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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....
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
