murder ballad, a song format that is notably popular as a sub-genre of ...
Rare Earth Metals and Global Politics (07/22)
In The Brilliant Abyss, Helen Scales draws attention to growing international interest in rare earth mining. Rare earths look set to overtake fossil fuels as the most valued energy resource on the planet, as they are key to producing green technology. What will this profound shift mean for oil- and gas-producing countries?
In the 20th ...
Jaipur, Rajasthan (India's "Pink City") (07/22)
Alka Joshi's novel The Secret Keeper of Jaipur takes place in the city of Jaipur, the capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan and home to over three million people.
Founded in 1727 by Maharaja Jai Singh II, Jaipur is said to be the first completely planned city in India. The Maharaja became aware that his current capital, Amber (now ...
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) (07/22)
The narrator of Rivka Galchen's novel Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is Katharina Kepler, mother of noted astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler was born in 1571 in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg, a German territory within the Holy Roman Empire. His father, whom Kepler pronounced 'an immoral, rough and quarrelsome soldier,' was a ...
Literary Dublin (06/22)
The backdrop of Sally Rooney's
Beautiful World, Where Are You is the city of Dublin and its environs. Rooney herself lives in this
UNESCO City of Literature, a metropolis that boasts a flourishing literary scene and an impressive inventory of influential authors, poets and playwrights. The streets of the vibrant capital are infused ...
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