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The Legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft (06/22)
Although the word 'feminist' did not enter popular political discourse until over a century after her death, the published works of Mary Wollstonecraft show her to be one of the world's pioneering feminist writers. As Love and Fury explores in some detail, the events of Wollstonecraft's life were crucial in cementing her ideologies and ...
The Importance of "Tech Company" Status (06/22)
In Big Vape, Jamie Ducharme describes an existential crisis at the heart of Juul; while its founders (and many of its employees) saw the business as a tech start-up, to the Food and Drug Administration (and much of the public) it looked like a manufacturer of tobacco products. This distinction is not a mere matter of brand identity —...
Sweatshops in Asia (06/22)
In Joan Silber's Secrets of Happiness, Ethan's father, Gil, has a lucrative career in the women's clothing industry, frequently jetting off to parts of Asia to oversee the outsourcing of production. Elsewhere in the book, a character named Bud takes a job with an organization in Cambodia campaigning to improve working conditions in ...
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 ...
Belle da Costa Greene (06/22)
Belle da Costa Greene was an American librarian who ran the private library belonging to banker John Pierpont Morgan (better known as J.P. Morgan) and later to his son. During her time working for the Morgans, Greene acquired many rare books, manuscripts and other items for her employers, ultimately contributing to what is now an
...
The Republic of Chad (06/22)
Much of Ken Follett's novel Never is set in present-day Chad, a landlocked nation located in north-central Africa. Officially known as The Republic of Chad, at 496,000 square miles, the country is the fifth largest on the continent.
Chad has a long and complex history; it's one of the areas scientists believe may have been the cradle ...
The Significance of Black Hair in the United States (06/22)
In her debut thriller, The Other Black Girl, Zakiya Dalila Harris includes but does not explain certain concepts linked to Black life. This may be an intentional choice to move past the expectation that racialized and other marginalized authors should clarify concepts and issues that aren't commonplace in mainstream white society for ...
Moonlight Schools (06/22)
At one point in Kim Michele Richardson's novel The Book Woman's Daughter, protagonist Honey Lovett discovers that a family friend attended a Moonlight School. The Moonlight Schools were the brainchild of Cora Wilson Stewart (1875-1958), an elementary school teacher and school superintendent in Rowan County, Kentucky. Born in the community...
Grief Memoirs (06/22)
Carol Smith's
Crossing the River recounts the death of her young son, Christopher, in combination with stories of other people who have experienced loss. In an interview with
Hippocampus Magazine, Smith recalls memoirs about grief that have been influential for her. Below are some of the books she mentions, along with other significant ...
Cultural Recognition of the Tulsa Race Massacre (06/22)
In
The Ground Breaking, Scott Ellsworth notes that for many Americans, the first exposure they received to the events of 1921 in Tulsa came from a dramatic portrayal on an episode of the HBO series
Watchmen that aired October 20, 2019. The show received credit for spurring a renewed interest in the Tulsa Race Massacre in the lead up to ...
Classical Music and the Cultural Revolution (06/22)
In
Swimming Back to Trout River, Dawn and Momo are united by their love of music during the turbulent years of the
Cultural Revolution, particularly Western classical music. There is a special significance attached to a bust of Beethoven within the novel. Beethoven was seen as a revolutionary symbol throughout 20th century China, since ...
Gentrification and Historic Racism in Portland (06/22)
In Willy Vlautin's novel, The Night Always Comes, a family in Portland, Oregan find themselves struggling to afford the cost of living in their neighborhood because of gentrification.
Gentrification is the process in which wealthy individuals and businesses converge on a previously working-class or low-income neighborhood. (The word ...
A Brief History of Cloning (06/22)
One of author Sarah Gailey's greatest skills on display in
The Echo Wife is that of making the science depicted look and feel real. The cloning in the novel seems plausible. But how far have humans actually come in the field of cloning? Where did it begin and where are we now?
First, we should establish what cloning is. As
Dr. Helen ...
Huey P. Newton (06/22)
In Meron Hadero's A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, the main character of 'Mekonnen aka Mack aka Huey Freakin' Newton' takes his titular nickname from Huey P. Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers were a group of revolutionaries focused on Black liberation in the 1960s-70s. Hadero's character...
Peanut Farming in the United States (06/22)
The central character in Nathan Harris's The Sweetness of Water decides to grow peanuts on his land in Reconstruction-era Georgia.
Although peanuts are often considered nuts, as the name would suggest, they're actually legumes like beans or peas. Legumes, according to the Peanut Institute, are defined by their edible seeds enclosed in...
Reading About Dictionaries and Lost Words (06/22)
Pip Williams was prompted to write The Dictionary of Lost Words, a novel including historical detail about words omitted from the Oxford English Dictionary, by reading Simon Winchester's 1998 book The Professor and the Madman and wondering where women were in the story of the dictionary. Below is some background on Winchester's book as ...
The Nutcracker (06/22)
Megan Abbott's The Turnout, a novel about two twin sisters who are dancers, begins at the start of The Nutcracker season. Apart from being a universally beloved show with deep roots in American ballet, The Nutcracker is also the Durant School of Dance's main moneymaker: 'Every year, their fall enrollment increased twenty percent because ...
The Guatemalan Civil War (05/22)
The narrator of Francisco Goldman's autobiographical novel
Monkey Boy, like Goldman himself, was a journalist who reported on the Guatemalan Civil War. The brutal war began in 1960 and lasted a total of 36 years. Over
200,000 were killed or 'disappeared,' more than 600 villages were attacked or completely destroyed by the army and 150 ...
Door Locks Throughout History (05/22)
In Ashley Weaver's novel A Peculiar Combination, the heroine is a safe-cracker who breaks into houses by picking door locks. Locks that operate with keys, including those typically used on doors, haven't changed all that much within the past century and a half. In fact, personal door locks in use today are of the same basic design ...
The Bielski Partisans (05/22)
In
The Forest of Vanishing Stars, persecuted Jews in Eastern Europe take shelter in the Naliboki Forest, located west of Minsk in contemporary Belarus. The area, then known as Byelorussia, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 at the same time as Germany invaded Poland as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that established a non-...
Poison from the Sky in Oregon (05/22)
In Ash Davidson's Damnation Spring, residents in a sparsely populated Northern California logging enclave in the late 1970s face a disturbing epidemic of miscarriages, stillbirths, birth defects and other ailments linked to the local timber company's use of herbicide sprays. While the specific location, people and events chronicled in the...
Conflicts Over Credit: CRISPR and HIV (05/22)
When a scientific breakthrough is achieved, it can be a moment of major celebration. Depending on the implications of that advancement, previously unknown individuals can find themselves vaulted into the highest levels of celebrity. Yet, the challenge of deciding who is truly responsible for the scientific advancement can be contentious. ...
Elinor Smith (05/22)
Great Circle features an account of a fictional early aviatrix named Marian Graves, and author Maggie Shipstead inserts snippets of aviation history throughout the narrative. One woman frequently mentioned is Elinor Smith, aka 'The Flying Flapper of Freeport.'
Elinor Regina Patricia Ward was born in New York City in 1911 to parents who...
The Quaker Clearness Committee (05/22)
Throughout What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins, Isaac Balch meditates on how his Quaker religion might help him come to terms with the murder of his son, Daniel. Paramount in Quakerism is the belief that a person's relationship with God is an independent matter. In keeping with this, much of the community's spiritual work is carried out ...
W.E.B. Du Bois (05/22)
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (aka W.E.B. Du Bois) was a noted author, historian, activist and sociologist as well as a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (
NAACP). His philosophies play an important role throughout Honorée Fannone Jeffers' novel
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois; each ...
Deep Space Travel Technologies (05/22)
From the first description of its maiden launch in the year 2072, the fictional Lazarus is more than just a spaceship in Riley Redgate's Alone Out Here. It is a cryogenic ark filled with extensive samples of Earth's faunal DNA, and an integrated archive for preserving a cross-section of humanity's archaeological treasures. Moreover, the ...
Creation Myths (05/22)
Woven into Guido Tonelli's
Genesis are origin myths from different cultures and religions throughout history. He frames his work using the first book of the Hebrew Bible and often brings up creation myths from around the world. So what are these myths, and what do they have in common?
In the creation story found in the Hebrew Bible ...
Rewilding Scotland (05/22)
In Charlotte McConaghy's novel, Once There Were Wolves, the heroine leads a project to reintroduce wolves to the Highlands, the mountainous region of northern Scotland. As they were hunted to extinction around the end of the 17th century, there is a very real debate surrounding the possibility of bringing wolves back to this area, and ...
Mabel Dodge Luhan (05/22)
Rachel Cusk reveals through a note at the end of her novel
Second Place that the book is based on
Lorenzo in Taos, a 1932 memoir by Mabel Dodge Luhan recounting the time the author D.H. Lawrence spent with her in Taos, New Mexico. Luhan, whose full name was Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan (as the result of multiple marriages), was a...
Creative Writing MFA Programs (05/22)
The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is a graduate-level degree earned by students who seek to pursue work as authors, editors, playwrights, or to teach at the college level. As of 2019, there were more than 200 Creative Writing MFA programs according to
Poets & Writers' MFA Index, of which 158 were full-time residency and 64 low-...
Overcoming Childhood Sexual Assault: Survivors' Stories (05/22)
In her debut memoir, Ashley C. Ford reflects on the lasting impact of her childhood, most notably the sexual assault she suffered at the age of 14. The process of dissecting trauma through literature is certainly not easy, but doing so can bring catharsis to writers and readers alike.
With assault affecting everyone differently, ...
The Four Treasures of Chinese Calligraphy (05/22)
In Four Treasures of the Sky, heroine Daiyu arrives at Master Wang's calligraphy school as an orphan looking for work. She quickly becomes his best student as she learns about the titular four treasures: brush, ink, paper and ink stone. Since the time of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420–589 CE), these items have been ...
West Windsor and Plainsboro, New Jersey (05/22)
As Fabian Nicieza comments in an author's note for Suburban Dicks, 'fiction means it is not real.' But that said, the two towns he uses as the setting for the novel—West Windsor and Plainsboro—are definitely real places. Let's take a trip to explore these suburban paradises, shall we?
The area where West Windsor and ...
Skinship in Korean Culture (05/22)
'Skinship' is a term commonly used to describe physical affection in Korean culture. It can be read as a portmanteau of the words 'skin' and 'kinship.' In the eponymous story from her book Skinship, Yoon Choi puts a different spin on the word's agreed meaning and uses it in an unexpected way. In the last scenes, instead of any kind of ...
Village de L'Est and Hurricane Katrina (05/22)
When the Vietnamese family depicted in Things We Lost to the Water arrives in New Orleans, they move into an apartment building called Versailles located in the eastern part of the city. The setting is based on the real-life Versailles Arms public housing project in the neighborhood of Village de L'Est, which attracted a large Vietnamese ...
LGBTQ+ History and Community in Richmond, Virginia (04/22)
In S.A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears, Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins attempt to solve the murder of their sons, Isiah and Derek, by sorting through the married couple's former lives in Richmond, Virginia. As they speak to Isiah and Derek's friends and acquaintances, they put together a better picture of who their sons were, and of the ...
Wildlife Trafficking in Latin America (04/22)
In Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer, the main character is left a taxidermied hummingbird as a clue. Early on in the book, it is revealed that this hummingbird belongs to a now-extinct species; wildlife trafficking and environmental degradation both become themes of the novel.
Although poaching and wildlife trafficking in ...
Ariadne in Greek Mythology (04/22)
In her novel Ariadne, Jennifer Saint retells events from the life of the mythological title figure. In Greek mythology, Ariadne is known for helping the hero Theseus slay the Minotaur — a beast who was the offspring of Ariadne's mother and a bull — and find his way out of the Labyrinth, the maze beneath her father's palace. In...
Joan Miller, Unlikely Spy (04/22)
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and in the case of An Unlikely Spy, fiction mirrors reality with a protagonist whose escapades parallel those of a real MI5 spy, Joan Miller.
Don't worry, An Unlikely Spy strays from the real-life story just enough in the end for me to assure you there are no spoilers here.
Joan Miller was ...
HarperVia (04/22)
In 2019, HarperCollins, the world's second-largest book publishing group, announced a new imprint for international literature: HarperVia. With a planned 24 releases per year, HarperVia focuses on works from around the globe. Staff in the US and UK work to streamline the acquisitions process: Rather than waiting for a manuscript to be ...
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe (04/22)
In Julietta Henderson's
The Funny Thing About Norman Foreman, the title character is a 12-year-old boy who wants to perform his stand-up comedy at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Also known as 'the Edinburgh Fringe' or simply 'the Fringe,' this event started out as an unofficial offshoot of the Edinburgh International Festival in
Edinburgh...
Open Adoption in the United States (04/22)
Around 140,000 children are adopted in the U.S. each year. This equates to
nearly 100 million Americans having some experience of adoption within their immediate family. While the process was once shrouded in secrecy and stigma for many, it is much more commonly discussed and celebrated today. In fact, many U.S. agencies now encourage ...
Novels About Inheritance (04/22)
In Housebreaking by Colleen Hubbard, protagonist Del finds herself in the position of having inherited her family's home and being tasked with what to do with it. Inheritance, whether of a home, money, information or an object of unique value, has long proven to be a fertile plot point in fiction. The revelation of an inheritance can ...
Black Americans in Paris (04/22)
In The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, Opal Jewel finds solace in Paris when her music partner, Nev Charles, has become increasingly unreliable due to an opioid addiction.
It begins at Versailles with a charity fashion show designed to raise money for the palace's restoration, where celebrity attendees include Stephen Burrows, one of the ...
Waverly Oaks (04/22)
When I picked up Tony Hiss's Rescuing the Planet, I expected to find stories about great forests and vulnerable wetlands and vast mountain landscapes. I definitely did not expect to encounter a story about my own town of Belmont, Massachusetts, an inner suburb of Boston. But that's exactly what happened when I started reading Hiss's ...
The Demographic Impact of Colonialism in the Americas (04/22)
In the United States, the term 'colonies' typically conjures images of pilgrims eking out homesteads and log cabins in the woods, or soldiers in tri-cornered hats fighting the mighty British at the birth of the American republic. Yet, the colonization of the 'New World,' as Europeans called it, began well before these early settlements in...
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Human Race (04/22)
Science fiction tends to reflect deeper moral issues and fears confronting a society at the time it is written. Storytelling is a safe method to express anxieties about the state of the world. It allows authors and readers an opportunity to explore the murkiness of uncertainty in a non-threatening manner. Reading and discussing sci-fi is ...
Exophonic Authors (04/22)
Jhumpa Lahiri wrote her novel Whereabouts in Italian, a language she learned in adulthood, and later translated it into English. Many authors have at some time made the decision to become exophonic (to write in a language other than one's native tongue), whether for personal, artistic, practical or political reasons.
The author who is ...
Cocaine Use in the British Military During World War I (04/22)
In his historical novel Two Storm Wood, Philip Gray portrays the reality of World War I mostly from the perspective of a young British officer, showing everything from the gruesome and harrowing details of war to lesser-known facts of everyday life for those serving in it. This reality includes substance use and abuse among troops. Drugs ...
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