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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 ...
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...
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 ...
"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...
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 ...
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. ...
Media vs. Death in Don DeLillo's White Noise (01/26)
Death is a central theme of
White Noise, stalking the narrative at every turn—one of DeLillo's working titles for the book was
The American Book of the Dead. Another major theme is the psychological consequences of a media-saturated society.
White Noise overlaps strongly with the ideas of
Jean Baudrillard, whose influential ...
Hometown Anxiety in Naima Coster's Halsey Street (01/26)
Quite a few years ago my mother and I drove to Chicago for a wedding she was hired to officiate; she is an Episcopal priest. It was a four-hour road trip with most of it laughing and joking and singing to old school R&B (hip-hop horrifies my mother). But I noticed a change in her as we entered Chicago. Her face suddenly lost its color. ...
The Carceral State in Billy-Ray Belcourt's A Minor Chorus (01/26)
Billy-Ray Belcourt's A Minor Chorus examines aspects of the human condition in a way that is deeply erudite but also intensely physical. Through this approach, Belcourt demonstrates how the problems and questions of existence don't reside in some nebulous realm of the mind, but are bound up in the politics of how we inhabit our bodies, ...
Morality and Authenticity in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (01/26)
The central question Tolstoy tries to answer with The Death of Ivan Ilyich is, what does it mean to live a moral life? His examination is presented directly, through Ivan's ruminations, and indirectly, through the juxtaposition of two opposing ways of living: that of Ivan and his peers, and that of his servant Gerasim.
Although the ...
Margaret Atwood's Poetry (01/26)
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) is probably best known for her novels, such as 1985's The Handmaid's Tale and its Booker Prize–winning sequel, The Testaments (2019). Her first published works, however, were volumes of poetry—five collections before her first novel, The Edible Woman, hit the shelves in 1969.
Atwood spent ...
The Dangers of Roundup Ready Seeds (01/26)
In Louise Erdrich's novel The Mighty Red, a rural community in North Dakota grapples with common problems facing agricultural centers—the bankruptcy of small farms and resulting consolidation into mega-farms; job loss and depopulation; and increasingly brittle economies and ecosystems damaged by monoculture.
In Erdrich's ...
Desegregation Activist Daisy Bates (01/26)
In We Refuse, Kellie Carter Jackson recalls the courageous and tireless efforts of civil rights activist Daisy Bates and her husband, L.C., to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Bates home became a place of refuge for the students known as the 'Little Rock Nine' — the first group of Black children to attend the ...
Beloved Criminals (01/26)
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...
The Bribri (01/26)
Like brothers Max and Jay, the protagonists of her debut young adult novel Saints of the Household, author Ari Tison is Bribri American, descended from an Indigenous group native to the Talamanca region of Costa Rica. The characters' grandfather was raised among the Bribri people and their matriarchal society. His gentle, loving nature ...
Women and the Cultural Salon (01/26)
In Gertrude Stein's salon, where every Saturday the leading artists of the time gathered, along with writers, film directors, painters, sculptors, and even bullfighters, a portrait of Stein painted by none other than Picasso (and surrounded by Matisses and Cézannes) presided over the room, just as
Stein dominated the space. This was ...
The Manhattan Project in Media (01/26)
'Choose Your Own Apocalypse' is a delightful name for a story all on its own; doubly clever when you learn it's about the Manhattan Project. But author Senaa Ahmad isn't making use of the Choose Your Own Adventure format for the sake of cheap juxtaposition. Sure, the real J. Robert Oppenheimer didn't become an eldritch abomination due to ...
Parabiosis: The Blood Transfusion Practice That Captivated Silicon Valley (01/26)
Madeline Cash's debut novel Lost Lambs features a sinister billionaire who has younger people's blood transfused into his body in order to slow or prevent the aging process, a practice known as parabiosis (also a general term for the physiological joining of two organisms) or 'young blood transfusion.'
Young blood transfusion is ...
Ni-chōme, the Hub of Tokyo's LGBTQ+ Community (01/26)
Shinjuku Ni-chōme, commonly referred to as Ni-chōme, is a lively, small neighborhood in the heart of Tokyo, and is said to have the highest concentration of gay bars in the world. It features prominently in Bryan Washington's novel Palaver as a key setting for one of its main characters. Known as Japan's LGBTQ+ cultural hub, the...
Dinosaurs at the Crystal Palace (01/26)
In Beasts of the Sea, the reality of extinction is first discovered by the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier when he is tasked with analyzing a mammoth tooth sent to him by none other than Thomas Jefferson, who is determined to track down a living mammoth. In a nightmarish sequence he walks through his vast collection of ...
British Involvement in Albania During World War II (01/26)
Indignity author Lea Ypi's grandfather—her grandmother Leman Ypi's husband—was charged by the Hoxha regime with espionage because of his interactions with British nationals in Albania. Vandeleur Robinson, Eliot Watrous, and Brigadier Edward Hodgson are all described in the author's index first as 'Asllan's friend' and second ...
When Friends Become Caregivers: A Reading List (01/26)
In Ann Packer's
Some Bright Nowhere, a woman asks her best friends to be her caregivers as she's dying of cancer. It's not as uncommon a fictional plot as you might think. Sometimes the relationship precedes the illness; other times the patient/carer dynamic gives way to friendship.
Talk Before Sleep (1994) by Elizabeth Berg
When ...
The Gray Lady Ghost Archetype (01/26)
Fans of the gothic, horror, or supernatural genres will certainly be familiar with the image of an ethereal woman clad in white or gray. Captured in fleeting glances and shrouded in mystery, the so-called Gray Lady has become a mainstay of ghostly fiction, and examples of the figure can be found in folklore and real-life testimonies ...
The Malleus Maleficarum: A Witch Hunting Guidebook (01/26)
The history of witch hunting in Europe is broad and varies by locale and time period. However, one of the unifying factors across these different contexts is the Malleus Maleficarum—translated as the 'Hammer of Witches'—a 1487 German handbook on witchcraft that inspired witch hunt movements for centuries after its publication....
The Racialization of Disease (12/25)
One idea that stuck with me from John Green's book Everything Is Tuberculosis was how TB became racialized. And a brief look at history shows the same pattern occurring not just with tuberculosis but with nearly every major outbreak. Which means that pathogens and bacteria weren't and aren't the only things that spread during such ...
Fado de Lisboa (12/25)
In Allen Levi's novel Theo of Golden, the protagonist moves to a small city in Georgia
where he forms friendships with many of the town's residents. Among these are a young
man studying the cello at a nearby university and a street musician who plays guitar for
tips; the three bond over discussions about music. Theo, who is from ...
Novels About Late-Life Romance (12/25)
Virginia Evans' debut novel, The Correspondent, features ardent letter-writer Sybil Van Antwerp, who has just turned 73 when the novel opens. Through her correspondence, we learn about many aspects of Sybil's rich life, including a growing attachment to a man of her acquaintance, with whom she eventually finds late-life love and ...
The Myth of the Holly King (12/25)
Time of the Child by Niall Williams is rich with Irish lore and tradition. The story is set in the fictional Irish village of Faha, where holly branches adorn the homes, shops, and churches during the season of Christmas. The holly tree that sits at the top of the drive of main character Jack Troy's home is the best-looking in Faha. As ...
Lamb Farming in the UK (12/25)
In Clare Leslie Hall's novel Broken Country, main characters Beth and Frank Johnson are sheep farmers in the North Dorset region of England. The book talks about the couple raising lambs that are then sold to market.
Sheep have been farmed on the British Isles since Roman times, and it remains a significant industry, particularly in ...
The Waiting Period: Mourning Tradition in Geraldine Brooks' Memorial Days (12/25)
On the worst day of her life, author Geraldine Brooks began to shake in her lower extremities. Above her thighs, she was frozen. No tears, no screams, no falling onto the floor with anger and rage. Her shock was suddenly buried and it all felt so surreal. Tony Horwitz, her husband of thirty-four years, had died, which felt impossible, ...
The Influence of King Solomon's Mines on The Creation of Half-Broken People (12/25)
King Solomon's Mines, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, is referenced throughout Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's African gothic historical fiction work The Creation of Half-Broken People.
After Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) had returned to England from a stint as an administrator in South Africa, his brother suggested a wager: he would...
The Activism of William Monroe Trotter (12/25)
Americans know the names Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, and many may be familiar with W.E.B. Du Bois, but if asked about Black activists, fewer would recognize the name of William Monroe Trotter. This is an unfortunate oversight because Trotter was a passionate defender of Black civil rights and founder and editor of one of the ...
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (12/25)
A main character in Charlotte McConaghy's novel Wild Dark Shore is employed as a caretaker for an isolated seed bank. The author has stated that the facility is based on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.
A seed bank's main ...
The History of the Buckeye (12/25)
The title of Patrick Ryan's novel, Buckeye, is the nickname of one of the book's characters. Two young boys, Skip and Tom, gather buckeye nuts from their yard, sneak into an abandoned mill, and slingshot them at various targets from its roof. Just when Skip thinks they'll have to stop because they're out of ammunition, he discovers Tom ...
"In This House, We Believe" (12/25)
In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad levels several critiques against Western liberalism and its contradictions. One of the most damning is this: 'It's difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times...
Searching for Sir Hincomb Funnibuster (12/25)
I should start by letting you know that I am a gamer of the decidedly antiquated sort. I grew up in a family that often played table games together, and although my siblings have all moved on to far more sophisticated digital gaming, I have remained analog and still adore an old-fashioned board or card game.
So, along with my literary ...
Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434) (12/25)
In
The Original by Nell Stevens, Grace Inderwick, who lives a privileged but dreary existence with her aunt in England at the turn of the 20th century, dreams of making an independent life for herself as an art forger. In her endeavors to do so, one of the paintings she copies is Jan van Eyck's
Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife ...
Mary Oliver and "The Summer Day" (12/25)
Fredrik Backman's new novel,
My Friends, repeatedly quotes 'The Summer Day,' a well-known poem by poet Mary Oliver (1936-2019).
Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a small, rural town less than 20 miles southeast of Cleveland. Her upbringing was 'chaotic' and she experienced sexual abuse at a young age, eventually finding ...
Who Was Elizabeth Gaskell? (12/25)
The first biographer of Charlotte Brontë was her fellow novelist and devoted friend, Elizabeth Gaskell. Born in London in 1810, Elizabeth Cleghorn spent her early years living in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon, and northern England until she married the Unitarian minister William Gaskell in 1832. Elizabeth gave birth to four daughters...
Indentured Servitude and Enslavement in Colonial Virginia (12/25)
In This Here Is Love, Princess Joy L. Perry tells the stories of Bless, David, and Jack as they grow from children into adulthood in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Tidewater, Virginia. At first glance, they appear to be bound by shared hardship: Bless and David are enslaved, while Jack is an indentured servant. But as the novel...
