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Reiving (11/16)
In the 14th century, the land on either side of the border between England and Scotland became known as the 'Border Country' or 'The Borders.' This area, where Fair Helen is set, was frequently used as a thoroughfare by English and Scottish armies, and consequently the residents were constantly impoverished as the militias sought to ...
A Funambulist By Any Other Name (11/16)
It seems that as long as there have been human beings and rope there has been the urge to string that rope between two posts or trees or buildings or things of any sturdy sort and walk - heel to toe - across the span.
For the ancient Greeks it held the appeal of balance offset by danger and, of course, the physical challenge. Though ...
Ancient Apartment Buildings (11/16)
Fishbowl is set in a high-rise apartment building.
The contemporary apartment building has evolved over hundreds of years to its current avatar, sleek structures fashioned with high-tech materials and serviced by powerful elevators.
It is believed that the first apartment buildings were built by the Romans two thousand years ago...
Flash Floods (11/16)
Flash flooding is a constant concern in The Never-Open Desert Diner.
A flash flood is a sudden release of water that inundates an area, and is differentiated from a normal flood by its duration; by definition, a flash flood lasts less than six hours. Although they can occur under a wide variety of circumstances they're especially ...
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (11/16)
The economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen, a frequent point of reference (and the main character's namesake) in Elizabeth McKenzie's The Portable Veblen, was born in Wisconsin in 1857. Veblen is famous for the concept of 'conspicuous consumption,' or spending more on things than they are worth to make a show of one's class.
He was the ...
Diego Velázquez's Contemporaries (11/16)
Diego Velázquez (1599 - 1660) was a painter in the court of Spain's Philip IV during the Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro), a period influenced by the Italian Renaissance, during which the arts flourished throughout the country. The exact dates of the Spanish Golden Age vary by commentator, but it began no earlier than 1492 with ...
Prohibition in Vermont (11/16)
Press, the protagonist of In the Country of the Blind, lives in Vermont near a forgotten trail that rum-runners used to smuggle alcohol into the United States during Prohibition. 'The Nobel Experiment,' as the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was called, was an attempt at social engineering lasting from 1920 to 1933.
Section 1 ...
Bat Mitzvah (11/16)
One of the stories in Robert Oldshue's November Storm is about a 12-year old girl who is about to become a Bat Mitzvah. Most people have heard of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah – a Jewish rite of passage; a time when boys and girls are formally welcomed into the adult community. The word mitzvah means commandment or law, as well as good deed; ...
Parenting a Prodigy (11/16)
In Gilly Macmillan's The Perfect Girl, seventeen-year old Zoe Maisey is a musical prodigy. Her genius, Zoe says, is 'temptingly bright' to other people but she sounds a strong note of caution: 'Be careful what you wish for, because everything has a price.' Her mother and stepfather, she explains 'are disguising a level of ambition for ...
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (11/16)
When English clergyman Reverend David Railton spied a British grave marked 'Unmarked British Soldier' in 1916, he developed the idea for a national war memorial. It would take until 1920, however, for his idea to come to fruition, but this proved to be the perfect time. Two years after the end of World War I there were still tens of ...
The Challenges of Genius (11/16)
In A Doubter's Almanac, Hans Andret, a mathematical genius, checks into a rehab facility, seeking treatment for his addiction. In a counseling session, his therapist, Matthew, asks Hans why he suddenly brought his addiction out in the open and suggests that Hans wished to be caught.
When Hans protests that such a notion would be ...
America's First Ransom Note (11/16)
In People of the Broken Neck, a series of mysterious messages, scribbled in salt, follow the Sawyers as they flee from the authorities all across the country. Cryptic communications, especially when interlinked with crimes, have always been intriguing, and the ones in this novel reminded me of ransom notes even if they make no overt ...
Michel Houellebecq in Profile (11/16)
Michel Houellebecq (pronounced mish-elle wellbeck) is nothing if not an autobiographical writer. He has, in fact, become the poster child for a movement, prevalent in contemporary French literature, known as 'auto-fiction' which sees authors unashamedly use fictionalized versions of their own lives in their novels. Autobiographical ...
The Hokule'a (11/16)
In
Pacific, author Simon Winchester closes with the image of the vessel
Hokule'a, which he views as a symbol of hope for the people of the Pacific Islands and a physical manifestation of a return of respect for indigenous traditions.
The Hokule'a is built in the tradition of the ancient Hawaiian double-hulled voyaging canoe known as
wa...
Galvanism (11/16)
Who would have thought that one frog could have such a huge impact on science?
As bizarre as it sounds, that was exactly the case. In the late eighteenth century, a scientist named Luigi Galvani performed an experiment on a frog, making a slight cut just beneath the frog's skin to expose nerve cells. When the scalpel came into contact ...
Occupy Wall Street (11/16)
Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size Of a Fist is built around the 1999 street protest in Seattle against the World Trade Organization. Its core message of capitalism and globalization smothering the lifeblood out of an individual has been mirrored in demonstrations before and since, most notably in the Occupy Wall Street movement that was ...
Blind Runners (11/16)
'I don't need a saint to run with, just someone willing and able and most of all, fast.' When Parker, the main character in Eric Lindstrom's debut novel Not If I See You First, begins to contemplate making the switch from running on her own in an empty field at the crack of dawn to joining the track team, she knows she'll need ...
What Defines a Novel? (10/16)
Many of the reviews of Strout's latest novel,
My Name is Lucy Barton, have called it a 'slim volume.' Some might even say that its length of just over 200 pages makes it a novella not a novel. This raises the question, what page/word count defines a novel?
Opinions on this differ widely. For example,
Writer's Digest suggests to ...
Kurt Cobain (10/16)
In 'Nirvana,' the opening story in Adam Johnson's
Fortune Smiles, the main character's wife, Charlotte, is paralyzed from the shoulders down. She lies in bed and listens to the rock band Nirvana, as if the band's frontman, Kurt Cobain, was the only person who could understand her despair.
'It's not you,' she says. 'I just need my ...
Nuclear Waste in Yucca Mountain (10/16)
In Gold Fame Citrus, the Yucca mountain, which is located in the deserts of Nevada, an hour northwest of Las Vegas, has officially become a nuclear waste depository: 'The white bullet trains come in and out thrice daily, soundless, only a slight pressing and unpressing of the air. One day the repository will be filled and it will be ...
The Tridevi in Hinduism (10/16)
The Opposite of Everyone is peppered with elements from Hinduism, most prominently with references to the goddess Kali who is widely revered among Hindus for her ability to quell chaos during dark times (read '
Beyond the Book' for
The Strangler Vine to learn more about Kali).
According to the tenets of Hinduism, the Supreme Being ...
Shakespearean Insults (10/16)
'You taught me language. And my profit on't is, I know how to curse.' That's the lament of Caliban, the resident savage of Shakespeare's The Tempest, but it's also the the savvy modern reader's takeaway of Shakespeare's plays. Among the linguistic legacies of Shakespeare, eloquent and eclectic cursing and insults must certainly be ...
Perfecting Humanity - The British Eugenics Movement (10/16)
As mentioned in Anna Hope's historical novel The Ballroom, just over 100 years ago in 1912, London hosted the first International Eugenics Conference, an event attended by people who believed in the prevention of those deemed inferior – whom they labeled 'feeble-minded' – from reproducing. It was a categorization ...
Struwwelpeter (10/16)
In
The Gustav Sonata, Gustav and Anton share a love of the German children's book,
Struwwelpeter, which was written by Dr Heinrich Hoffmann in 1844. NPR
noted that
Struwwelpeter 'set the stage for children's book classics like
Where the Wild Things Are and the beloved
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.'
There have been countless ...
Anegada - BVI (10/16)
Set on the remote British Virgin Island (BVI) of Anegada,
Sun, Sand, Murder is a mystery novel that owes much to its setting.
Anegada is the northernmost island of the BVI archipelago chain (click map for larger image). Of the inhabited islands, Anegada is the only one made of coral and limestone, instead of being volcano-created like...
Eccentric British Noblemen (10/16)
William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, 5th Duke of Portland and the eponymous 'Dead Duke' of Piu Marie Eatwell's book, was undeniably eccentric. He was extremely reclusive, never inviting anyone to his home at Welbeck Abbey and prohibiting his servants and workmen from acknowledging his presence in any way (any who did were immediately ...
Cyprus: Divided Loyalties (10/16)
One of the many historical events that are featured glancingly in A Strangeness in My Mind is the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
For a long time Cyprus was a part of the Ottoman Empire, which arguably explains why Turkey considered it its own, even after the Ottoman Empire handed over governance of the island to Great Britain in ...
Wallace Stevens (10/16)
The title of the story collection,
Thirteen Ways of Looking, is a reference to a poem,
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. This poem, a stanza of which prefaces each chapter of McCann's novella, was written by Wallace Stevens in 1923.
Stevens, an American poet, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879. A Harvard graduate and ...
The Thorne Rooms (10/16)
In The Making of Home, Judith Flanders argues that it can be difficult to know what ordinary homes throughout history looked and felt like, in part because museums with 'period rooms' tend to devote precious space to recreating the opulent homes of wealthy figures from the past. Perhaps it's much more fun to look at ceilings replete ...
The Yakhchal (10/16)
Long before the advent of the refrigerator, around 400 BCE, the ancient Persians had figured out a way of making ice and having it readily available even over the summer. At its most basic, the solution took advantage of the low humidity and cool desert nights, especially in winter, to make ice and then store it in an insulated building ...
Childhood Food Novels (10/16)
When my sister, Meridith, was little my parents' frequent dinner table entreaty was that she stop playing with her food. But she was an unstoppable force (a picture of her as a baby shows her pointing a crooked finger at the camera as if to warn the world to beware because she had lots of things to say and do). Mom and Dad soon gave up on...
Novelist as Method Writer (09/16)
The Novelist by W.H. Auden
Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none...
Nigeria's Stance Against Homosexuality (09/16)
Over the course of Under the Udala Trees, the heroine, Ijeoma, discovers she's a lesbian, at first fighting her inclinations and trying to fit in, but later accepting that she's different from many of her peers.
Although homosexuals have gained more acceptance over the past decade in the United States and other Western countries, ...
Geoffrey Pyke's Genius (09/16)
Geoffrey Pyke, the subject of The Ingenious Mr Pyke, was a man of many talents; his interests were as varied as they were obsessive. To understand them, we need look no further than two of his most successful projects, The Malting House School and the development of a remarkable substance which became known as 'pykrete.'
The Malting ...
Haiku (09/16)
at my feet
when did you get here?
snail
- Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828)
It's no coincidence that Elisabeth Tova Bailey chose Kobayashi Issa as one of several selected poets to gently ease us into the passages of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. The haiku poet's simplicity and grace complement Elisabeth Tova Bailey's quiet ...
Hollywood's Margaret Herrick Library (09/16)
If you live in or near Los Angeles, you're guaranteed to have at least one Hollywood experience, be it a TV show taping, a star sighting, tickets to a premiere, or some crazy confluence of circumstances that gives you something you never expected.
Up until late summer 2012, I lived in the Santa Clarita Valley, 30 minutes north of ...
Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs' Children (09/16)
Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of being Soviet spies, are at the center of Jill Cantor's novel, The Hours Count. After their marriage in 1939 the Rosenbergs moved to New York City's Knickerbocker Village where they lived with their two sons, Michael and Robert (renamed John and Richie in the book), until their arrests on ...
Criminal Justice Theories (09/16)
In the second half of her memoir,
Riverine, Angela Palm uses terms she learned from her college criminal justice classes as headings to organize the material. Here's a closer look at a few:
The Broken Windows Theory
In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling
proposed the broken windows theory to explain why ...
Homeless By Choice (09/16)
U.S. Marine veteran Peter Ash in The Drifter is homeless – well, houseless. By choice. While he has little money he is not a vagrant. He has skills and does odd jobs. Outdoor jobs. Because Peter is incapable of staying indoors for any amount of time. This incapacity is a consequence of his military tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan ...
Hoverflies as Expert Masqueraders (09/16)
In his memoir, The Fly Trap, Fredrik Sjöberg writes: 'hoverflies are meek and mild creatures, easy to collect, and ... appear in many guises. Sometimes they don't even look like flies. Some of them look like hornets, others like honeybees, parasitic ichneumon wasps, gadflies, or fragile, thin-as-thread mosquitoes so tiny that ...
Art Inspired by 9/11 (09/16)
The events of September 11, 2001 changed the world in many ways and naturally, that change has been reflected in the arts and humanities. In film, fiction, theatre and more, artists from across the globe have responded to the tragedy in many ways and on many levels.
'After 9/11,' writes Jill Bialosky in her novel The Prize, 'many ...
Uplifting Books (09/16)
It is difficult to write an uplifting book about death and dying but it seems that Anna McPartlin has succeeded in doing so.
We featured a dozen uplifting books about a variety of topics in a recent
blog post and invite you to add them to your reading list and share recommendations of your own.
Pulau Bidong Refugee Camp (08/16)
In Dragonfish, Suzy writes about leaving Vietnam with her daughter, and arriving on an island before finally being resettled in the United States. She was one of many boat people, and this aspect of the story might well be modeled after Vu Tran's real-life experiences where he and most of his family were refugees at Pulau Bidong ...
The Flannery O'Connor Award and Bread Loaf Conference (08/16)
Most of us are familiar with high-profile book recognitions such as the Man Booker Prize or the National Book Award. There are many lesser known writing awards and programs that are prestigious and well known in literary circles. Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade, can include two such recognitions as part of her biography: The ...
The Kibbutz (08/16)
Atwood's experimental Positron/Consilience project in The Heart Goes Last shares many similarities with the kibbutz movement in Israel, which began in the early 20th century as a way for Jews to develop and settle the land.
The basic philosophy behind the kibbutz embodied Karl Marx's maxim: 'from each according to his ability, to each ...
René Descartes: I Think, Therefore I Am (08/16)
Western philosophy since the Renaissance has been governed by an idea so simple it could appear on a bumper sticker: 'I think, therefore I am.'
The idea – originally expressed in French but more often rendered in Latin ('Cogito ergo sum') – came from a French philosopher of the 17th century named René Descartes, ...
Julian Assange (08/16)
In
Purity, Andreas Wolf, who starts The Sunlight Project to expose corruption worldwide, is often compared to Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks.
A computer scientist by training, Assange was named to
Forbes magazine's 'Most Powerful People'
list in 2010 for being the 'genius provocateur behind Wikileaks, hard at work providing ...
Animals in Literary Fiction (08/16)
In an
interview with
The Globe and Mail in 2009, David Wroblewski, author of
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, said: 'I thought that 'dog stories' had been juvenilized over the course of the 20th century, and that was wrong.'
Like Lauren Holmes, whose short story 'My Humans' - in the collection
Barbara the Slut and Other People - charts...
Hampstead Heath (08/16)
After his wife's death in Owen Sheers novel I Saw a Man, Michael Turner moves from their home in Coed y Bryn in Wales to a flat in London owned by the very friend that informed him of Caroline's death. While he is reluctant to do much of anything after her death, he knows he must inch himself forward and the noncommittal ...
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