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Albania, Then and Now (02/22)
Lea Ypi's memoir Free charts the author's coming of age in a family of dissidents in Albania in the 1980s and '90s, before and after the fall of communism. Albania is located in southern Europe in the Balkan Peninsula, with the Adriatic Sea on its western border and Greece, North Macedonia and Kosovo to the east. The earliest recorded ...
Book Burning and Censorship (02/22)
Hugo Hamilton's The Pages is narrated by a book that survived the Nazi regime's ceremonial book burning in wartime Berlin. Censorship of books has been a recurring issue throughout history, which suggests the power and influence of the written word and poses questions surrounding the motivation and fears of the censors.
The book ...
The Legend of the Sandman (02/22)
In one story from Kim Fu's collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, an insomniac character is visited by the Sandman and subsequently finds it much easier to fall asleep. There is no consensus among experts as to the origin of the Sandman in folklore, as it is believed to be part of a long history of stories passed from ...
A History of Acapulco and Ongoing Cartel Control (02/22)
Acapulco de Juárez, commonly known as Acapulco, is a city located on the coast of Mexico in the southwestern state of Guerrero. The name 'Acapulco' is believed to come from a word in the Náhuatl (Aztec) language meaning 'place of the reeds.' Once considered a desirable vacation spot and bustling resort town, Acapulco has in ...
Self-Serve Frozen Yogurt (02/22)
In My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee, Pong Lou enlists Tiller Bardmon to help with the formulation and branding of a product called jamu, a kind of restorative drink. However, Pong first tests Tiller's nose for business by having him taste and evaluate flavors for his self-serve frozen yogurt (froyo) chain, WTF Yo!. According to Tiller, the...
Twins (02/22)
Brit Bennett's novel, The Vanishing Half, follows the lives of Stella and Desiree Vignes, identical twin girls born in Louisiana in 1938.
As you likely know, there are broadly two types of twins: fraternal and identical. Fraternal, or dizygotic, twins are formed when two separate eggs are fertilized by two separate spermatozoa, ...
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) (02/22)
In his memoir
Buses Are a Comin', Charles Person explains that he got involved with the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s through fellow students at his school, Morehouse College, which is one of the country's oldest Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
The HBCU designation was created by the ...
Mendocino, California (02/22)
Even amidst ghosts; a loving, family-centered farm; and the courageous Mila trying to face horrible memories from her past, Nina LaCour's description of Mendocino, California in
Watch Over Me stands out when Mila gets her chance to go there as part of a farmer's market:
Mendocino greeted us with its tiny business district, its ...
Challah (02/22)
In "Birdsong from the Radio," a story in Elizabeth McCracken's collection The Souvenir Museum, the main character fills the void of her missing children by consuming a loaf of challah daily. Challah is a traditional Jewish bread that is usually braided. It can come in many different forms, but it is often made as a soft, ...
DNA Profiling (02/22)
In Kia Abdullah's courtroom drama Take It Back, the prosecution relies on a forensic technique called DNA profiling. Also known as genetic fingerprinting, the process can be used to match bodily material found at a crime scene to a suspect, to identify a person's relatives, to determine one's risk of some genetic diseases and to identify ...
Leeches in Medicine (02/22)
The Doctors Blackwell, Janice P. Nimura's biography of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, explores the tools 19th-century physicians used to address their patients' needs. Many common ailments were believed to be caused by an excess of blood, and consequently removing some of a person's blood was thought to be efficacious; often doctors ...
Rick Ankiel (02/22)
Rick Ankiel was born in 1979 in Fort Pierce, Florida. At an early age, he threw himself into baseball as a way of escaping a tumultuous and often violent home life. In 1997, as a pitcher for Port St. Lucie High School, he was named 'High School Player of the Year' by USA Today. By his major league baseball debut with the St. Louis ...
Apartheid and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (02/22)
Damon Galgut's novel The Promise is set in South Africa during the dismantling of the country's apartheid system. In this period, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to deal with the after-effects of apartheid, and the body is mentioned several times throughout the book.
After the National Party took power in ...
Contemporary Retellings of Classic Stories (02/22)
Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor is a feminist reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic American novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). Instead of retaining Nick Carraway as the narrator, Cantor retells the story from the viewpoints of the novel's women. Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker and Catherine McCoy were all secondary characters ...
Spiritualism in Victorian London (02/22)
Though the movement of Spiritualism — the belief that the spirits of the dead are able to communicate with the living — was born in New York in 1848 with
the Fox sisters, it quickly took hold of the Victorian imagination when it arrived in England in the mid-19th century. Maria Hayden, a famous American medium, arrived in the ...
Life in 1980s China (01/22)
The world of 1980s China depicted in Liu Xinwu's The Wedding Party was a unique and transitory one. Starting after the end of Mao's Cultural Revolution and leading to the infamous Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, this was mostly a decade of quiet change.
After the death of Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1976, Mao's successor Hua ...
The Laogai Research Foundation (01/22)
In her debut book,
Made in China, Amelia Pang cites the
Laogai Research Foundation (LRF) as a source for much of the information she presents about China's Laogai system (pronounced like loud-guy but without the 'd'). The organization's website explains:
'The Laogai system is the Chinese network of prisons, factories, and farms ...
American Intervention and Counter-Narcotic Efforts in Afghanistan (01/22)
The events of Jasmine Aimaq's debut novel, The Opium Prince, play out in the lead-up to the 1978 Saur Revolution, in which the Afghan president Mohammed Daud Khan was assassinated and overthrown by the Soviet-backed Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (the PDPA). The president had himself come to power in 1973 by overthrowing...
The "Central Park Five" (The Exonerated Five) (01/22)
On the night of April 19, 1989, several dozen teen boys went into New York City's Central Park as a loose group. Early on the morning of April 20, Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old white investment banker, was found in the park; she had been raped and badly beaten. She remained in a coma for two weeks and retained no memory of the attack.
...
The Black Dahlia Murder (01/22)
In
Windhall, the murder of Hollywood starlet Eleanor Hayes is the unsolved crime of the century. Eleanor's friend and movie director Theodore Langley was initially accused of the crime, but he was never charged, and speculation abounds as to what exactly happened on that unfortunate night. Although Eleanor Hayes and her murder are ...
The Falsity of a Real Reality (01/22)
Humans are incapable of knowing for certain what is real. We use our five senses to collect data about the environment around us. Data is the key word here; we don't see, hear, touch, taste or smell reality. We use our senses to sample data about the environment.
This data is processed by our brains, which then interpret and give form ...
Operation Condor (01/22)
The action in Daniel Loedel's debut novel, Hades, Argentina, is propelled by a clandestine South American military campaign known as Operation Condor.
Operation Condor's roots can be traced back to the mid-1960s, when Che Guevara left Cuba to spread socialist doctrine throughout South America, advocating the violent overthrow of the ...
Monstrously Powerful: Patriarchy and the Demonization of Women (01/22)
In a letter addressed to readers in The Gilded Ones, Namina Forna writes that the book is 'at its heart…an examination of patriarchy. How does it form? What supports it? How do women survive under it? And what about people who don't fall into the binary? Who thrives and who doesn't?' Deka and all the women of Otera live in a society...
Anti-Chinese Sentiment Past and Present (01/22)
In
Last Night at the Telegraph Club, some of the pressure that Lily faces in her family life is related to their precarious situation as immigrants, specifically as Chinese immigrants in the aftermath of the anti-communist hysteria of
McCarthyism. Chinese immigrants have a long, often obscured history in the United States, which includes ...
East Asian Populations in Plano, Texas (01/22)
Simon Han's debut novel Nights When Nothing Happened is set in Plano, Texas, located about 20 miles north of Dallas and 50 miles northeast of Fort Worth. The Chengs, who are Chinese American, have chosen to live in Plano because it is a safe community with good schools, but what's not stated overtly is that the city and surrounding area ...
The Legacy of Ireland's Curses (01/22)
In Ruth Gilligan's novel The Butchers' Blessing, we meet a small yet devoted group of people who strive to uphold historic, ritualistic methods of cattle slaughter in 1990s Ireland. They do this in accordance with their continued belief in the power of the so-called 'Curse of the Farmer's Widow.' Born of an ancient folktale of unknown ...
When Dystopia Meets Mystery (01/22)
With his novel Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam explores how a group of isolated strangers react to an unspecified threat that is sweeping across New York. By hinting at the disaster's cause and effect, but depriving both his characters and his readers of concrete answers, he is able to tap into our inherent fear of the unknown.
...
The Apple in Religion and Myth (01/22)
The unnamed mother in Lynne Sharon Schwartz's story 'Apples' rejoices when her picky daughter delights in a new kind of apple that makes her 'elated and energetic and enthusiastic.' The mother is so impressed she mentions to the pediatrician that the apple might be magical.
This character is certainly not the first to attribute ...
John Coltrane's Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album (01/22)
Sarah Schalansky's book An Inventory of Losses introduces readers to an eclectic group of 12 things that no longer exist, from extinct species to ruined castles. But early on, Schalansky notes that sometimes the opposite happens — something is pulled back into public consciousness after a period of dormancy. One of these things is ...
Oulipo (01/22)
Hervé Le Tellier, the author of the novel
The Anomaly, is a member of Oulipo. Oulipo is an international literary group that was founded in 1960 and
embraces 'formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature's possibilities.' The name comes from the French 'Ouvroir de littérature potentielle' (OuLiPo), which translates ...
Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose) (12/21)
In
A Million Things by Emily Spurr, 10-year-old Rae recalls her mother reading her the story of Briar Rose. Briar Rose, better known as Sleeping Beauty, is a popular fairy tale character. While many people may be familiar with recent versions of her story, including the 1959
animated Disney adaptation, the tale is centuries old and has ...
The Tempestuous History of Lady Chatterley's Lover (11/21)
During the 1920s, author D.H. Lawrence wrote several manuscript versions of his famous Lady Chatterley's Lover, as is reflected in Alison MacLeod's 2021 historical novel Tenderness. Lawrence's earlier novel The Rainbow had been banned for its exploration of human desire, including a lesbian affair, and his agent was hesitant to ...
Willa Cather and the American Outsider Experience (11/21)
Willa Chen, the main character in Kyle Lucia Wu's Win Me Something, mentions that her mother named her after the writer Willa Cather. This connection is significant in that Willa expects to be asked about her name in the context of her Chinese heritage, and is surprised when her employer's brother asks about the origin of her first name ...
Mount Osorezan (11/21)
Mount Osorezan, or Mount Osore, is located on the northern end of Honshu, the largest of the four main islands of Japan. An active volcano, its name translates to '
Fear Mountain.' It's a popular pilgrimage site because of its Buddhist temple and because of the occasional presence of the itako — female mediums believed to be able...
Libraries and Other Imagined Communities (11/21)
In The Book Collectors, a band of Syrian resistance fighters work together to salvage and share books from their bombed-out suburb of Damascus. The book focuses on the protagonists' newfound passion for reading, which helps them cope with the hardships of everyday life during very dark times.
Though it's nice to think that these young...
Using (or Not Using) Quotation Marks in Fiction (11/21)
A lack of quotation marks around dialogue is a pet peeve for some readers. Yet it seems to be an increasingly popular stylistic choice in literary fiction, and one that Bryan Washington opts to use in his debut novel Memorial. You may have also encountered this approach in books by Jesse Ball, Junot Diaz, Bernardine Evaristo, Kate ...
Metempsychosis, Transmigration and Mesmerism (11/21)
Central to Alex Landragin's debut novel Crossings is an idiosyncratic version of soul metempsychosis. Metempsychosis is the reincarnation of a soul from one biological body to another occurring after the first body's death. Reincarnation plays a prominent role in Hinduism and Buddhism. The European concept developed independently in ...
Megiddo (11/21)
In
To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss, a character in the story 'End Days' is an archaeologist working at Tel Megiddo, the site of the ancient Palestinian city of Megiddo, which is situated near present-day Haifa, Israel. 'Tel' refers to the 'mound' on the site in which excavations have uncovered 26 layers of remains of ancient ...
Ovarian Cancer (11/21)
In Danielle Evans' collection The Office of Historical Corrections, the short story 'Happily Ever After' centers around Lyssa, who at 30 years old is navigating life after her mother's death from ovarian cancer and has been advised to have her own ovaries removed as soon as possible. Ovarian cancer is the seventh most commonly diagnosed ...
Survivor Trees (11/21)
Destructive and unsustainable human habits are wiping out ecosystems around the world at alarming rates, not only threatening millions of wildlife species with extinction but also endangering human health and well-being. '[H]umans depend on the natural world for food, air, water, clothing—everything,' as acclaimed primatologist and ...
Jim Thorpe (11/21)
In The Removed, Edgar visits a mysterious town called the Darkening Land, where his high school friend Jackson tells him about a video game he's designing featuring the Native athlete Jim Thorpe. Thorpe was a multi-sport talent, notable for his careers in baseball and football, along with competing in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm in ...
Transphobia in Gender-Critical Feminist Ideology (11/21)
In Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters draws attention to the views of feminists who discriminate against transgender women through the thoughts of Reese. 'In old books she had read,' Peters writes, 'Reese remembered women saying that if your husband doesn't beat you, he doesn't love you, a notion that horrified the feminist in Reese but ...
Agatha Christie's First Marriage (11/21)
In
The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, Marie Benedict explores mystery writer Agatha Christie's marriage to Archibald Christie through the lens of Agatha's mysterious temporary
disappearance in 1926. Many different theories have been proposed as to the exact details regarding how and why the famous author went missing, but no one account of ...
Olympic Equestrian Eventing (11/21)
Eventing, sometimes described as an equestrian triathlon, became an Olympic summer sport at the Stockholm Games in 1912, but before that, it had its roots in the military as a series of exercises developed to test and prepare cavalry horses. Equestrian sports date back much further, in some cases all the way back to the ancient Olympics, ...
Myles Standish and the Defense of the Plymouth Colony (11/21)
Beheld takes place in 1630 at the Plymouth settlement in what would later become Massachusetts and features several characters taken from the real-life history of the colony. One of these is Myles Standish, a decorated soldier who arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower with the first group of English pilgrims and served as Plymouth's head of ...
Gamification and AI: Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go (11/21)
As American political scientist Joseph Nye postulated in the 1980s, there are two ways to control people in geopolitics: hard power (i.e., coercion via violence) or soft power (i.e., enticement via incentive). Successful geopolitical strategy is often about knowing when to use soft power instead of force.
In We Have Been Harmonized, ...
The Truth Behind Helen of Troy and the Trojan War (11/21)
The story of the Trojan War, fought between the Greeks and the people of Troy, has been told and retold for thousands of years. This is in large part thanks to the efforts of Homer, the ancient Greek poet who penned the Iliad and Odyssey, recordings of epic stories set during and after the war. Legendary figure Helen of Troy plays a ...
The UK Independence Party (UKIP) (10/21)
Jasper Fforde's novel
The Constant Rabbit is a not-so-thinly-veiled allegory of racism and xenophobia that takes place in an alternate version of the United Kingdom. The governing party in the book is the UK Anti-Rabbit Party (UKARP), led by Nigel Smethwick, who seems to be based on Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK ...
Simone Weil (1909-1943) (10/21)
What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez takes its title from the writing of Simone Weil, an influential French philosopher and intellectual whose work was unusual for incorporating both left-leaning politics and religious traditions.
Weil was born in Paris on February 3, 1909 to agnostic Jewish parents. Her family was well-off and ...
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (10/21)
The plot of Jess Walter's novel, The Cold Millions, revolves around the actions of the newly-formed Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Spokane, Washington in 1909.
The groundwork for the IWW was laid by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a union formed in Columbus, Ohio in 1886. That organization's purpose was to ensure ...
