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The Legacy of Sappho (01/24)
Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut novel After Sappho reimagines the lives of early 20th century lesbian authors and artists. The novel tells the story of how these women ignited a radical feminist movement inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, broke free from conventions to pursue their own desires and creativity, and flourished within...
North Korean Immigrants in the United States (01/24)
In City Under One Roof, some characters living in the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska are hiding their status as undocumented North Korean immigrants. If their secret is discovered, they will face deportation. Their fear of being found out, and their general situation, is based in real-life troubles of North Korean immigrants in the ...
Jacob Riis Beach (01/24)
In the essay 'We Swarm' from their debut collection How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler reflects on their experience finding comfort and kinship in New York City's queer community. The primary setting of this essay is a part of the beach at Jacob Riis Park in the borough of Queens, which, they explain, 'had been a gay haven as early...
The Camp Logan Mutiny (01/24)
Before he was hanged for his alleged role in the Camp Logan Mutiny, Army Pfc. Thomas Hawkins wrote a letter to his mother and father. It was both poignant and simple. 'When this letter reaches you, I will be beyond the veil of sorrow. I will be in heaven with the angels…I am not guilty of the crime that I am accused of but Mother it...
Black Jockeys: The Foundation of American Horse Racing (01/24)
On its face, the end of the Civil War should have marked a time in which African Americans would be afforded freedom. But the end of slavery did not mean the end of Black oppression. Many white Americans built their fortunes on, and were heavily entrenched in, slavery's infrastructure. These individuals, as well as others, bore great ...
A Brief History of Korean Relations in the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries (01/24)
In EJ Koh's The Liberators, Insuk's friend Robert is an activist passionately in favor of the reunification of North and South Korea. Korea was occupied by Japan from the early 20th century through 1948; when the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II, Korea was split along the 38th parallel by the United States. The northern ...
Traian Popovici: The Man Who Saved Jews in Czernowitz (01/24)
The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold tells the story of Frederieke 'Rieke' Teitler, a young Jewish girl trying to survive the atrocities of Nazi-controlled Romania. Throughout the war, many of Rieke's friends are deported to Transnistria, a small country to the east where Jews were sent to live in camps and ghettos. Rieke and her family, ...
The History of the Everglades (01/24)
For thousands of years, the southern half of Florida was one of the most vibrant, unique ecosystems on Earth, composed of water flowing over land, interspersed with plant and animal life in a massive mosaic of wetlands. What came to be known as the Everglades was formed by fresh water spilling out from Lake Okeechobee and flowing slowly ...
The Red Hat Society (01/24)
'When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.' These opening lines to the poem 'Warning' by Jenny Joseph serve as inspiration (and uniform) for Glory Broussard, protagonist of Danielle Arceneaux's Glory Be, and for real-life members of the Red Hat Society, an international social ...
The 2023 Spiel des Jahres: Dorfromantik (01/24)
In his section on European games in Around the World in Eighty Games, Marcus du Sautoy discusses the Spiel des Jahres ('Game of the Year'), the most prestigious award in tabletop gaming, awarded annually since 1979 by a jury of journalists who write about games. The Spiel des Jahres carries no cash prize, but certainly the winners (which ...
East Germany's Secret Police: The Stasi (01/24)
The main character in Dan Fesperman's spy thriller Winter Work is a colonel in East Germany's HVA, a unit of the infamous East German security service commonly referred to as the Stasi.
After World War II, the United States and the USSR vied for influence over Europe, with most countries in the western half of the continent joining ...
The Freedom Swimmers (01/24)
May Chen, the main character in Joanna Ho's The Silence That Binds Us, explores her identity through her family heritage, including the experiences of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Hong Kong as a young refugee from mainland China. Faced with formidable hardships during the Cultural Revolution, she left everything behind and ...
The Four Yugas (01/24)
Deepti Kapoor’s novel
Age of Vice takes its title from the Hindu term
Kali Yuga. In Hindu scripture and mythology, humanity is destined to cycle repeatedly through four great eras, known as yugas. Opinions as to the length of a single cycle (Kalpa) vary greatly — from around four million to four billion years — suffice...
American Involvement in Korea During and After the Korean War (01/24)
The novel Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl is divided between the experiences of the character Big Uncle during the Korean War in 1950 and his nephew Insu's adolescence in the 1970s. It shows how alliances and protections formed during the war gave rise to familial ties and cultural integrations in the postwar era. Insu's identity as the ...
The C.R. Patterson & Sons Company (01/24)
Krystal Marquis mentions in a brief author's note that her debut novel The Davenports was 'inspired by the story of the C.R. Patterson & Sons carriage company, founded by a proud patriarch who escaped enslavement to become a wealthy and respected entrepreneur.'
Charles Richard Patterson was born into slavery on a plantation in Virginia...
Chivalry and the Black Prince (01/24)
In Dan Jones' novel Essex Dogs, readers see fictionalized portrayals of royalty and knights from the point of view of the foot soldiers under their command in the early years of the Hundred Years' War (a series of wars interspersed with truces between the French and English that began in 1337 and lasted for 116 years). Far from the ...
George Orwell and 1984 (01/24)
Sandra Newman's novel Julia is based on George Orwell's classic work of fiction 1984, retold from the point of view of the protagonist's lover. Who, though, was George Orwell, and how did 1984 come to be?
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Bengal, India. His father, Richard, was employed in the India ...
Protesting Operation Alert (01/24)
Alice McDermott's novel about the humanitarian efforts of American corporate wives living in Vietnam in the early '60s, Absolution, takes a detour to New York City in the previous decade, where Tricia, the protagonist, and her radicalized friend Stella participate in sit-ins against the compulsory Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
In ...
Irish Short Stories and Their Common Themes (01/24)
Storytelling has always been an integral part of Irish heritage and culture. Originally, Irish stories were passed down through the generations by ear, first by bardic poets, and later by storytellers called seanchaí (or seanchaíwere, which means 'bearer of old lore' in Gaelic). The bards and seanchaí weren't just ...
The American Diet Industry (01/24)
In
Hot Springs Drive, main characters Theresa and Jackie attend a dieting support group. In the United States, commercial diet plans like these are a big business. The research firm Custom Market Insights
estimates the industry was worth $135.7 billion in 2022 and predicts that it will continue to grow, with Herbalife, NutriSystem and ...
Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project (01/24)
Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.
Ringelblum was born in ...
Species Reintroduction to Save the Permafrost (01/24)
In his book
The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth, Ben Rawlence describes how global warming is altering northern ecosystems like the tundra of Siberia. As temperatures rise, the permafrost no longer lives up to its name; instead of staying permanently frozen, the ice within is melting. This causes the ground to ...
Books by Filipino Authors for Young Readers (01/24)
Not that long ago, it would have been difficult to find many young adult or middle-grade novels featuring a Filipino or Filipino-American protagonist, let alone Filipino settings and customs as we see in
My Heart Underwater. Fortunately, that is no longer the case.
In 2005,
Melissa de la Cruz, best known for her Descendants, Alex...
Sun Yat-sen (12/23)
In the novel The House of Doors, Lesley Hamlyn volunteers as a translator for Sun Yat-sen's political movement in Penang, Malaysia. Sun Yat-sen is one of the foremost figures in Chinese political history. By leading China from an empire to a republic, he also became an important inspiration to other independence movements of twentieth-...
Revenge Westerns (12/23)
Revenge is an arduous task, and tales of retribution are especially suited for the western setting. In the popular imagination, the American West is lawless and brutal, besotted with everyday bloodshed, and so revenge seems like an appropriate goal. Nearly every writer of westerns has a vigilante or two somewhere in their lineup. It's a ...
Free People of Color and Their Roles in the American Slave Trade (12/23)
In Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend, one of Annis's enslavers is a woman. Typically, when people think about enslavers and those perpetuating slavery as a system, they often think about white men. Some may find it surprising that women played a significant role in the slave trade, too. Furthermore, white people were not the only ones who ...
The Fires of 1970s New York City (12/23)
In her novel Remember Us, author Jacqueline Woodson draws from her own experiences growing up in 1970s New York. Her protagonist's hometown of Bushwick is plagued by housefires, landing it the callous nickname 'The Matchbox.'
Bushwick wasn't the only community affected by numerous fires at the time. Records show that by mid-1974, the ...
Cape Horn (12/23)
David Grann's The Wager is a nonfiction book about events surrounding the 1741 wreck of the British ship the HMS Wager, which met its doom while rounding Cape Horn, a rocky headland at the southernmost tip of the Chilean archipelago Tierra del Fuego, where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans meet. With this book, Grann sheds light on one ...
The Carville National Leprosarium (12/23)
King of the Armadillos by Wendy Chin-Tanner takes place partly in a federal institute in Louisiana where young protagonist Victor Chin is sent to be treated for Hansen's disease — commonly known as leprosy — in the 1950s.
This inpatient center, often referred to simply as Carville, was built on the site of an abandoned ...
Gentileschi's Masterpiece: Judith Slaying Holofernes (12/23)
Judith Slaying Holofernes — also referred to as Judith Beheading Holofernes — is widely considered the masterpiece of Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1656), the protagonist of Elizabeth Fremantle's novel Disobedient. It depicts the Biblical tale of the widowed Israelite Judith, with the help of her ...
Conditions for People with Disabilities in 1930s America (12/23)
James McBride's novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store follows a community as they work together to save a young deaf Black boy, Dodo, from unjust institutionalization in 1930s America. Though Dodo's disability is physical, the state authorities are determined to place him in a mental institution called Pennhurst. In the context of ...
The Catamount (12/23)
A mysterious recurring figure in Daniel Mason's Massachusetts-set novel North Woods — starting with the cover image — is the 'catamount.' This folk name, which originates from the Middle English 'cat of the mountaine,' usually refers to a particular North American wild cat species, the cougar (Puma concolor), which is also ...
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) and Our Town (12/23)
In Ann Patchett's novel Tom Lake, the main character fondly remembers starring in a production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. This is Wilder's best-known play, which debuted in 1938 to mixed reviews but earned him a Pulitzer Prize that same year, making him the only writer to have received the award in both fiction and drama.
Born in ...
The Malaga Island Eviction of 1912 (12/23)
Paul Harding's novel This Other Eden takes place on Apple Island, where a Christian missionary arrives and becomes a catalyst for the destruction of a flourishing community of vulnerable people who did not, and could not, fit into societal norms. Harding's novel is inspired by true events that took place in the early 20th century on ...
Saint Thomas Christians (12/23)
One of the overarching themes in Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water is faith, in all its various guises. For the character Big Ammachi and her family, it is their proud history as Saint Thomas Christians that sustains them in their bleakest hours.
The novel refers to the legend of Saint Thomas, one of the twelve disciples of ...
The Women of the Ku Klux Klan (12/23)
Timothy Egan's book A Fever in the Heartland mentions the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, a group of women who were actively aligned with the mission of the KKK during its 1920s resurgence. In 1923, the WKKK formed in Little Rock, Arkansas. The WKKK had chapters in every state and at least 500,000 members over the course of its existence. ...
Crossing the Pyrenees (12/23)
In The Postcard, Jeanine Picabia, the author's grand-aunt, is a leader in the French Resistance movement. When she is betrayed, she becomes "one of the most wanted female fugitives in France." In December 1942, she flees to England by way of Spain, which she enters by crossing over the Pyrenees mountains. She takes a ...
Iranian Americans (12/23)
Susanne Pari's In the Time of Our History focuses on an Iranian American immigrant family between New Jersey and San Francisco in the 1990s. The novel is inspired by the author's own family's experiences following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. While people of Iranian descent have lived in the United States since at least the 1930s, ...
What They Don't Tell You About the Success Sequence (12/23)
When adolescents are baptized at the church where I worship, the recognized ritual is for the pastor to bellow out for all the congregation to hear and for the teenager to repeat: College. Job. Marriage. Family. In that order.
The words conflate virtue with escaping poverty and are known as the success sequence. In principle, the ...
A Brief History of the Peach (12/23)
In Shelley Read's debut novel, Go as a River, the heroine's life revolves around her peach farm in Colorado.
Genetically the peach is part of the rose family, but its closest relative is the almond. Its genera, Prunus, also includes cherry, apricot and plum trees. While its formal name, Prunus persica, translates to 'Persian plum,' it...
Burmese Pythons in Florida (11/23)
In her book
Pests, Bethany Brookshire provides several examples of introduced species becoming huge destroyers of local wildlife and ecosystems. One of the most well-known (and perhaps, if you dislike snakes as much as I do, most terrifying) examples of this phenomenon is the Burmese python in Florida. A
whole section of the Florida Fish ...
Novels by Cree Writers (11/23)
Jessica Johns, the author of Bad Cree, is a member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Northern Alberta. The Cree, or ininiw, who also refer to themselves as nêhiyawak (Plains Cree), nihithaw (Woodland Cree) and nèhinaw (Swampy Cree), are the largest group of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and live in areas stretching from ...
Historic Black Communities in the United States (11/23)
Jamila Minnicks' debut novel
Moonrise Over New Jessup takes place in an all-Black town in 1950s Alabama. Residents are wary of integration, preferring to exist in their own space rather than being left to contend with racism in a white-dominated society. In an
interview with
The Rumpus, Minnicks explains that she wanted to write about...
A Brief Overview of the Good Friday Agreement (11/23)
Francesca McDonnell Capossela's novel Trouble the Living is in part set in Northern Ireland during the waning days of the Troubles, a 30-year period of violence brought mostly to an end by the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998.
In 1921, at the end of the Irish War of Independence, Ireland was partitioned into ...
The Pre-Columbian City of Tetzcoco (11/23)
In David Bowles' novel The Prince and the Coyote, Prince Acolmiztli is forced to flee his beloved city of Tetzcoco after it is overrun by enemies. Acolmiztli, later known as Nezahualcoyotl, was a real historic figure still famous today, and his city was one of the most important in the Aztec Empire.
Tetzcoco (also spelled Texcoco or ...
Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (11/23)
Both the first hospital and the first medical school in the United States were founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, landing it the nickname 'City of Medicine.' Therefore, it seems only natural that it also became home to the first school in the world dedicated to providing women with a full formal education in the field, allowing them ...
Dementia: A Two-Person Illness (11/23)
After a dementia diagnosis, the rules that families depend on — who takes care of who — just don't exist anymore. The hierarchy of parent and child or grandparent and grandchild dissolves under lost memory. Dementia is an illness that affects two people: The patient, and the person caring for them. Anger or frustration often ...
Bolivia's Cerro Rico and the Mining God El Tío (11/23)
During the height of the Spanish colonization of Latin America in the 16th and early 17th centuries, conquistadors forced enslaved workers to extract vast amounts of silver from mines in Cerro Rico ('rich hill' in Spanish) near the city of Potosí (in what is now Bolivia), which once held the largest silver deposits on Earth. As many ...
Imagining Life on Mars: A Reading List (11/23)
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's A City on Mars discusses what a space colony on that planet might look like. Science fiction authors, though, have been imagining life on the Red Planet for well over a century (some coming closer to reality than others).
The concept of intelligent life on Mars was likely sparked in the late 19th ...
