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Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (02/25)
In Mona Acts Out, seasoned actress Mona Zahid is about to start rehearsals for her role as Cleopatra in Shakespeare's tragedy Antony and Cleopatra. Mona approaches the whole thing with trepidation, citing that she's "never actually seen a great Cleopatra," as the character is many-layered and must command the stage ...
A History of Strip Clubs in the United States (02/25)
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 ...
Authorial Pseudonyms (02/25)
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 ...
Berlin Club Culture (02/25)
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 ...
The Jeju Uprising (02/25)
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 ...
Red Lines and Anticipatory Obedience (02/25)
In Ali Smith's Gliff, two children living in a sinister surveillance state in the not-too-distant future return home to find a line of red paint circling their house. In this dystopian society where all-pervasive technology tracks and controls every aspect of people's lives, these red painted lines are used to flag those who have been ...
Sugar Beets (02/25)
In Beta Vulgaris — titled after the scientific name for sugar beets — workers come to Minnesota from across the country to work long shifts on big machines called pilers to harvest the crop. Is that what you picture when you hear the term 'sugar beets'? Me neither — I always imagined deep red or borscht, but as it might ...
Demeter and Persephone (02/25)
Rachel Lyon's novel Fruit of the Dead is based on the story of Demeter and Persephone from Greek mythology. In the original story, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, is devastated when her daughter Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, who intends to make her his wife. Demeter's grief is so great that it affects the ...
Escape and Evasion Maps (02/25)
In Lea Carpenter's Ilium, some of the spies have escape and evasion maps. Also known as escape maps or silk maps, these are scarves imprinted with maps that intelligence officers and soldiers have historically used when they've ended up behind enemy lines. They offer information about how best to escape or at least find somewhere safe to ...
Mobilian Jargon (02/25)
Joe Barrow, the protagonist of Francis Spufford's
Cahokia Jazz, does not speak the titular city's common language, Anopa. He learns bits and pieces of it over the course of the novel, at around the same pace as the reader (heeding the
suggestion of his friend Alan Jacobs, Spufford does not include a glossary). We learn the words for ...
The Harlem Renaissance (02/25)
Tia Williams' novel A Love Song for Ricki Wilde contains flashbacks to the Harlem Renaissance, considered a golden age for Black culture and art in the United States. This movement, centered in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood, took place between the 1910s and 1930s.
During the period known as the Great Migration, when large numbers...
Harvard's Glass Flowers (02/25)
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's novel Glassworks begins with the heroine employing a Czech glass artist to create a collection of realistic flora and fauna for her university in Boston. In interviews, the author has stated that she was inspired by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father-and-son team who created thousands of remarkably detailed ...
US Military Mules in World War II (01/25)
One of the characters in Derek B. Miller's novel The Curse of Pietro Houdini is a limping mule named Ferrari. The author notes that mules were used extensively during World War II in the Italian theater, in areas where trucks couldn't go, such as mountain passes and forests.
Mules are remarkable creatures that have been used as pack ...
A History of the Texas Rangers (01/25)
In Elizabeth Gonzalez James's novel The Bullet Swallower, a group of Texas Rangers pursue the protagonist, Antonio Sonoro, with maniacal zeal. The most dangerous member of the posse tortures and murders innocent civilians as a warning to Sonoro, crossing the Rio Grande and attacking Mexican citizens with impunity. Set in the mid-1890s...
How to Build an Emotional Safety Net (01/25)
Tessa Ensler wants her mother. The heroine of Suzie Miller's Prima Facie is in a panicky mess after a sexual assault, and, like many of us when things go sideways, she wants her mother's arms wrapped around her. She wants her mother's acceptance and kindness. When she confides that she 'had a bad experience' and has 'been to the police to...
Canadian Nurses in World War I (01/25)
Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts, in addition to focusing on the violence and trauma of the World War I trenches, is also about the female nurses who treated wounded soldiers.
Protagonist Laura's point-of-view sections devote ample description to the sordid day-to-day of serving as a hospital nurse in WWI. Already sent away ...
The Publication History of The Price of Salt, or Carol (01/25)
When Patricia Highsmith finished The Price of Salt in 1951, the manuscript was rejected by her publisher, Harper Bros., who had just put out her first hit novel Strangers on a Train. She sent the manuscript on to Coward-McCann (then an imprint of G.P. Putnam's Sons) using a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, and it was accepted for publication. (...
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction & Agatha Christie's Legacy (01/25)
In the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, people sought comfort and escapism in a world marked by chaos and uncertainty. Detective fiction offered a perfect outlet, with meticulously plotted mysteries that allowed the reader to regain a sense of control. After all, aren't detectives in these stories trying to restore the status quo, ...
Modern Perspectives on Giovanni's Room (01/25)
While rereading and reviewing Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, a book that has stayed with me for many years, I wanted to see what others have taken away from the novel, an early work of queer literature and a mid-century story of an American confronting his Americanness overseas. It was interesting to see recurrent themes and references...
Daphne du Maurier: A Brief History (01/25)
Author Daphne du Maurier belonged to a rich dynasty of storytellers and creatives. Her parents, Gerald du Maurier and Muriel Beaumont, both led successful acting careers. Her grandfather, George du Maurier, was a celebrated novelist and illustrator, while her uncle Guy de Maurier was a playwright. Du Maurier was the middle of three ...
The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon (01/25)
When we think about how pioneers changed the American frontier — or if we think about it — we may picture the hunting of bison herds as one of the biggest environmental changes wrought by settlers. The grainy photographs of thousands upon thousands of bison skulls piled unimaginably high, a near-extermination that seems mind-...
Marco Polo (01/25)
Although Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities concerns itself with two real people, it is far from historical fiction. The Marco Polo who describes city after fantastical city to Kublai Khan broadly resembles the Venetian merchant and explorer of the 13th century: both traveled the Eastern world and (allegedly, in the real Polo's case) served...
Sufism and the Hippie Movement (01/25)
In the novel Hideous Kinky, a young mother living in Morocco becomes interested in Sufism and takes her daughter with her to study at a zaouia, or Sufi mosque. Sufism is a form of Islamic mysticism or asceticism popular in some African countries, including Morocco and Senegal, where it is seen as a mystical form of Sunni Islam.
...
TikTok's Impact on Book Sales (01/25)
In 2024, Dostoevsky's short story White Nights became popular on BookTok, the corner of TikTok populated by readers. BookTok users post videos of themselves recommending books, discussing books, crying at the endings of books, and showing off their color-coordinated bookshelves, tagging these videos with the hashtag #BookTok. BookTok ...
Civil War in the Republic of Georgia (01/25)
In Leo Vardiashvili's Hard by a Great Forest, young Saba and his brother and father flee their home in Tbilisi, Georgia, when the city erupts in violence. "We heard gunfire by night and saw brass twinkling on the pavement in the mornings, as though it had rained shell casings all over Tbilisi," Saba says. "[W]hen a ...
Toni Morrison & The Bluest Eye (01/25)
Toni Morrison is the author of 11 works of fiction as well as a number of books and essays. She's best known for her novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 (the first Black woman to win the award) and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom —...
Beloved Criminals (01/25)
In A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage, Fox and Hazel are an attractive, wealthy, glamorous couple who kill others for sport. (But they only kill evil men, like rapists and child abusers—making them, in the reader's eyes, less serial killers and more vigilantes.) Their wealth and beauty offer them an inconspicuousness that lets them...
Novels Within Novels (01/25)
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 ...
The Work of Heather O'Neill (01/25)
Novelist, essayist, and contributor to NPR's This American Life, Heather O'Neill is a literary powerhouse in Canada, where she was born and raised and lives today. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals was published first in the US (Harper Perennial, 2006) before going on to win notable Canadian literary awards Canada Reads and ...
This Historical Deed: The Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan (01/25)
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 Ballet Giselle (01/25)
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 ...
The Long and Exhausting Journey for Central American Migrants (01/25)
For seven years, anthropologist Jason De León followed low-level smugglers to understand the motivation, culture, hopes, and dreams of those guiding migrants to the US-Mexico border and beyond. De León documents their stories, some of which ended in death, in
Soldiers and Kings. While his work is centered
on the smugglers, a ...
The History of the International Space Station (01/25)
Samantha Harvey's Booker Prize–winning novel
Orbital takes place aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite,
Sputnik 1, into space. According to
NASA's website, the event "had a 'Pearl Harbor' effect on American public opinion. It was...
The Djinn in Islamic Folk Culture (01/25)
In Shubnum Khan's debut novel The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, set amidst the Indian diaspora of South Africa, fifteen-year-old Sana and her father move into a dilapidated house by the sea that is haunted by a djinn. The djinn is the link between past and present, a connection between the 21st-century tenants and the immigrant family who ...
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri and The Epistle of Forgiveness (01/25)
In My Friends by Hisham Matar, the classical Arabic poem The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risalat al-Ghufran) by the Syrian writer Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri makes multiple appearances. Main character Khaled refers to his copy of the work, given to him by his father when he left Libya for university in Scotland, as 'the most precious object I ...
Iran Air Flight 655 (01/25)
On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a Navy missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, saw on its radar an Iranian aircraft. This aircraft was a passenger airplane, flying from Tehran to Dubai with 290 civilians on board, including 66 children. But the crew of the USS Vincennes identified the airplane as a fighter jet and fired two ...
Glassworks by Philip Glass (01/25)
In Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland, the protagonist, Adina, has a visceral reaction to a song that plays at the end of a movie she sees at the planetarium. 'At the end of the film, they pan through the universe. A song begins. Made out of choppy, repetitive phrases, sturdy in the middle and fragile around the edges, so ...
Abortion in Ireland (01/25)
In 2018, in a culturally and historically significant move, the Irish public voted in favor of overturning the country's long-held ban on abortion, with more than 66% supporting the repeal. This victory for improving access to healthcare for millions was by no means an overnight success, however.
On the contrary, the fight to legalize ...
A Moby-Dick Reading List (01/25)
Whether you love Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, hate it or have never read it, you may find yourself unable to escape it. Even for a classic, it shows surprising reach, having inspired and influenced numerous authors, artists and scholars, historical and contemporary. Published in 1851, it continues to be deconstructed, reconstructed, ...
Enslavement in Canada (01/25)
The nonfiction book Flee North recounts how activist and writer Thomas Smallwood encouraged the enslaved individuals he helped escape to relocate to Canada, where slavery was illegal, rather than remaining in the United States, where they might be returned to captivity if caught. Smallwood himself settled in Toronto with his family in ...
The History of Grog (12/24)
Hampton Sides' book The Wide Wide Sea records the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook and relays some of the exploits of his crew aboard the HMS Resolution. One of Cook's key decisions concerned an alcoholic drink known as "grog."
During the Age of Exploration—the 15th to 18th centuries—Royal Navy...
Fort Sumter Today (12/24)
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 ...
The Vietnam Women's Memorial (12/24)
In Kristin Hannah's The Women, nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath joins the Army Nurse Corps and is shipped overseas to serve as a combat nurse in the Vietnam War. Upon returning home, Frankie spends years running from her trauma until she eventually finds a way to share her experiences. At the end of the novel, she ...
Emergency Powers (12/24)
In Paul Lynch's novel Prophet Song, the enactment of an Emergency Powers Act sets in motion a sequence of destabilizing events that will eventually lead to societal dissolution and civil war. The Act provides the legal justification for an authoritarian government, through its newly formed secret police force and military, to bypass ...
Midwifery in Colonial America (12/24)
Martha Ballard, the heroine of Ariel Lawhon's
The Frozen River and a real-life 18th-century midwife, left behind a diary that remains one of history's best sources on midwifery in late colonial America. In addition to this work of historical fiction, Ballard is the subject of historical monographs and of a
PBS special on her life. Along ...
Reimagining the Classics from a New Perspective (12/24)
Percival Everett's
James is a reimagining of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved companion Jim. This kind of reconfiguration is a common source of inspiration for authors, as one can see in the following list of books that similarly provide new points of view on classic works of literature.
Beautiful ...
Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong (12/24)
Eve J. Chung's debut novel Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Chung has spoken about how she was motivated to write the book by her maternal grandmother's experiences of that period of history.
However...
History of the Summer Camp (12/24)
Liz Moore's mystery The God of the Woods begins with the disappearance of a girl from fictional Camp Emerson, a summer camp for children in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
For many children, attending summer camp is a rite of passage. According to a 2023 Newsweek article, there are over 12,000 summer camps across the United ...
The Classics Discipline (12/24)
When you hear the word "classics," what jumps to mind? Literature over the centuries? Famous authors? For people entering university to study "classics," it means something quite specific. Classics is typically defined as the interdisciplinary study of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, their interactions and ...
Cuneiform and Ashurbanipal's Library (12/24)
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak begins with the story of King Ashurbanipal (c. 685–631 BCE) of Ninevah, an ancient city on the eastern bank of the Tigris in part of what is now Mosul, Iraq. Although cruel even by the standards of his day, Ashurbanipal valued learning, and sometime around 647 BCE he built a library to ...
