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Harris Tweed (05/26)
The protagonists of Douglas Stuart's novel, John of John, are John and Cal Macleod, a father and son who live on a croft (a small, rural family homestead used for subsistence farming) on the remote Isle of Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. In addition to raising sheep, the men are among the many individuals on the islands who weave ...
Free Will on Stage and Screen (05/26)
Artie struggles throughout The Things We Never Say with the concept of free will. He wrestles not just with the idea that he may or may not have control over his life, but also with what it actually means. Has he earned the good things he has in life or done things to justify the struggles he's faced—or is it all just random ...
The Pandemic-Era National Park Boom (05/26)
If Bo Burnham's Inside captured the feeling of pandemic-induced isolation in 2020, Lindy West's memoir Adult Braces taps into the one that possessed many Americans the year after: the urge to get out of the house.
As she describes herself setting out on a cross-country odyssey in 2021, West explains her need to escape—a need ...
Colossal Cave Adventure (05/26)
In Portia Elan's debut novel Homebound, protagonist Becks and her late uncle share a love of coding computer games, and because Becks's story takes place in 1983, these look pretty different from the video games we know today. Known as teletype games, these early computer games involved no graphics; instead, they were more like a ...
Mauritian Literature in English Translation (05/26)
Mauritius is an African island nation found in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Its location between the African and Asian continents and its colonial history mean the country is today home to a variety of cultures, giving rise to a vibrant literary scene with works written in several different languages.
Though some key titles ...
Judith Clark and the 1981 Brink's Truck Robbery (05/26)
The Hill is very loosely based on author Harriet Clark's experiences as a girl visiting her mother, Judith Clark, in prison. Judith Clark's crime was driving a getaway car during the robbery of a Brink's truck that was making deliveries to banks. One guard and two police officers were killed. In the novel, Suzanna's mother went to ...
Could Artificial Wombs Become a Reality? (04/26)
In her novel Vanishing World, Sayaka Murata presents an alternate version of the present, in which most children are conceived either via artificial insemination or using newly available artificial wombs, which are sack-like external devices strapped to the body of a parent that allows them to carry a child without undertaking the risks ...
Body Horror Fiction About Women (04/26)
In Kim Samek's short story collection I Am the Ghost Here, several stories fall into the realm of 'body horror.' The phrase refers to books or movies featuring the transformation or mutilation of the human body. The term was coined by Philip Brophy in a 1983 article on horror films. Although the concept might seem unique to cinema, it can...
Community Land Trusts and Housing Affordability (04/26)
Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, the community organizer at the heart of Abigail Savitch-Lew's debut novel Livonia Chow Mein, knows she's landed on a solution to the skyrocketing real estate prices and rampant speculation that are displacing Black and Brown folks in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. Now if only she can get the decision-makers...
Anna Darvulia: Killer, Healer, or Victim? (04/26)
One thing that quickly becomes clear in Shelley Puhak's The Blood Countess is that Elizabeth Bathory, accused of being a serial killer, wasn't alone in whatever her activities were. She had a mysterious confidant, Anna Darvulia—to some, a sadistic torturer; to others, a skilled midwife and healer caught in political and patriarchal ...
Effects of the 2008 Financial Crisis on South Korea (04/26)
Che Yeun's debut novel, Tailbone, is set in Seoul, South Korea, during the 2008 global financial crisis. In it, the unnamed narrator observes how the crash impacts the women in her boarding house, all of whom are sex workers.
The international Great Recession was triggered in mid-September 2008, when the housing bubble in the United ...
The Real Walking Dead: The Practice of Corpse-Herding in China (04/26)
In Tesia Tsai's debut novel
Deathly Fates, Kang Siying is a ganshi priestess who reanimates corpses in order to guide them back to their home for burial. This fantastical premise is based off of the historical occupation of 'corpse-driving' or 'corpse-herding'—
gǎn shī—
a tradition that stretches back centuries in the ...
The Lewinsky/Clinton Scandal (04/26)
In Dear Monica Lewinsky, a fictionalized, supernaturally powerful version of Lewinsky helps a woman experiencing shame and confusion about a past sexual experience with a much older man. In real life, Lewinsky is an activist committed to fighting the shaming of women—and this career path is the direct result of her own trauma.
...
Poitiers, France (04/26)
In Marie NDiaye's The Witch, main character Lucie's husband, Pierrot, leaves Lucie and their two daughters—initially to visit his mother in the suburbs of the city of Poitiers, though it ends up being a longer absence. Poitiers is a university town (home to the University of Poitiers) in west-central France in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine...
Claude Monet's Water Lilies Series (04/26)
Born in Paris in 1840, Claude Monet grew up in the town of Le Havre in Normandy. He was interested in art from a young age, studying at a Le Havre arts school under masters Jacques-François Ochard and Eugène Boudin, the latter of whom became his mentor and introduced him to "en plein air," or outdoor painting ...
Futoko (Non-Attendance) and Free Schools in Japan (04/26)
In the United States, the 'model minority' is a stereotype linked to Asian immigrants and diaspora. The myth speaks to a commitment to academic excellence while simultaneously diminishing experiences of discrimination. The stereotype and those who believe in it cherry-pick a racial group seen as embracing assimilation and pit them against...
The Ballet Giselle (04/26)
City of Night Birds centers on a performance of Giselle, which a world-famous ballerina is going to perform as her first foray back to the stage after a forced hiatus. Giselle is a romantic ballet in two acts that tells the story of a German peasant girl from the countryside. Giselle falls in love with a nobleman, Albrecht, who has ...
Objectum Sexuality (04/26)
Linda, the narrator of Sky Daddy, is sexually and romantically attracted to commercial airplanes. This phenomenon could be viewed as a subset of objectum sexuality (OS) — defined as romantic or sexual attraction to an object — although Linda insists that her interest in planes is different from 'the woman who married the ...
Books Featuring Actors as Characters (04/26)
The protagonist of Katie Kitamura's Audition is an actress, and sections of the novel reflect her thought process on performance, from the creation of her character to her considerations of a play's rhythms and structures. This plot device allows author Kitamura to contemplate themes that she and all novelists must also explore, ...
The Women's National Book Association (04/26)
In The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss talks about one of the few women in the book trade in the early 20th century: Madge Jenison, who opened The Sunwise Turn bookshop in Manhattan in 1916. A year later, she joined 20,000 other women in a protest for women's suffrage, marching with her fellow female booksellers....
The Jeju Uprising (04/26)
Han Kang's latest novel, We Do Not Part, delves into a dark part of Korean history known as the Jeju uprising, the Jeju massacre, or (in Korea) 'Jeju 4.3,' for the day it began. Jeju, Korea's largest island, located southwest of the Korean peninsula, is sometimes today called 'the Hawaii of Asia.' In the introduction to a recent article ...
The Submarine Cable System (04/26)
Much of Colum McCann's novel Twist takes place on a cable repair ship sent to locate and fix a breakage in the underwater cables conveying the globe's digital information pathways.
For many of us, perhaps because of the metaphorical terms used for internet storage and connection, such as cyberspace and the cloud, when we ...
Classics of Queer Irish Literature (04/26)
Ireland has an undeniably rich literary history across a wide range of fiction, drama, and poetry—this abundant legacy includes a number of noteworthy pieces of queer fiction and memoir. One of the latest entries into this catalog is poet Seán Hewitt's debut novel Open, Heaven, a gay coming-of-age story that centers on ...
The Plow That Broke the Plains: A Dust Bowl Documentary (04/26)
One of the protagonists in The Antidote is Cleo Allfrey, a photographer dispatched by the Resettlement Administration to document life in Nebraska's Dust Bowl. She and others in the book mention a similar, real-world project: a documentary titled The Plow That Broke the Plains.
The Plow That Broke the Plains was a controversial, ...
Preventing Urban Bird Strikes (04/26)
Near the beginning of a section in María Ospina's novel Only a Little While Here that chronicles the southward migration of a scarlet tanager, the bird narrowly escapes a fate that dooms dozens of his fellow migrators. Traveling through the landscape of New York City on the way from Connecticut to the forests of Colombia, the tanager...
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...
Agnes Martin's Relocation to New Mexico (04/26)
In
I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley, the protagonist is loosely inspired by the late
Agnes Martin, a famed abstract expressionist painter who spent a period of her life in New Mexico, during which the story is set. In 1967, Martin stopped painting and left New York City, then disappeared from public view for 18 months before reappearing in ...
Theme Cruises (04/26)
As fantastical as the Boy Talk cruise seems in
American Fantasy, it's roughly inspired by author Emma Straub's experiences aboard the annual
New Kids on the Block cruise. The energy and community her character Annie finds with the Talkers is something many theme cruise participants speak to as a core part of their experiences, ...
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 ...
