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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 ...
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...
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 ...
The Evolution of Alcoholics Anonymous (12/25)
Wally Lamb's novel The River Is Waiting centers on the experiences of Corby Ledbetter, who is responsible for an unthinkable accident while intoxicated. Addicted to alcohol and lorazepam (an anti-anxiety medication in the benzodiazepine family), Ledbetter begins attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings to help him remain clean and ...
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 ...
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...
Books Set in Sweden (11/25)
In Lisa Ridzén's debut novel When the Cranes Fly South, main character Bo struggles with a lack of autonomy near the end of life as he passes his days at his home in northern Sweden. Readers interested in reading more stories that take place in the country need not look far to find some. Here are just a few other examples of popular ...
Women Who "Left" Their Children: A Reading List (11/25)
In Quiara Alegría Hudes's novel The White Hot, April Soto asks a librarian for '…any books about a mother who leaves her child.' She receives in return a list of both real and fictional women who, according to the librarian, did just that, in various ways ranging from calculated murder to choosing not to raise a child under ...
Global Declines in Bird Populations—And What You Can Do About It (11/25)
From his perch among the trees, Adam Nicolson observed the birds of the Sussex woods for over a year, cataloguing his findings in Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood. By the spring migration, however, he noticed that numerous species that should have arrived—that for centuries had arrived at that time—were notably absent: ...
The Impact of Rising Sea Levels in India (11/25)
Boomba, one of the protagonists of Megha Majumdar's A Guardian and a Thief, is living on the east coast of India with his family when their home becomes permanently flooded due to rising sea levels. Although the novel is set in the near future, this type of displacement is already occurring.
It's estimated that the oceans have risen by...
The 1985–1986 Paris Terror Attacks (11/25)
In Sacha Bronwasser's Listen, Eloïse leaves her home in Germany to spend a year in Paris as an au pair. As she adjusts to her new life, the news is punctuated with stories of bombings targeting civilians across the French capital. Indeed, the events forming the backdrop to Eloïse's year abroad really did take place: ...
Vacations from Hell (11/25)
Quan Barry's literary horror novel
The Unveiling follows an Antarctic sightseeing expedition that goes horrifically awry. Here are a handful of other thrillers and horror novels about dream vacations gone very, very wrong—perhaps you'll want to pack one on your next holiday?
The Ruins by Scott Smith
Two young couples set out ...
Christianity in Nigeria (11/25)
Before the Mango Ripens by Afabwaje Kurian focuses on the tensions between residents of a Nigerian town and white American missionaries based there. The book's Nigerian characters have a widely diverse set of reactions to the church: some adamantly oppose Christianity and persecute their Christian family members, others go to church in ...
Playwright John Webster (11/25)
In her memoir My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss conjures up an imaginary wolf spirit to support her childhood self. She claims the idea came from a line in one of the first poems she memorized, "A Dirge" by English dramatist John Webster, widely regarded as the last of the great Elizabethan playwrights, second only to William ...
Development and Habitat Loss in Florida (11/25)
In August 2024, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) (under direction from the governor) proposed to clear land in nine state parks to make room for tourist-friendly developments—pickleball courts, golf courses, lodges, etc. Called the 2024-2025
Great Outdoors Initiative, it was anything but great. Here's just ...
Comet Hale-Bopp and the Heaven's Gate Cult (11/25)
A central event in Ruby Todd's debut novel, Bright Objects, is the sighting of a comet in the atmosphere. Comet St. John appears in January of 1997 over Sylvia's small town in Australia, causing its residents, along with the rest of the world, to stargaze and ponder the mysteries of the universe.
While Comet St. John is a ...
Suicides Among Cab Drivers (11/25)
Abdul Saleh was fifty-nine when he
died at home in Brooklyn in 2018 after working as a cab driver for thirty years. His roommate found him hanging from an electrical cord. His shifts had lasted as long as twelve hours but financial difficulties plagued him. It was hard to stay afloat in the era of Uber, Lyft, and rideshare companies that ...
History of the Summer Camp (11/25)
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 Unmaking of Atticus Finch: Go Set a Watchman as First Draft (11/25)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, tells the story of Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch, a six-year-old girl growing up with her brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus Finch, an upstanding lawyer who takes on the defense of a young Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.
Go Set a ...
The Ocean as Metaphor, Symbol, and Motif in The Seas (11/25)
'That is how a small northern town in America works. It enlists one beautiful thing like the ocean or the mountains or the snow to keep people stuck and stagnant and staring out to sea forever. I watch the blue in the mirror. It is so beautiful that it is hard to look away,' muses the unnamed speaker of Samantha Hunt's The Seas. It's not ...
The History of Go (11/25)
In Richard Powers' novel
Playground, best friends Todd and Rafi become obsessed with the board game Go (often capitalized in English to differentiate it from the common verb), and the pastime plays a large role in the narrative. According to
the National Go Center, 'Beyond being merely a game, Go can take on other meanings to its devotees...
The Case for Rats as Pets (11/25)
Rats are polarizing animals. In some people, they evoke feelings of fear and disgust, thanks to their historical association with squalid settings and the spread of disease. But others find them adorable and friendly—the sort of creature that makes a great companion.
In the book Blood Test by Charles Baxter, the main ...
Auditory Hallucinations (11/25)
Neely, the main character in Mindy McGinnis's Under This Red Rock, experiences auditory hallucinations (AHs). Since an early age, Neely has heard people clapping for her, children laughing and playing, and the voice of a young girl asking for water. She's developed techniques for managing her symptoms, but she still suffers emotionally ...
The Picaresque (11/25)
In The Book of George, Kate Greathead covers the life of her eponymous hero in 14 chapters depicting key moments from his first 40 years. In doing so, she draws on elements of the picaresque, an episodic literary genre in which an outsider moves from adventure to adventure while satirizing the society of the day.
The picaresque is ...
Composite Narratives and Swann (11/25)
Carol Shields (1935–2003), a dual American and Canadian citizen, published ten novels and three short story collections, in addition to poetry, plays, and nonfiction. She won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for her novel
The Stone Diaries, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice.
Swann, her fifth novel, is a composite narrative ...
Class Tensions in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (11/25)
In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the wealthy Blackwood family lives in a sort of tension with their working-class neighbors. Things reach a boiling point when daughter Constance Blackwood is accused of murdering several of her family members, with the neighbors feeling free to openly mock the now-orphaned Blackwood girls. But as the...
The Music of Shadowbahn (11/25)
Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman' is a song caught between centuries. Released in 1981, it appears to have traces of postwar optimism—optimism about technology, about institutions, about one's own country—but those traces are weaponized, suffused with an icy dread for what's to come. 'Here come the planes,' Anderson warns, her ...
Storytelling and Interpretation in The Beauty (11/25)
Aliya Whiteley's The Beauty is a dystopian tale about the aftermath of a lethal infection that killed all women, and man's response to a new humanoid species that subsequently grows from the bodies of the dead. The book explores gender roles and human evolution; but running parallel to these themes is an equally fascinating thread about ...
Timelines, Time Loops, and Memory in Ling Ma's Severance (11/25)
Many contemporary novels feature alternating dual or multiple timelines, and many make free use of flashbacks, weaving backstory into the main narrative as it progresses. Ling Ma's Severance employs both of these techniques, creating layered narratives that interact with one another and eventually intersect. This approach serves several ...
Utopia as Structure in Everything for Everyone (11/25)
A large number of contemporary American works of speculative fiction, if not the majority, could reasonably be classified as dystopian in some sense—imagining a future world in which the era-defining problems of our time like climate change, white supremacy, fascism, and the obscenely wide income gaps of late-stage capitalism have ...
Monsanto's Seed Monopoly (10/25)
In Saltcrop, the Shimizu family has relied on farming to survive for generations, and by extension, on the agricultural corporation Renewal's seeds and anti-blight treatment, Amaranthine. Sisters Carmen and Skipper worry about making enough money to purchase supplies, even as Amaranthine poisons the land. While a competitor exists in the ...
Grief Memoirs Exploring Suicide Loss (10/25)
Miriam Toews' memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the grief behind the loss of a loved one to suicide, as the author tries to understand the deaths of her father and sister, about a decade apart from one another, through the act of writing. There have been many memoirs and other works of nonfiction centered around navigating grief, ...
Art Restoration Is a Science (10/25)
The half-century-old painting of a young child is owned by a Houston family who wants it restored to its original beauty. It is the job of Olin-Noah Venderhaven and his crew of assistants, Chloé and Wyeth, to manage the project. After the painting is de-aged, once the old varnish, debris, and residual dirt and dust are erased, what ...
Poet Luo Binwang and An Ode to the Goose (10/25)
The first part of Gish Jen's book Bad Bad Girl narrates her mother Agnes's life in China. Although Agnes was treated cruelly by her mother (Jen's grandmother), Agnes's father doted on her and encouraged her intellect. He had her reciting poetry almost as soon as she could talk, their joint favorite being An Ode to the Goose by Luo Binwang...
Books About Science and Systems (10/25)
In The Last Extinction, geologist Gerta Keller summarizes research supporting her theory of Deccan volcanism (which suggests the dinosaurs were not killed off in conditions produced by an asteroid but rather by a period of sustained volcanic activity) and offers a view of the patriarchal and other hierarchical systems she encountered over...
Activism for Iranian Women's Rights (10/25)
Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran had started taking significant steps to improve women's rights. Under
Reza Pahlavi, many reforms were implemented, increasing women's access to education, work, and public life, while also protecting their freedoms in the private sphere. With the Family Protection Law (1967, 1975), for example, the...
Books That Take Place Over a Single Day (10/25)
Souvankham Thammavongsa's novel Pick a Color takes place over the span of one day at a nail salon, Susan's, owned by the main character Ning. This slice-of-life style of storytelling has been employed by numerous authors for different purposes—to heighten dramatic tension, to explore one character's daily reality, or to defy ...
Benito Juárez (10/25)
In his novel Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera illuminates the year and a half Benito Juárez spent as a political exile in New Orleans, an often-overlooked period in the life of Mexico's first Indigenous president.
Juárez was born in 1806 to a Zapotec family living in the town of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca, Mexico. He was ...
The Magnetic Pull of Historically Black Colleges (10/25)
One of the first scenes in Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell takes place in Professor Charlie Brunton's lecture hall at Howard University. Howard is one of the oldest HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), founded in 1867. Located in Washington, D.C., it has over the decades been a space safe from racial taunts and ...
Sally Rooney Reads from Intermezzo in Dublin (10/25)
On Saturday, September 21, 2024, more than 500 people gathered at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, located a few meters from St. Stephen's Green, a setting in Sally Rooney's new novel Intermezzo. The Irish author, one of the most influential figures on the contemporary literary scene, greeted the audience with a warm smile and a hand ...
European Spa Resorts (10/25)
Olga Tokarczuk's novel The Empusium is set in the mountain health resort of Görbersdorf (modern day Sokołowsko in Poland) in 1913. Renowned for its tuberculosis sanitorium, the town fit into a context of around 600 similar resorts in Europe that focused on recovery from then-incurable diseases, as well as overall wellness. The ...
Book Tours Behind the Scenes (10/25)
In The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, readers get a taste of what authors go through in the rite of publishing passage known as 'the book tour.' For new or established authors, a book tour usually includes an (often hectic) travel schedule to bookstores, schools, and writing conferences; book signings; and readings from their work. For ...
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (10/25)
In Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home, main character Ezri Maxwell reflects on Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun — about a Black family living in Chicago after World War II, the Youngers, who make plans to move to an all-white neighborhood. Ezri's Aunt Jacqueline compares the situation of the Youngers to Ezri's ...
