Note: The key icon
indicates member-only content.
Learn more about membership.
The Long and Exhausting Journey for Central American Migrants (10/25)
For seven years, anthropologist Jason De León followed low-level smugglers to understand the motivation, culture, hopes, and dreams of those guiding migrants to the US-Mexico border and beyond. De León documents their stories, some of which ended in death, in
Soldiers and Kings. While his work is centered
on the smugglers, a ...
George Oppen (10/25)
In Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the unnamed protagonist—facing a difficult and uncertain medical diagnosis—finds solace in a poem by the poet George Oppen. The poem is only a few simple lines, but the protagonist marvels at how much unfolds when one sits with Oppen's work and lets it quietly speak. 'I loved how, among ...
Willie Reed: The Witness Who Returned Home (10/25)
The plan had to be executed perfectly by Willie Reed, an eighteen-year-old native of the Mississippi Delta. He had to walk into the darkness by himself making sure his bearings were correct. He had in his possession a coat and another pair of pants. He had to walk six miles on rural roads absent of all light. That would protect him, the ...
Rumspringa (10/25)
In Life, and Death, and Giants, the Amish rite of Rumspringa is a cause of great angst for Gabriel's grandmother Hannah Fisher. Rumspringa refers to a period of adolescence when young people are given more personal freedom. Gabriel was born into the 'English' (or modern-day secular) world of Lakota, Wisconsin. As a young boy he returned ...
Grove Press (10/25)
Grove Press, the publisher of Betsy Lerner's Shred Sisters, formed in New York City in 1947. Four years later, it was purchased by Barnet Lee 'Barney' Rosset, Jr., who took chances by publishing books that were considered edgy: the Beats, modern plays, and sexually explicit literature and works with gay themes that had been banned ...
The Ties That Bind: A Closer Look at Interdependencies Between Species (09/25)
In The Call of the Honeyguide, applied ecologist Rob Dunn examines the many ways that living things in an ecosystem are synergistically connected by reciprocal relationships called mutualisms—defined as interactions between two or more species in which each benefits.
As the book shows, some of the connections between species are...
Bully Parenting Hurts: Cycles of Abuse (09/25)
When Mary Roy was growing up in Delhi, India, she endured extensive trauma. Her violent father would yank her by her hair to hold her in place, then brutally whip her with his riding crop. Recentering his rage onto her mother, he would beat her until she bled, and in the heart of winter he would throw both wife and daughter out of the ...
The Gau Box (09/25)
In Kiran Desai's novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Sonia has a talisman, inherited from her grandfather, that she takes with her wherever she goes for protection and inspiration. She's told it's a gau box from Tibet, 'fashioned from tarnished, battered silver that was carved intricately with curly clouds swirling to dragons. It ...
The Prominence of Religion in Southern American Culture (09/25)
In Dominion by Addie E. Citchens, religion strongly influences both a family and the entire town of Dominion, Mississippi. The focus is on the Winfreys, whose patriarch is the reverend of the Seven Seals Baptist Church. Because of how important and widespread Christianity is in the South, this position brings power and high status to him ...
Walter Benjamin and "Hashish in Marseilles" (09/25)
In one chapter of Patricia Lockwood's Will There Ever Be Another You, the protagonist narrates her experience giving unofficial lessons in literature to her teenage niece, Angel, who has ambitions of becoming a writer one day herself. Lockwood explains, 'Mostly this meant we would read a few pages of whatever I was reading and talk about ...
Sideshow Performers (09/25)
In the early 20th century, traveling circuses were common, and so were the sideshows that often accompanied them. While no one can definitively say which was the first, we know that P.T. Barnum was an early innovator. In 1842, he opened a museum to display his collection of oddities and human attractions. After the museum burned down, ...
Slate Mining in America (09/25)
What does one name a fictional small town that once served as a hub for slate mining before its inevitable decline? Well, Slater, of course. In her novel The Dark We Know, Wen-yi Lee describes it as 'an old mining town sunk in a crater at the end of the road with nowhere to go beyond it but down.' Isadora Chang dreads returning there for ...
Pets and Poverty (09/25)
It's a standard feel-good trope of countless viral YouTube videos and the central narrative of many animal rescue marketing campaigns: a suffering dog or cat found in a horrifying state—emaciated and filthy, abandoned, neglected, or abused—is saved by a heroic rescuer and adopted into a new, loving home where it lives happily ...
Rejected Authors (09/25)
The final, titular story of Tony Tulathimutte's collection Rejection is styled as a letter from a publisher explaining to the author why they will not be publishing the book. This form is used as a means of exploring the stories within from the perspective of a potential critic, and is used to humorous effect as the author considers his ...
The History of the Sin-Eater (09/25)
In Elizabeth Strout's novel Tell Me Everything, the author discusses the concept of the modern-day 'sin-eater.' In her interpretation, the term applies to a person who helps others unburden themselves of their guilt or emotional pain, allowing them to move forward with their lives. In England, Scotland, and Wales, however, 'sin-eater' was...
The History of the American Pharmacy (09/25)
In Lynda Cohen Loigman's novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern, the title character works in her father's pharmacy and aspires to become a pharmacist herself.
Both the pharmacy and the role of the pharmacist have changed dramatically in the United States over the centuries. Pharmacies were referred to as apothecaries back in the ...
Leos Janacek's Piano Works (09/25)
Leoš Janáček (pronounced lay-osh YAH-NAAH-check) is widely considered the greatest Czech composer of the early twentieth century. Perhaps best known for his opera The Cunning Little Vixen, Janáček created not only several operas, but also symphonic works, chamber music, choral pieces, compositions for piano,...
Bloodstain Pattern Analysis and Its Problematic Role in Forensic Science (09/25)
The protagonist of The Good Liar is a forensic scientist who has developed the Blood Spatter Probability Scale (BSPS), a fictional modeling system that uses blood spatter information from a crime scene to create a 3D model reconstruction of the events. Although bloodstain pattern analysis has been used to help solve real crimes for over a...
A History of Tigers in Captivity in Europe (09/25)
The first tiger gets introduced just a few pages into The Magician of Tiger Castle as part of the wedding dowry for Princess Tullia, who is set to marry Prince Dalrympl of Oxatania. (Tigers aren't native to Oxatania, a fictional kingdom in what is now France, which makes the dowry an act of olden time regifting.) The tigers are put to use...
Ezra Pound's Fascist Politics (09/25)
Joyce Hinnefeld's The Dime Museum makes many references to the poet Ezra Pound. Pound was born in Idaho in 1885, grew up near Philadelphia, and spent much of his adult life in Europe. He died in Italy, his adopted country, in 1972. As a poet, he was best known for his epic The Cantos, published in segments from 1925 onward. Taking ...
The (False) Rose of Jericho, Selaginella lepidophylla (09/25)
In Nathan Harris's novel Amity, June, a formerly enslaved woman, is forced to relocate to the foothills of Mexico's Sierra Madre range with the man who has oppressed her since childhood. As her party nears the Rio Grande, she encounters Isaac, a young Black Seminole who lives in the area. She claims the desert through which they've been ...
The Epic of Gilgamesh (09/25)
Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid explores the history of the early city-states that sprang up in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the third millennium BCE, focusing on the beliefs, practices, and technological advances that impacted the lives of everyday people. One of the most important cultural artifacts from...
"The Goose Girl," Dorothea Viehmann, and the Brothers Grimm (09/25)
'The Goose Girl' tells the story of a princess who is sent by her mother to a faraway land to marry. The queen gives her daughter a magical talking horse and talisman, telling her to care for both, as they will protect her from harm. But when the princess loses the talisman, the waiting maid she is traveling with forces her to change ...
Ultra-Processed Foods (09/25)
Fernanda Trías's Pink Slime takes its title from the nickname of Meatrite, a fictional meat paste developed by the government to combat food shortages during an environmental collapse. Although set in an imagined near future, Trías's Meatrite could easily be inspired by the ultra-processed foods (UPFs) that have come to dominate...
Stolen Relics (09/25)
M.T. Anderson's novel Nicked is based on a real-life relic theft occuring when, in 1087, an expedition from Bari, Italy, traveled to Myra, in present-day Turkey, to steal the bones of St. Nicholas. Even today, St. Nicholas's primary reliquary can be found in Bari, where pilgrims can buy holy water infused with the 'myrrh' his bones ...
The Thunderous Òrìṣà Ṣàngó (09/25)
Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi repeatedly draws from mythology surrounding the Òrìṣà pantheon of deities from the Yorùbá religion, which is still practiced throughout southern Nigeria, other areas of West Africa, and the African diaspora. Ṣàngó, the bringer of thunder, is particularly ...
Conditions for People with Disabilities in 1930s America (09/25)
James McBride's novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store follows a community as they work together to save a young deaf Black boy, Dodo, from unjust institutionalization in 1930s America. Though Dodo's disability is physical, the state authorities are determined to place him in a mental institution called Pennhurst. In the context of ...
Black Utopias (09/25)
As Jasmyn Williams and her husband King arrive in the fictional Black utopian suburb of Liberty, California in Nicola Yoon's One of Our Kind, Jasmyn reminds her husband 'that Black utopias ha[ve] been tried with little success before.' She names two examples of real-world short-lived utopian experiments: Allensworth and Soul City. While ...
The Japanese Era Calendar (09/25)
The publication date of this review corresponds in the Japanese era calendar to Reiwa 7/09/10, or September 10, 2025.
Japan uses two dating systems: the Gregorian calendar, used in most Western societies and adopted in Japan in 1873, and the system of imperial eras (gengō 年号), which divides time according to the ...
The Mental Health Crisis Among American Youth (09/25)
In C. Mallon's debut novel Dogs, we follow a group of young people who feel lost and forgotten, chasing artificial highs through drug and alcohol abuse. Chief among them is Hal, whose internalized childhood trauma and identity struggles have led to major issues with depression and self-harm. Though the exact timeframe of the novel is not ...
Cinéma Vérité (08/25)
In Aysegül Savas's The Anthropologists, Asya, the novel's narrator, is a documentary filmmaker set to embark on a project based around the goings-on in her local park. Though not explicitly identified as such, Asya's project sounds a lot like 'cinéma vérité,' a style of filmmaking developed in the 1950s and '60s that ...
The Cinema Rex Fire (08/25)
In the southwest of Iran lies a city called Abadan, over five hundred miles from the country's capital of Tehran, with a population of a little over 200,000. Despite its relatively quiet presence, it played a crucial role in sparking the Iranian Revolution of 1979. On August 19, 1978, Cinema Rex, a movie theater located in a working-class...
New Perspectives in 21st-Century Arthuriana (08/25)
Since the earliest texts of the 11th and 12th centuries (which in turn are based on much older narratives), Arthurian legend has been one of the richest sources of material available to authors. Over centuries, the tales, characters, and concepts of Arthuriana have lent themselves to a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of adaptations, ...
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (08/25)
One of the characters in Kate Quinn's The Briar Club played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 to 1954.
In 1942, owners of professional baseball teams and stadiums were in a panic. Young men who played ball were being drafted to fight in World War II, and several minor league ...
The Birkin Bag (08/25)
In Yasmin Zaher's novel The Coin, the unnamed protagonist, who has inherited a coveted Birkin bag from her mother, enters into a pyramid scheme with a relative stranger that involves buying more of these elusive items and reselling them. In many ways, the Birkin, a luxury handbag made by the French designer Hermès, is the ultimate ...
Weather, Film, and Television in Sunny Los Angeles (08/25)
In Colored Television by Danzy Senna, Jane, a novelist turned aspiring TV writer from the East Coast, reflects on her inability to get used to the warm springs of Los Angeles while also considering their utility: 'All that sunshine was said to be the reason the film industry had moved west back in the 1920s. Only in Los Angeles could they...
Penelope Fitzgerald (08/25)
The British writer Penelope Fitzgerald is famously known for having published her first novel at the age of sixty and then winning the prestigious Booker Prize for her third novel two years later. In fact, becoming a writer was always Fitzgerald's plan, but life led her down an unexpected path marred with painful, sometimes tragic turns. ...
Marriage as a Path to American Citizenship (08/25)
In Elaine Hsieh Chou's short story collection Where Are You Really From, 'Mail Order Love' examines certain realities of American 'green card marriages' and 'mail-order' brides (women seeking long-distance romantic connection and marriage through a service, typically to men from other countries), despite some very fictionalized elements. ...
The National Book Awards (08/25)
Jason Mott won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction with
Hell of a Book, a novel that shares some characters and qualities with
People Like Us. In
People Like Us, one character narrates his own experience winning what is alternately called the National Book Award, 'the n-word,' and 'The Big One.' Mott is playful and exaggerated (let's...
Appalachian Granny Witchcraft and Folk Magic (08/25)
Verity Vox and the Curse of Foxfire is about a witch who saves an Appalachian town called Foxfire from a curse. The Appalachian mountain region has its own tradition of using native plants to perform magic and healing, which is also referred to as root work, granny magic, granny witchcraft, kitchen witchery, or Braucherei.
Appalachian ...
Hutterites: An Anabaptist Branch (08/25)
Kate Riley's novel
Ruth takes place on a Hutterite commune in Michigan. Hutterites are a branch of the Anabaptist movement, a radical movement of the Protestant Reformation (other branches include the
Amish and
Mennonites). The primary tenets of the Anabaptists are adult baptism and the separation of church and state.
Hutterites were ...
Frances Glessner Lee's Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (08/25)
In
Sweetener, Charlotte and Olivia go to the Smithsonian to view an exhibit of dioramas created by forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee to further the training and work of law enforcement in solving crimes involving a suspicious death. One piece they look at closely features a woman lying on the floor, surrounded by the ordinary ...
Displacement and Migration as a Theme in Speculative Fiction (08/25)
In Ruben Reyes Jr.'s short story collection There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, speculative fiction is a way to rediscover the experiences of first- and second-generation Latinx immigrants. Alternative history might commemorate the devastating effects of genocide or alienation while at the same time offering imaginative escape from them. ...
Dunbar Creek and the Igbo Landing (08/25)
On the slave ship The York, nearing St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast, Igbos and other West Africans were below deck and chained to one another like property. They were to be auctioned off once they reached land. The Igbos were from the region we now know as Nigeria but that in the early 1800s was a series of independent states, ...
Artificial Intelligence in Literature (08/25)
As artificial intelligence has become an ever-present part of our world, more and more authors have considered its ramifications on our society. In recent years alone, a slew of novels and short stories have been published that explore themes like human nature, scientific progress, love, and human connection through the eyes of characters...
French Philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord (08/25)
Characters in Creation Lake frequently reference the French philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord, whose popularity has recently grown due to his work's relevance to digital culture.
Born in Paris in 1931, Debord had activist leanings early on while protesting France's war with Algeria. He also joined the Lettrists at age 18. They were ...
Hippos in Literature (08/25)
In Mina's Matchbox, a book filled with quirky characters, Yōko Ogawa introduces one of her most memorable creations yet: Pochiko, a 35-year-old pygmy hippopotamus. Flying in the face of the species' reputation as aggressors, Pochiko has a sweet temperament, charming the novel's protagonist and the readers alike. But she is far from ...
Cuneiform and Ashurbanipal's Library (08/25)
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak begins with the story of King Ashurbanipal (c. 685–631 BCE) of Ninevah, an ancient city on the eastern bank of the Tigris in part of what is now Mosul, Iraq. Although cruel even by the standards of his day, Ashurbanipal valued learning, and sometime around 647 BCE he built a library to ...
Oracle Bone Script (08/25)
One of the short stories in Ed Park's collection An Oral History of Atlantis involves a research group made entirely of Tinas trying to unravel the meaning of an ancient script found on a mysterious island. While much of the story is fantastical, the writing they are trying to interpret is quite real. Oracle bone script, in use from the ...
VR Therapy (08/25)
In Elaine Castillo's novel Moderation, content moderators working for a virtual reality platform are assigned to undergo mandatory VR therapy. This can look like meditation on a beach for employees experiencing general stress or standing on top of Big Ben for those afraid of heights. For Girlie, the book's protagonist, this ...
