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The Hundred Years' War (10/12)
Joan of Arc's successes on the battlefield helped to end the series of battles known today as the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). Essentially, the series of battles were dynastic conflicts between the Plantagenets in England and the Valois in France. In the 1330s, both Houses claimed rights to the vacant French throne, but these claims ...
Biography in Verse (10/12)
As reviewer Marnie Colton points out in her
blog post at BookBrowse, biographies in poetry form allow for freedom of expression that a more constraining non-fiction prose form might not. Marnie calls the biography-in-verse 'a dynamic form that allows poets to revisit the lives of their subjects through imagery, rhythm, and metaphor ...
Amos Oz (10/12)
In the story 'Strangers,' two characters have a discussion about how writers choose their subject matter. 'There are some subjects and motifs that a writer comes back to again and again because apparently they come from the root of his being.'
There is nothing more true that could be said about Amos Oz, Israel's best known novelist...
The Novels of Paul La Farge (10/12)
According to an article in
Time Out Chicago (August 2011), 'Paul La Farge might be the greatest American writer you haven't read, but now there's no excuse.' He has been constructing a solid home for himself in American letters since his first published novel in 1999.
With a flavor of European modernism,
The Artist of the Missing...
The Ozarks (10/12)
The region known as 'The Ozarks' sprawls across southern Missouri as well as parts of northwestern and north central Arkansas, spilling over into Oklahoma and a small corner of Kansas. In area it's about the size of the state of Tennessee, in topography it's similar to the Appalachian region with rolling hills, plateaus (e.g. the ...
The Day Literature Made Headlines (10/12)
Before there was the fatwa, there were protests, bans, and deaths. The first inkling of controversy came just before the book's publication, when an Indian journalist broke the publishing embargo on writing about a book before it is available for sale. Madhu Jain's article, 'An Unequivocal Attack on Religious Fundamentalism,' was ...
The Funny, Frightening, Lyrical, Odd, and Very Talented Kelly Barnhill (10/12)
Kelly Barnhill is a very cool person. I don't know her personally, but you can just tell about some people.
She is a mother of three, a teacher, and a writer (and probably a million other things too). She has written poetry and short stories for adults, non-fiction books for children and, now, her first middle grade debut novel, ...
Forward Operating Bases and Their Place in Military Strategy (10/12)
David Abrams' novel Fobbit is set primarily at Triumph, a fictional Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Baghdad, Iraq.
Almost always very close to the action, FOBs are secure areas where military operations are planned and front-line soldiers are fed and housed when off duty. FOBs can be low-tech: generally tents or bunkers surrounded by ...
Centenarians' Birthday Celebrations Around the World (09/12)
While many of us assume that the key to a long life is health and happiness, recent studies from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine suggest that reaching the 100-year mark is a complex blend of genetics, environment, optimism, and emotional wellbeing. Given that recent U.S. census data shows that centenarians make up approximately 0....
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (09/12)
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
Robert K. Massie constructed his biography of Catherine the Great relying heavily on material from her memoirs (now published by Random House under the title
The Memoirs of Catherine the Great), which provided him with rare, honest views of an eighteenth century royal's life.
These memoirs ...
Roe vs. Wade (09/12)
The United States started adopting laws restricting abortion in the early 1800s, ultimately outlawing it in most states by the turn of the century. Interestingly, at the time, abortion wasn't proscribed as a moral issue the same way it is today; it was criminalized primarily because it was a dangerous practice with very high mortality ...
IG Farben Industries (09/12)
Auschwitz was a huge complex that covered 40 square kilometers (25 square miles) near the town of Oswiecim, Poland. It was comprised of three sections: Auschwitz I, the base camp and central office; Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau, a concentration camp and crematorium; and Auschwitz III, aka Monowitz or Monowitz-Buna, a labor camp adjacent to...
Type Design and Printing (09/12)
These days, typefaces are designed using computer programs such as
Macromedia Fontographer, but in the early days of type, each was made by hand using basic tools. There were three products that together formed the backbone of the process by which type was developed: the mold, the matrix, and the final piece also known as a 'sort.'
To...
Prominent Victorian Writers (09/12)
Madeleine Hanna, heroine of
The Marriage Plot, is enthralled with the tidy, thoughtful novels of the nineteenth century. Here are three prominent Victorian writers and information about their literary styles that will make the experience of reading Eugenides's story all the more pleasurable.
George Eliot (1819-1880)
Born with the ...
Polar Creepiness in Early Sci-Fi Novels (09/12)
Uncharted expanses of polar ice are blank pages for science fiction writers to drool over, and many frozen landmarks spring to mind when trolling the genre.
What better place to locate creepy caves, secret lairs, and unexplained phenomena? A closer look through the early literature of science fiction reveals that polar ...
Schrödinger's Cat (09/12)
One classic thought experiment (i.e. an experiment that is purely theoretical but could never be actually carried out) that plays a pivotal role in I Married You for Happiness is the famous case of Schrödinger's cat. 'Something else about a cat,' Nina recalls. 'Something she can never quite grasp. Tell me again, she whispers to ...
Victorian Grandeur and its Fate (09/12)
'What do you think, Ralph?' said George. 'For or against the egregious grotesqueries of the Victorians?'...
'I suppose what I feel,' said Revel, after a minute, 'well, the grotesqueries are what I like best, really, and the more egregious the better.'
'What? Not St. Pancras,' said George. 'Not Keble College?'
'Oh, when I ...
Foster Care Statistics in the U.S. (09/12)
As she discusses in the book trailer below, the author, Summer Wood, was once a foster parent of four young boys (ages eight months through four years) in addition to having three boys of her own. This unplanned experience, she says, is what her novel Wrecker grew out of - the exploration of what happens to a child after he is taken from...
The Devotion of a Hafiz (09/12)
In American Dervish, Hayat is distraught over the behavior of his parents as they break with many of the teachings and traditions held in the Quran*. Fearing for their afterlife, Hayat sets out to become a hafiz, or one who memorizes the Quran by heart.
Originally, memorization of the teachings of the Quran were preferable to the...
Obama in Europe (09/12)
'Poor old Sarkozy,' Addie remarks at one point in This Is How It Ends. 'Poor Angela Merkel. They all seem so dowdy now, by comparison. It's like we all went to the movies in the middle of the afternoon and spent two hours swooning over George Clooney. Then we came home and found the husband sitting on the couch with his beer belly.' She's...
Shakespearean Themes in The Night Circus (08/12)
The use of magical motifs in Erin Morgenstern's debut novel, The Night Circus, helps make it a unique and fascinating read.
But the literary device is by no means new. Magic can be found in some of the oldest, most revered pieces of literature throughout history, as in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. In fact, his play served ...
Norwich, England (08/12)
In John Boyne's The Absolutist, twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich, England to deliver a package of letters to Will Bancroft's sister. Norwich, a city located along the River Wensum in eastern England, is the county seat of Norfolk and was once one of the largest, most populated towns in England, ...
What Is a Meme? (08/12)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a meme (pronounced meem) is, 'n. An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation'. A meme is a nugget of meaning, the smallest building block of an idea, the basic unit of culture. What a gene is to biology, some say, the meme is to ...
Introducing Bryn Greenwood (08/12)
Bryn Greenwood grew up in the minute Kansas town of Hugoton; ten blocks by ten blocks. After escaping to college, earning three degrees (a BA in English, a BA in French Literature, and an MA in Writing) and making up stories all the while, she completed her first novel and sent it out to agents. Ten rejections, eight other novels, and ...
The Panama Canal (08/12)
Juan Gabriel Vásquez's novel, The Secret History of Costagauna, centers on the making of the Panama Canal. Constructed between 1904 and 1914, the Panama Canal is a vital shipping route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Though it only took ten years to construct the current canal, the idea for a waterway connecting ...
Why Write Historical Fiction? (08/12)
What makes a writer turn to historical fiction? The task of creating a fictional world is hard enough, so why throw in the additional labor of intensive research and the mental calisthenics of imagining another time? Some of the genre's biggest names respond...
Before his death in June 2012, Barry Unsworth's literary imagination...
Le Grand Hémorragie (08/12)
Although some elements of Vandal Love seem mystical or even supernatural in their origins, one significant theme of the novel is very much rooted in history. Early in the story, Hervé - Jude and François's father - expresses disgust with the mass migration of Québécois away from the country of their birth, a journey of...
Golem as Jewish Legend and Literary Device (07/12)
Shepherd's English monster is a being that has no conscience, no soul. In Jewish lore such a creature is called a golem. It has the appearance of a man but is a nonhuman creation brought into being by magic. Both the concept and the word date back to the Old Testament and the Talmud (the book of Jewish law). The word is variously ...
The Julia Tuttle Causeway Sex Offender Colony (07/12)
Lost Memory of Skin revolves around a colony of convicted sex offenders residing beneath the Archie B. Claybourne Causeway, which connects the city of Calusa, Florida with the bordering Great Panzacola Swamp. Banks's vivid descriptions bring these fictional locations to life, and though they are imaginary, both the city and the colony ...
Zombies in Literature (07/12)
They're the undead dreaded monsters that feast on the brains of the living. But what exactly is the origin of the zombie? No one knows for sure - perhaps it's the Haitian belief that animals can be brought back to life via witchcraft; or maybe it's the jiang shi (reanimated dead body) in Chinese folklore that lives off others' qi or life ...
The Gabra People (07/12)
The Names of Things is set in the Chalbi, a desert in northern Kenya near the border with Ethiopia (marked 'A' on the map below).
The Chalbi, which means 'bare and salty' in the local language, was once part of Lake Turkana, the largest permanent desert lake in the world. It is an immense flat expanse of clay and white salt stretching ...
Ernest Hemingway and Aldous Huxley (07/12)
On the surface, few early- to mid-twentieth century writers could be more different than Ernest Hemingway and Aldous Huxley. Hemingway (1899-1961), a rugged American with an appetite for alcohol, women, and outdoor sports, fine-tuned the art of the terse, elliptical sentence. Huxley (1894-1963), on the other hand, was born into a ...
Achondroplasia (07/12)
In Rachel DeWoskin's novel, Big Girl Small, Judy Lohden has achondroplasia, a genetic bone growth disorder that results in short-limbed dwarfism (responsible for about 70% of all dwarfism cases). The word 'achondroplasia' literally means 'without cartilage formation,' however, the term is a bit of a misnomer as the body of a person with ...
Literature of the American South (07/12)
With her vivid descriptions of 'the old home place,' a hundred-acre farm in Arkansas in the 1950s, and her knack for capturing the local dialect in her writing, Jenny Wingfield's debut novel, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, fits comfortably into the category of 'literature of the American South.'
This genre, also known as 'Southern ...
Seafaring Terms (07/12)
While the terms used on a ship sound familiar to me, I often don't really know what they mean. Many people recognize that a cabin is a room, and a porthole is a window, but what exactly is a purser, and which direction is the stern? If you're not sure, the definitions of the seafaring expressions below - all used in The Cat's Table - ...
Southern Gothic (07/12)
A number of reviewers describe A Good Hard Look as 'Southern Gothic'.
Gothic fiction generally combines elements of horror and romance, and might include, among many other features, psychological or physical terror, mystery, the supernatural, gothic architecture, darkness, death and madness.
One of, if not the earliest ...
The Persecution of the Hazara People (06/12)
The Hazara people - a long-persecuted and long-suffering population - are an Iranian ethnic group living in central Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. First mention of the Hazara is believed to have occurred in the late 16th century when the term was used to describe the people of the geographic location bordered by Kabul, Ghor, and ...
Two Unlikely Spies: Mary Bowser and Elizabeth Van Lew (06/12)
Lois Leveen's debut novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, is based on the real-life story of Mary Bowser, a woman born into slavery in 1839 in Richmond, Virginia to John Van Lew, a merchant. After Van Lew passed away, his daughter, Elizabeth Van Lew, freed his slaves and paid for Mary Bowser to get an education. She also helped procure a ...
Radical Homemaking & Foxfire Magazine (06/12)
At various points throughout Once Upon a River, Margo forages for vegetables, traps muskrats and raccoons, pinpoints the change in seasons by minutely observing foliage, chops firewood, whitewashes her boat, skins fish, and shoots deer. While the men all praise her aim with a rifle and her self-reliance, she is not as much of an ...
Charles Jamrach, The Essex and The Custom of The Sea (06/12)
Jamrach's Menagerie borrows from a number of historical events and people including:
Charles Jamrach
Charles Jamrach's father was chief of the Hamburg River Police, a position that enabled him to establish himself as a dealer in wild birds and animals. When his father died around 1840, Charles moved from Germany to take over the ...
Bengaluru (Bangalore), India (06/12)
Situated on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern Indian state of
Karnataka (aka Mysore), of which it is the capital, Bengaluru sits approximately 940 meters above sea level, and is one of India's largest and fastest growing cities.
Legend suggests that Bengaluru was named after King Veera Ballala of the Vijayanagara Kingdom (...
Freeganism (06/12)
In The Astral, the Quirk's daughter Karina is a practicing 'freegan' - a term that comes from a fusion of the words 'free' and 'vegan' (although not all freegans are vegans) - and as such, she chooses to eschew conventional consumerism.
Often referred to as 'dumpster divers,' freegans generally believe that western society throws ...
Twenty-First Century Cities (06/12)
In
City, P.D. Smith observes that contemporary urban populations are steadily growing, and he predicts that by the middle of this century the majority of humankind will be living in urban areas that he terms 'eco-cities.' Some recent trends like
urban homesteading, community gardens, and
vertical farming provide a glimpse of what ...
H. G. Wells (06/12)
H. G. Wells is not only a prominent character in The Map of Time; he's also a famous novelist, sometimes called 'The Father of Science Fiction.' Born on September 21, 1866 in Bromley, a small town southeast of London, Herbert George Wells grew up quite poor but, after an incident in 1874 in which he broke his leg and was forced to rest in...
The Macdonald Triad and the Madness of Evil (06/12)
In 1963, New Zealand forensic psychiatrist John Marshall Macdonald published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry called 'The Threat to Kill.' This paper described three behaviors - bedwetting past age 5, cruelty to animals, and the setting of fires - as 'red flag' indicators of sociopathy and future episodic, aggressive ...
Van Morrison (06/12)
In Andrea Kayne Kaufman's
Oxford Messed Up, Rhodes Scholar Gloria Zimmerman (who has
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) and Henry Young (an underachieving, drug-addicted musician) become unlikely friends when they're forced to share a bathroom in the Oxford University dorms. Over time, these 'loo-mates' learn that, despite their differences, ...
Struggle for Democracy in Post-Franco Spain (05/12)
Victor del Árbol's The Sadness of the Samurai begins in pro-Nazi Spain and takes place over three generations - the perfect political backdrop for the violence, betrayal, mystery and murder that takes place in the novel. Every nation struggles with its own demons, and 20th century Spain was no exception - experiencing civil war, ...
Suicide and The Golden Gate Bridge (05/12)
In the story 'The Bridge' from Daniel Orozco's collection of short stories
Orientation, one man is traumatized when he witnesses a woman commit suicide by jumping from the bridge he's employed to paint. Though the story is fictional, suicide jumping is an all too frequent occurrence in real life. The
Golden Gate Bridge, located in San ...
Thailand's Political Turmoil (05/12)
In Colin Cotterill's
Killed at the Whim of a Hat, protagonist Jimm Juree makes this tongue-in-cheek assessment of Thailand's political climate:
'Politics used to be a lot more complicated before the recent introduction of the English Premiership system of colored shirts, which helped no end to know who was who. The yellows, headed ...
Hank Williams's Last Days (05/12)
Speculation and myth swirl around accounts of 29-year-old country music legend Hank Williams's death in the back seat of a Cadillac on January 1, 1953. For years, Charles Carr, the only person who knew for sure what had happened that snowy day in the hinterlands of West Virginia, never talked about it.
A mere 17 at the time, Charles ...
