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The Rising Problem of Muscle Dysmorphia in Teen Boys (04/26)
In Adib Khorram's novel One Word, Six Letters, Farshid is struggling to come to terms with his identity. The pressure of being a closeted immigrant teenager in modern America manifests in anxiety and a fixation on diet and exercise.
Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) can have a potentially devastating impact on a person's physical ...
Publishing Industry Terminology (04/26)
The Ending Writes Itself is a murder mystery, but also a sharp satire of the publishing industry. In its final pages, a character observes: 'Publishing pretends that it cares about discovering talent, fostering talent, but it's just a machine, chewing people up, spitting out their work. If this weekend has taught me anything, it's that ...
The Invention and Early History of Television (04/26)
When Nonesuch begins, just before the invasion of Poland by the Nazis in the late summer of 1939, Geoffrey Hale is a technical wizard working for the BBC in the young medium of television. Although by this point residents of the United Kingdom only have about 20,000 TV sets all told, Geoff rhapsodizes about its capabilities. 'It makes you...
Sisters, Not Friends: Mary and Anne Boleyn (04/26)
There is a warning about children born into the same family. Three children are problematic because one can always be left out and two can gang up on one. That was the case in the Boleyn family. Mary was the oldest. The other two, Anne and George, were best friends. They were sophisticated, intelligent, religious, loved art and literature...
Ojibwe Values Pertaining to the Natural World (04/26)
The Ojibwe are the most populous Indigenous tribe in North America today, encompassing several smaller bands, including the Turtle Mountain Band of of Chippewa, of which Louise Erdrich is a member. The Ojibwe people's connections to each other and to the environment are core details in the stories in her collection Python's Kiss.
In ...
The 2023 Writers Guild of America Strike (04/26)
Hallie Cantor's novel, Like This, But Funnier, is about a TV writer who, in 2023, is stalled in her career and hasn't been able to find steady work—a situation that makes her feel ashamed and financially anxious. In a letter to the reader at the beginning of the book, Cantor is up front that this is based on her own life: 'I felt ...
What Is a Tradwife? (03/26)
The protagonist of Caro Claire Burke's novel
Yesteryear is a social media influencer who promotes her lifestyle as a 'tradwife.' A portmanteau of the words 'traditional' and 'wife,' the term is
defined by Dictionary.com as 'a married woman who chooses to be a homemaker as a primary occupation and adheres to or embodies traditional ...
Glasgow's Reputation in Literature (03/26)
A Bad, Bad Place, the excellent debut novel from Frances Crawford, is set in Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city. For those with any knowledge of the country and its literature, the title will seem like a knowing wink: over the past century, Glasgow has developed a literary reputation for being a very bad place indeed, one where ...
Cinderella Retellings with a Twist (03/26)
The most famous version of the Cinderella story is probably the one included in the Brothers Grimm's 1812 collection of fairy tales. But its roots as a folk tale go back far further, and stretch into many cultures. The ancient Greek story of Rhodopis tells of a king who finds a beautiful sandal and sends servants to search for the ...
The Bracero Program: Social and Political Consequences (03/26)
The Bracero Program, a joint US–Mexico labor agreement, began during World War II and ran from 1942 to 1964. It was created to address severe farm labor shortages in the United States due to the war draft, while also providing jobs for unemployed Mexican farm workers. It was formally established by the 1942 Farm Labor Agreement, and...
Whidbey Island (03/26)
Whidbey Island, approximately 45 miles long with a total land area of 168.7 square miles, is situated in the Pacific Northwest, off the coast of Washington and nestled in the waters of Puget Sound. Its original, ancestral name is Tscha-kole-chy, used by the Native tribes that first inhabited it, including the Lower Skagit, Swinomish, ...
Accessibility Hacks and Laura Mauldin's Disability at Home (03/26)
The website
Disability at Home is a digital archive of creativity. Created by sociologist Laura Mauldin, the site documents the inventive ways disabled people and caregivers adapt their homes to make everyday life possible. The project grew out of interviews Mauldin conducted with 44 couples across the United States while researching her ...
What's a Hare? Isn't It Just a Rabbit? Actually, No (03/26)
While commenting on Chloe Dalton's memoir Raising Hare, about her experience rescuing a wild baby hare, some of our First Impressions reviewers mentioned the common misperception that a hare is a kind of a rabbit. So what exactly is a hare?
Hares and rabbits are related, but not the same. The hare is in the genus Lepus and falls into ...
The Impact of the 2004 Tsunami on Thailand (03/26)
On December 26th 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck 31 miles beneath the floor of the Indian Ocean. The force generated was so vast it triggered a devastating tsunami, with waves as high as 100 feet traveling as fast as 500 miles per hour towards land. At least 13 countries suffered casualties, with the death toll estimated at around...
The Pale in Ireland (03/26)
In Jo Harkin's new novel The Pretender, Lambert Simnel—a long-shot hopeful for the English throne—is taken to raise an army in the English Pale in Ireland, the last Tudor stronghold on the island. A small area encompassing the counties around Dublin, the Pale is intimately tied to the history of Ireland and the beginnings ...
Fort Sumter Today (03/26)
As Erik Larson recounts in The Demon of Unrest, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12th, 1861. Thirty-six hours later, Union Major Robert Anderson and his small force surrendered with no loss of life. Ironically, the only casualties sustained came ...
Gender Fluidity and Trans Identity in the Old West (03/26)
The titular 'novel' from Torrey Peters' book Stag Dance takes place in an illegal logging camp in early 1900s Montana. During a cold and lonely winter, the lumberjacks there hold a dance, with some men designating themselves as women by placing a triangle of fabric between their legs, showing that they wish to be courted by the others. ...
How to Become a Professional Clown (03/26)
In Stop Me If You've Heard This One, the main character, Cherry, chases her dreams of becoming a successful clown. The unusual career path actually requires a lot more work—and financial investment—than one might assume. If you're considering trading in your 9-to-5 for a bright red nose, here are some steps you might ...
The History of Ruby Falls (03/26)
Gin Phillips's novel Ruby Falls is named after the famous underground waterfall in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The tallest (145 feet) and deepest (1,120 feet) underground waterfall open to the public in the United States is named after the wife of its discoverer, Leo Lambert, who turned it into a tourist attraction. In the novel, Leo's wife's...
The Blue Mosque (03/26)
In Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel Theft, multiple characters dream of seeing the world, but only some have the privilege of doing so in reality. Badar, whose economic situation puts travel out of reach, keeps a photograph of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul on the wall of his rented room as a symbol of that dream. The Blue Mosque is one of the most...
The Social Impact of COVID-19 on Young Adults (03/26)
COVID-19 has had an immense impact on people of all ages, in all stages of life, and in all parts of the world. Mahogany L. Browne's novel A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe focuses on the various effects on young people's lives, which are still being felt and studied today. Along with the widespread death, disability, and ...
Parallel Histories in Ireland and the Basque Country (03/26)
In 'Amalur,' the second story in Liadan Ní Chuinn's debut collection Every One Still Here, a young Irish woman finds herself drawn less to her boyfriend than to his Basque family. Meals stretch late; anecdotes slip across generations. Through allusion and quotation, Chuinn traces a subtle symmetry between Ireland and the Basque ...
The History of Zombies (03/26)
Novelist Daniel Kraus's first nonfiction book, Partially Devoured, is a paean to the movie Night of the Living Dead (1968), a film that has been meaningful to him since his childhood and which helped inspire his writing career. He credits the movie's writer-director, George A. Romero, with creating the being most think of when we ...
Atlanta's Black Bourgeoisie (03/26)
In Tayari Jones's novel
Kin, Black characters have varying experiences of class and privilege in the South in the 1950s and '60s. Coincidentally, I was reading Margo Jefferson's 2015 memoir
Negroland at the same time, and in it I came across a reference to E. Franklin Frazier's
Black Bourgeoisie (1957). The title intrigued me and seemed ...
The Great Migration and Chicago (03/26)
In Nikesha Elise Williams's novel The Seven Daughters of Dupree, Gladys, the fifth generation of Dupree women, leaves southern Alabama for Chicago with her new husband, Eugene, in 1953. Eugene worked for the railroad, ferrying passengers between the Midwest and the Deep South but also carrying news of northern cities that offered ...
José Revueltas (03/26)
In Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza first introduces readers to her grandparents at the point where their lives intersected with that of José Revueltas, an influential Mexican writer and political activist. Though she doesn't know if they ever spoke to him, in 1934 they were among the cotton workers at Estación ...
The Sámi Joik (03/26)
In Alice Menzies's translation of The Secret of the Snow into English, a few words remain italicized. These are not remnants from the Swedish edition of the novel, but Sámi terms with specific cultural context and meaning to the narrative. The most prominent of these untranslated terms is joik—a traditional Sámi form of ...
Literary Cameos (03/26)
In Rebecca Kauffman's novel The Reservation, the titular restaurant booking is for a group that includes bestselling author John Grisham. This isn't the first time a novelist has chosen to feature a guest appearance by another author—here are some other notable literary cameos for readers to discover.
Mark Twain in Darryl Brock's...
Countertexts and Shifting Perspectives (03/26)
Dark Laboratory is an incredible reconfiguring of a historical moment that provides a new understanding of the current climate crisis and how it is intertwined with the legacies of colonialism. One way of thinking about the book is as a countertext to commonly taught histories of globalization, colonialism, and climate change. A ...
The Signs and Effects of Emotional Abuse (03/26)
Ciara Fay, the protagonist of Roisín O'Donnell's novel, Nesting, is the victim of emotional abuse, although she remains unaware of this for most of the book. Also referred to as psychological abuse or psychological aggression, this behavior erodes another person's sense of self-worth until they develop a psychological dependency on ...
Virginia Woolf's The Years, British Empire, and Narrative Form (03/26)
The Years is the last of Virginia Woolf's novels to be published during her lifetime, in 1937. Beginning in 1880 and following three generations of the Pargiter family across five decades to the 'present day,' it captures intimate moments between characters and internal monologues against the backdrop of historical events and changes in ...
This Historical Deed: The Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan (03/26)
Adam Ross's novel Playworld takes place between 1980 and 1981, during which time the characters follow with interest the election, presidency, and attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
The attempted assassination of Reagan took place in March 1981, just a few months after he was inaugurated for his first term. The would-be ...
The Kingdom of the Happy Land (03/26)
Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, which follows a group of formerly enslaved people who build a self-sustaining community on a mountainous plot of land in the Carolinas during the Reconstruction era, is based on a real-life historical place known as the Kingdom of the Happy Land. Perkins-Valdez stumbled upon the kingdom's history online...
Spring-Heeled Jack (03/26)
Judge Dee Ren Jie, the protagonist of the Dee and Lao mystery series, frequently masquerades as Spring-heeled Jack, a legendary figure out of Victorian London. Sometimes Dee uses the costume to intimidate suspects into divulging information, but more often, he uses it to disguise his true identity while interacting with London's police ...
Magic Mushrooms (02/26)
In his book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, Michael Pollan states that his interest in human consciousness sprang from an experiment he undertook using magic mushrooms, a fungus that produces a chemical known as psilocybin.
Many use the terms hallucinogenic and psychedelic interchangeably when talking about certain drugs...
Women's Rights in Ireland (02/26)
In Saoirse by Charleen Hurtubise, the titular protagonist flees from the US to Ireland in the 1990s, escaping an abusive upbringing. When she becomes pregnant, she intends to do what Irish girls have done for decades—take a ferry to England to have an abortion. But when she realizes her stolen passport has expired, she is trapped ...
Evil Genius and "The Five Forty-Eight" (02/26)
In the author's note for
Evil Genius, Claire Oshetsky writes that their novel "owes its existence" to John Cheever's short story "The Five Forty-Eight."
Published in
The New Yorker in 1954, "
The Five Forty-Eight" is a story about Blake, a businessman who has a coercive sexual encounter with a ...
Bog Bodies: A Reading List (02/26)
Katya Balen's novel
Our Numbered Bones centers around the discovery of an ancient, fossilized corpse in a peat bog in rural England. These so-called 'bog bodies'
have been found throughout the world, particularly in Northern Europe, and offer invaluable insight into life and death thousands of years ago. The discovery of a bog body ...
The White Gaze and Toni Morrison's Beloved (02/26)
When I was in middle school my father sold a film to Columbia Pictures about his black Chicago childhood. He soon discovered the script had been changed. Chicago was replaced by a small Texas town. The black teenagers were now white. There was an unspoken understanding that what was missing from my father's script was a necessary feature ...
Rewriting Aladdin: Storytelling, Power, and Cultural Adaptation (02/26)
Aladdin's Tale: Origins, Adaptations, and Reinterpretation
'Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp' is arguably the most beloved and well-known tale associated with The One Thousand and One Nights, yet it was not originally part of the collection. Its true origins are lost to time and scholars consider it one of the 'orphan tales' along with ...
Paris Syndrome (02/26)
In the second story in Lauren Groff's collection Brawler, 'Between the Shadow and the Soul,' a woman named Eliza struggles with depression and ennui after retiring early from the post office. This is not an unusual experience, as people who have devoted their lives to a career often find themselves without a sense of purpose or meaning ...
Novels Within Novels (02/26)
Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author includes an example of a type of metafiction known as an 'embedded narrative'—in other words, the novel contains another novel (in this case a futuristic science fiction narrative) within its pages. This technique has been around for hundreds of years, in works like Shakespeare's Hamlet and A ...
The "Moon Is Made of Cheese" Trope (02/26)
While the central conceit of John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye is that the Moon has turned to cheese, the book is not overly concerned with how this has happened. Instead, it's more interested in how the world — specifically America — reacts to such a sudden, inexplicable event, as well as what happens when science ...
Authorial Pseudonyms (02/26)
I've joked on more than one occasion that, should I ever write a novel of my own, it will have to be under a pseudonym to save myself from the ire of all the real people I'll be turning into fiction. Many famous and acclaimed writers have used a pseudonym (also known as a pen name, nom de guerre, and nom de plume). The name Mark Twain is ...
The Institute in Basic Life Principles (02/26)
In the memoir A Well-Trained Wife, the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) serves as author Tia Levings' gateway from mainstream conservative Christianity into patriarchal Christian fundamentalism. Readers may already be aware of the IBLP thanks to the popular Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People, which focuses on the abuses ...
Tilly Nightingale's Books for Healing After Loss (02/26)
In Libby Page's novel This Book Made Me Think of You, Tilly Nightingale receives an unexpected gift from her recently deceased husband, Joe: before he died, he hand-picked one book for each month of the first year she would be living without him. These books help Tilly rediscover her love of reading, and in a way, herself. Joe's ...
Fables Old and New (02/26)
The premise of Jonathan Miles's darkly comic novel Eradication is fiendishly simple: a man is hired by a humanitarian foundation to sail to a desert island and, in the name of biodiversity, kill every goat he can find. To such an intriguing set-up, Miles attaches an equally intriguing subtitle: A Fable. It's a word that evokes ...
The Artists of Discipline (02/26)
In Discipline, Larissa Pham's debut novel, the main character is a former painter who pursued an MFA but dropped out after an affair with her college mentor and professor ended badly. The book is divided into two parts, and each of the five chapters in Part One is titled after a painter. Pham weaves these artists into the text as the main...
Berlin Club Culture (02/26)
In Aria Aber's Good Girl, narrator Nila spends her teenage years in the labyrinths of Berlin's legendary techno clubs. Awash with drugs and unrestrained by straight-laced sexual mores, the Berlin club scene was hand-built by grassroots pioneers into a recognized cultural institution, eventually attracting visitors from across the globe ...
In Sickness and In Health: Illness and Marriage (02/26)
While planning her wedding at the age of twenty-four, after seven years of dating her fiancé, Erin Fortin was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder. Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria, or PNH, involves the damage of red blood cells by the immune system. Because Erin and her future husband John both had a healthy sense of humor and ...
