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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Producing Reality Television (02/26)
Since its inception, reality television has asked the same question of its viewers: how much of this is real? The answer isn't exactly straightforward, and it forces us to ask a second question: what does 'real' even mean?
Looking back through television history, it's difficult to determine the first ever reality show, as the genre has...
Bears in Indigenous Cultures and Legends (02/26)
Many Indigenous people view themselves as stewards of the land and nature and, in North America, have special relationships with bears. Tribes such as the Chippewa, Creek, and Mi'kmaq have Bear clans, while others perform a traditional Bear Dance. The Haudenosaunee Bear Dance, performed as part of a midwinter ceremony, imitates a bear's ...
Tunnel Farming (02/26)
In Daniyal Mueenuddin's This Is Where the Serpent Lives, the character Saqib defies the odds of his caste by becoming an entrusted manager of a business venture for Hisham Atar, the son of Colonel Atar, whose estate Saqib's family has served for generations in Lahore, Pakistan. Hisham has given Saqib the task of implementing tunnel farms ...
Patrice Nganang's Cameroon Trilogy (02/26)
In Scale Boy, author Patrice Nganang relates his colorful childhood in the evolving post-colonial world of Cameroon and his love of books, reading, and writing. Nganang left Cameroon to pursue a Ph.D. in Germany and now teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University in New York. His most renowned novels are the Cameroon trilogy,...
Climbing at Joshua Tree (02/26)
In Gabriel Tallent's Crux, one of the novel's primary characters, Tamma, declares exuberantly, 'Get up, get up! It's Saturday and the rocks are a-warming! … Arise and go now, to a park I know, that sits upon the joining of three deserts, each more blighted and lonely than the last! Arise and go!'
Avid rock climbers like Tamma ...
Women the Music Industry Ate (02/26)
In a bit of myth-making, it is often said that in 1969 Janis Joplin fell to her knees, tears in her eyes, on the final note of her Woodstock performance. There is no evidence that this happened, but the image persists because it captures something audiences believed to be true about Joplin: that she did not simply perform, but bled on ...
The Buffalo Jills Lawsuit (02/26)
The main character of Karen Parkman's novel The Jills is a cheerleader on the Buffalo Jills cheer squad, and the terrible working conditions she faces are based in reality. The Buffalo Jills were the Buffalo Bills' official cheerleaders from 1967 to 2014—when the team disbanded after a lawsuit by former members. The legal ...
Gravesend, Brooklyn Over the Years (02/26)
Gravesend is only an hour from New York City's Grand Central Station by subway, but Manhattan 'might as well be Mars' to the characters of Saint of the Narrows Street. It is a small neighborhood in south Brooklyn, just north of the better-known Coney Island and Brighton Beach.
The name 'Gravesend' sounds macabre, but its roots are...
The Preppy Killer (02/26)
A crime that occurred in the summer of 1986 in New York City inspired Cynthia Weiner's A Gorgeous Excitement. On August 26, a cyclist discovered 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in New York City's Central Park, dead due to strangulation and half naked behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, badly bruised and with cuts on her face. She had been ...
A History of Strip Clubs in the United States (02/26)
In the novel Soft Core, protagonist Ruth works at a San Francisco club as a stripper, a profession with a long history in the United States. The first striptease acts in America were part of vaudeville shows at carnivals and burlesque theatres around the turn of the twentieth century. One early "disrobing act" by a trapeze ...
Nelly Dean: The Only Adult in the Room (01/26)
Though I'm not really the kind of person who has a 'favorite book,' when people ask if I do, I have, since the first time I read it, told them Wuthering Heights. This first reading would have been when I was a deeply romantic and dramatic young teenager, and I was turned inside out by the unrequited passion between Heathcliff and ...
The Kent State Pietà (01/26)
Of all the unsettling photos taken at Kent State University on May 4th, 1970, one of them became the iconic image of unthinkable tragedy. In
this photo, twenty-year-old student Jeff Miller lies face down bleeding as fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screams in horror over his body. The photographer was KSU student John Filo, and the ...
Queen Marguerite of Navarre (01/26)
Allegra Goodman's novel Isola concerns Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval (born c. 1515), a French noblewoman who was marooned on a deserted island with her lover while on a voyage to New France (Canada). Marguerite was eventually rescued and upon her return to France was treated as a celebrity; her tale became widely known very quickly....
Star Trek & Space Exploration (01/26)
From the 17th century on, Johannes Kepler, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs were just a few artists who contributed to a burgeoning awakening of the collective imagination, melding scientific and cosmic theories with myth and character, shaping something entirely new — science fiction.
...
Emily J. Taylor's Inspirations (01/26)
Emily J. Taylor's sophomore novel,
The Otherwhere Post, is an academic young adult fantasy filled with haunting secrets, a fascinating magic system, and a sweet slow-burn romance. Taylor has
shared that the idea for the story struck in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Between quarantining and the sleep deprivation that ...
The Devastating Earthquake Predicted to Hit Portland (01/26)
Emma Pattee's debut novel
Tilt follows one woman's journey across Portland after the city is hit by a devastating earthquake. Though fictional, the disaster is based on research that suggests such an event could take place in the not-so-distant future. Readers may recognize this future earthquake as 'The Big One' from
Kathryn Schulz's ...
Isolation, Alienation, and Escapism: Observing Two Thriller Narratives (01/26)
It's 2024. COVID-19, while still dangerous, is no longer the unknown factor it once was, and extended quarantines are no longer mandated as in the earlier days, pre-vaccination. Though the world has never stopped talking about what isolation has done to our collective psyche, I think it's only this year that we're starting to see some of ...
"The Only Good Indian": Reading Racism in Little House on the Prairie (01/26)
In Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder narrates a fictionalized version of her childhood in the Big Woods near Pepin, Wisconsin, in the 1870s. The first official book in the Little House series, Big Woods is less well-known than the third book, Little House on the Prairie, which has been read in countless classrooms across...
What Remains Unsaid: Analyzing an Author's Omissions (01/26)
Claire Keegan's slim novel, Small Things Like These, is in many ways about the things that people leave unsaid—the things they can't or won't say out of fear or, as it turns out, out of kindness.
In perhaps the most important example of this theme, towards the end of the novel, a passing comment from a neighbor about the ...
Literary Love Triangles: How Talking It Over Works Within and Subverts the Tropes (01/26)
Love triangles—stories in which one person must decide between two possible partners or embarks on a forbidden romance while bound to someone else—have been central to literature for millenia: In Greek mythology, Helen was married to King Menelaus of Sparta but, by some accounts, fell in love with Paris and joined him in Troy ...
Use of Stream of Consciousness in The Sound and the Fury (01/26)
William Faulkner's 1929 masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, is a work of modernist literature, and one of the best examples of stream-of-consciousness narrative ever written. This technique attempts to mimic the way a person's mind works, with one thought flowing into another, often sparked by an external stimulus that brings up ...
Rebutting Counterarguments in Nonfiction (01/26)
Throughout Superforecasting, Tetlock and Gardner seem to be aware they are fighting an uphill battle against skepticism. On one end of the spectrum, you have pundits committed to their ability to guess the future on intuition alone. On the other, you have an anti-intellectual rejection of the notion that experts can know anything at all. ...
