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The Life and Art of Pegeen Guggenheim (07/20)
Costalegre's main protagonist Lara Calaway is based on real-life artist Pegeen Vail Guggenheim (1925-1967), daughter of wealthy New York art collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979). In her afterword, author Courtney Maum leaves a dedication to the not widely known artist: 'Pegeen: Your story wasn't told much. I hope you...
Solastalgia, Eco-anxiety and Ecological Grief (07/20)
In
The Future Earth, Eric Holthaus describes having climate-related depression. Over the last two decades, we have become more attuned to the mental effects of worry about the environment. In 2003, Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the word '
solastalgia,' a variation on 'nostalgia' that draws on the connotations ...
Auschwitz-Birkenau Today (07/20)
The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (the setting of Jack Fairweather's riveting history The Volunteer) was liberated by the Soviet Army on January 27, 1945. In 1946, Poland's Ministry of Culture and Art recognized the need to preserve the site of so much horror for memorial and educational purposes, and set to work on a museum. ...
The Rise of Workplace Automation: 10 Shocking Facts (07/20)
It's no secret that rapid innovations in technology have drastically changed the way we work. But are these changes always for the better? Here are 10 shocking facts about the rise of automation in the workplace, taken directly from the pages of Emily Guendelsberger's
On The Clock.
- According to a 2013 study from Oxford University, 47 ...
The Controversy Surrounding On the Origin of Species (06/20)
The publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species forever changed the way humankind thought of themselves and their place in the world. Almost immediately, the public took sides; you were either pro-evolution or anti-evolution. This caused considerable strife between notable public figures at the time, and also resulted in ...
Minecraft and the Uncensored Library (06/20)
The story 'Mind Craft' in Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is named for one character's incorrect way of referring to the video game Minecraft, which is a multi-platform 'sandbox game,' the term for a game that leaves the player relatively free to explore a setting without having to progress through it in a linear fashion. Minecraft...
The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane in the Florida Keys (06/20)
Chanel Cleeton's historical novel The Last Train to Key West is based on a real event that took place on September 2, 1935, now known as the Labor Day Hurricane (and sometimes called the Labor Day Storm), a Category 5 storm that killed between 400 and 600 people in the Florida Keys. It was the first recorded Category 5 hurricane to hit ...
Microaggressions (06/20)
In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo devotes a chapter to racial microaggressions, or everyday instances of racism. As opposed to macroaggressions, which encompass obvious racist behavior such as the use of racial slurs, microaggressions are subtle, sometimes unconscious and often seemingly unremarkable actions that contribute ...
The Uruguayan Military Dictatorship (1973-1985) (06/20)
The small country of Uruguay (about the size of Missouri) is bordered by Argentina to the west, Brazil to the north, and the Atlantic to the south and east. Military rule began there in 1973 following a coup conducted in cooperation with then-president Juan María Bordaberry (1928-2011), and lasted for the following 12 years. During ...
Anna May Wong (06/20)
Anna May Wong was a Chinese-American film star who worked in the entertainment industry from the 1920s to the 1960s. As a person of color, she experienced limitations in the roles she was able to play throughout her career due to discrimination and typecasting. Many recognize her today as an overlooked icon.
Wong was born in 1905 to ...
19th Century Literary Companions (06/20)
In Sara Collins' historical novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton, the titular protagonist, a slave, tells her master's wife, 'Books were my companions…And I am grateful I could learn something, no matter how I came to do so. It was a way to know that lives could change, that they could be filled with adventures. There were times...
The Geography of Iceland (06/20)
As A. Kendra Greene writes in
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, 'Everywhere in Iceland is some kind of remote. It is almost always a word I reach for when describing a place here, though I mean it differently every time.' Greene makes it clear that understanding Iceland requires understanding its geography, which affects not only...
The Camel Corps of the U.S. Army (06/20)
A key section of Téa Obreht's novel
Inland takes place among the Camel Corps, a real-life mid-19th-century experiment conducted by the United States Army attempting to introduce camels as beasts of burden in the Southwestern territories.
This seemingly madcap idea originated when the army found they needed to vastly improve ...
Puppies and Prisoners (06/20)
In Owen Laukkanen's thriller Deception Cove, protagonist Mason Burke participated in a prison dog training program that brought meaning to his life during his incarceration. The origin of these programs can be traced back to a 1925 Boston Daily Globe news item. This article claimed that Pep, a Labrador owned by Governor Gifford Pinchot of...
The History of Presbyterianism (06/20)
Two of the main characters in Cara Wall's debut novel, The Dearly Beloved, are ministers in the Presbyterian Church. The novel focuses on the turbulence the Church faced in America during the social upheaval of the 1960s, but the roots of Presbyterianism, a Protestant denomination, can be traced back to 16th-century Europe.
On October ...
Emerging Infectious Diseases (06/20)
In Rory Powers' debut novel Wilder Girls, the students at the Raxter School for Girls are suffering from a mysterious illness called 'the Tox,' but other than knowing what the effects are and that some people from the outside world are working on trying to help them, they have no idea what is causing it, or what it even is.
How real ...
Women Who Ruled the Waves (06/20)
While Johnny Depp as the stumbling, coy, and flirtatious Captain Jack Sparrow may have taken over from the debonair and swashbuckling Errol Flynn as the contemporary image of a pirate, history is dotted with fearsome females who ruled the waves. They were by no means the majority – it was primarily a male profession – but female...
Reading the #MeToo Movement (05/20)
A large part of the later chapters of Susan Choi's Trust Exercise revolves around the publishing of a female narrative of past sexual assault, forcing other characters in the story to reckon with their own complicity in the event (or lack thereof). The empowerment of survivors telling of their own stories is a concept that today's public ...
Grief and Intergenerational Trauma (05/20)
As the narrative of How It Feels to Float unfolds, it becomes apparent that Biz's father suffered from some mental health problems and that there is a connection between how he and Biz process the world. The hereditary effects of trauma are only just becoming understood but, in essence, intergenerational trauma describes the transfer of ...
Funding Research in STEM (05/20)
In The Age of Living Machines, Susan Hockfield tells readers about the work of Angela Belcher, a chemist and bioengineer who found a way to make affordable, clean and natural renewable energy. Belcher and her colleagues did this by harnessing the power of viruses to make electric circuits that were then turned into high-powered batteries....
Young Adult Epistolary Novels (05/20)
Epistolary novels have a long tradition in literature, and even young adult novels like Sarah Henstra's We Contain Multitudes have gotten in on the act. Given their younger audiences, however, authors writing for teens often incorporate new technologies or other clever twists on the epistolary form. Check out a few of these examples of YA...
The Islands of Maine (05/20)
Sarah Blake's The Guest Book is set predominantly on a private island off the coast of Maine owned by the Milton family. There are roughly 3,000 islands in Maine's territory, some that are popular vacation spots, others that are entirely uninhabited.
Islands like Chebeague, Vinalhaven and Mount Desert are some of the most popular ...
The Five Most Destructive Wildfires in Recorded California History (05/20)
In Fire in Paradise, authors Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano capture the devastation wrought by the Camp Fire that destroyed the community of Paradise in California on November 8, 2018. California's hot, dry and windy climate makes it particularly susceptible to wildfires. Climate change has exacerbated these conditions, raising ...
Mayotte: A Community in Crisis (05/20)
An official department of France, Mayotte is a group of islands located in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of southeast Africa. This unique political and geographic setup has led to the development of a complex, fraught national identity for many of its people, with problems related to crime, population density, poverty and poor social ...
Korčula: Past and Present (05/20)
Korčula is a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea off the Dalmation coast, and the setting of Karen Russell's story 'Black Corfu' from her story collection Orange World. It's the second most populated island in the Adriatic (after Krk), and it has a long, storied history of being occupied by various superpowers reaching back to the ...
Foster Care (05/20)
In Kathryn Glasgow's How to Make Friends with the Dark, 16-year-old Tiger learns that her mother is dead, and almost equally upsetting, she can't even go somewhere familiar to stay while she figures out how to adjust to being an orphan; with no known father or other relatives, she is relegated to the legal responsibility of the state of ...
Greek Influence on the English Language (05/20)
As Mary Norris notes in her travelogue/memoir/historical narrative Greek to Me, many words and terms in the English language are derived from Greek. These range from somewhat arcane medical and scientific terminology, to more commonly used words and phrases. The etymological evolutions are generally divided into three categories: learned ...
The 1857 Dead Rabbits Riot (05/20)
In the historical novel The Parting Glass, narrator Mary Ballard's twin brother becomes involved with a notorious secret society/street gang in New York City called the Order. Mary's friend Liddie recalls meeting her brother during a night of rioting that seems to have been based on the Dead Rabbits riot, which took place July 4-5, 1857, ...
Freya, the Norse Goddess of Love, Fertility, War & Death (05/20)
The Boneless Mercies is based on the classic Anglo-Saxon poem
Beowulf, a sweeping tale of heroes, monsters and epic battles influenced by the culture and mythology of sixth-century Scandinavia. While there are no gods or goddesses in
Beowulf, there are references to mythological heroes like Sigmund of the
Völsunga saga (a Norse epic ...
The Ancient Druids (05/20)
It is likely that when you hear mention of the ancient Druids or Druidism, certain images arise–perhaps there are flowing white robes or oak leaves involved, there are also probably long, bushy beards and maybe a sprig of mistletoe. Over the centuries that separate us from this enigmatic group, we have done a great deal of ...
Literary Explorations of Women in STEM (05/20)
Through a compelling fictional storyline, The Tenth Muse draws attention to the sexism that pervades high-paying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers, and charts an expansive global tradition of underappreciated female trailblazers. In this, novelist Catherine Chung joins a chorus of other American women writers...
A Brief History of Podcasts (05/20)
The action in Denise Mina's novel Conviction is set in motion when the protagonist listens to a true-crime podcast.
Serial audio broadcasts have existed for more than a century; many of us remember gathering around our radios each week to listen to favorite shows, or remember parents or grandparents doing so. In many ways listening to ...
Nymphs in Greek Mythology (05/20)
The nature of nymphs, the 'least of the lesser goddesses,' as they are referred to in Circe, is central to the novel. Circe, herself a sorceress or witch nymph, is most famous for turning Odysseus' crew into wild pigs and later becoming the hero's lover and adviser. In Greek mythology, nymphs are female spirits associated with the natural...
Symbolism of the Pig (04/20)
In addition to having a very real fugitive pig running through the streets of Brussels, Robert Menasse deploys a pig leitmotif throughout The Capital that takes on a wealth of significance across the novel. Characters discuss the value of pig's ears, and pork is served in a succulent cherry beer sauce. Even fictional pigs such as Babe, ...
Time-Saving Appliances (04/20)
Jennifer Weiner's novel
Mrs. Everything confronts the notion that a woman can do and be everything to everyone. From the 1950s through the early 2000s, women in America became liberated from many household chores due to time-saving inventions. Refrigerators, dishwashers, laundry appliances, even automatic coffee makers, all helped ...
Brisbane, Australia (04/20)
Brisbane (pronounced 'brizz-binh'), the capital city of Queensland, Australia, is the setting for Trent Dalton's debut novel Boy Swallows Universe. In an essay in the Weekend Australian Magazine, Dalton describes his hometown with his trademark literary flair: 'Brisbane is a bat-sucked mango wedged in your mower blades...Brisbane is all ...
A Coney Island Tour (04/20)
Here we are, at the famed Coney Island in Brooklyn, through the eyes of Billy O'Callaghan in his novel My Coney Island Baby. The air is 'mean with cold.' Snow's coming, so along Surf Avenue, past Nathan's Hot Dogs, 'most of the stores along here are shuttered…some closed for the season, others having already written off the day as a...
The Indigenous People of Kamchatka, Russia (04/20)
The remote Russian peninsula of Kamchatka, where Julia Phillips' debut novel Disappearing Earth takes place, is very isolated. It is located on the far east side of Russia, surrounded by the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean, riddled by volcanic activity from the Pacific tectonic plate, part of Earth's 'Ring of Fire.' ...
HBOT: Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (04/20)
HBOT (hyperbaric oxygen therapy), the medical treatment at the center of Miracle Creek, is a real treatment used for a variety of conditions. While undergoing HBOT, you breathe pure oxygen in an environment where the air pressure is much higher than normal. The higher pressure allows you to take in more oxygen, which can help your body ...
The Corruption of Home in Gothic Literature (04/20)
Marina Kemp's Marguerite operates on several thematic levels; not least as an homage to classics of gothic literature. Like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw before it, the novel opens with a young woman arriving at a large, secluded country house, before documenting ...
Are Chickens Smart? (04/20)
Barn 8 recounts the formulation and execution of a plan to rescue (or, depending on your viewpoint, steal) nearly one million hens from an egg farm. Interspersed with the plot are ruminations on the lives, personalities, evolution and intelligence of these animals that the author obviously regards highly. So, how smart are chickens?
A...
History of the New York City Theatre Scene (04/20)
The New York City borough of Manhattan sometimes seems like it's much older than it actually is, given its massive scale, impressive infrastructure, and cultural impact. However, it was only in the 1850s that work began on Central Park, and Manhattan started to rapidly expand north of 14th Street. Times Square was only so named in 1904, ...
Women Spies Who Changed WWII (04/20)
For a wide array of reasons, the Allied countries recruited many women as spies in WWII. Their first advantage was they could blend in more easily than their male counterparts in the civilian population of a typical town or village. But there was also a growing sense that women were more skilled at being secretive, coy, and courageous. ...
The Internment of Japanese, German and Italian-Americans During WWII (04/20)
In The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner, the novel's main character is a child of German descent confined to the Crystal City internment camp during World War II, and later repatriated with her family to Germany. Many of us are aware of the exclusion, removal and detention of 120,000 people of Japanese heritage that occurred as the ...
The Controversy of Capital Punishment (04/20)
In David R. Dow's thriller, Confessions of an Innocent Man, the protagonist is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. Since the murder is committed in Texas, one of the 30 U.S. states that still allows capital punishment, he is sent directly to death row. There he awaits his execution among the 200+ other residents. From 1976 to ...
1970s Hangouts in New York City (04/20)
Among other things, Hustvedt's novel Memories of the Future is a vivid portrait of what it was like to live in New York City as a young woman in the late 1970s. She writes evocatively about many of her character's favorite haunts, which include several establishments that are still operating today. Interested in a glimpse into 'Minnesota'...
Climate Change and Migration in the U.S. (04/20)
In John Lanchester's The Wall, protagonist Joseph Kavanagh is conscripted into military service to defend the titular wall against a breach by the 'Others.' The Others are not an invading army, however, but individuals displaced from their homes by some unnamed climate disaster. In the real world, as the effects of climate change become ...
The Mighty Zambezi River (04/20)
One of the longest rivers in the world, the Zambezi is fed by many tributaries and flows more than 1,500 miles from the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Angola, Namibia and Botswana, then carves its way through Zambia and Zimbabwe and southeast through Mozambique, ultimately spilling into the Indian Ocean. In some places it's ...
The Life and Career of Yūko Tsushima (04/20)
Born in 1947 in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka, Yūko Tsushima was one of the most accomplished Japanese novelists of her generation at the time of her death from lung cancer in 2016. The author remains lesser known outside of Japan, but with the recent translations of Territory of Light and Of Dogs and Walls, there has been a small wave ...
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