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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 ...
How Satellite Imagery of Penguin Poop Is Leading to Advanced Animal Monitoring (08/25)
In The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog¸ Carly Anne York discusses how 'silly science'—science driven by curiosity that may not have an immediate real-world application—can lead to important findings and innovations. But before they lead to anything, these research projects, especially those that are unusual or ...
Shaanxi Cuisine and Biang Biang Mian (08/25)
Shaanxi cuisine, also known as Qin cuisine, originates from Shaanxi province in north-central China, a region historically significant as the starting point of the ancient Silk Road and home to Xi'an, one of China's oldest capitals. Its geography, straddling the Loess Plateau and bordered by the Central Plains, has contributed to a ...
Famously Critical Critics (08/25)
The jumping-off point for Charlotte Runcie's Bring the House Down is a one-star review of a one-woman play. Her fictional theater critic Alex Lyons claims 'people like reading bad reviews.' Apparently Lyons is not alone in this belief; the annals of theater history are awash in notoriously vitriolic critics.
Alexander Woollcott ...
The Pulaski (08/25)
In Hotshot: A Life on Fire, author River Selby states more than once that their favorite firefighting tool is a Pulaski. The implement is similar to an axe one might use for chopping wood, but it terminates in a two-sided head, with an axe blade on one side and an adze or mattock on the other. (An adze is similar to a hoe, with the ...
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 ...
Generational Trauma in Vietnamese American Fiction (08/25)
In 1975, the US military withdrew from Vietnam after having signed the Paris Peace Accords two years prior. This marked the end of the Vietnam War, and it left millions of Vietnamese citizens vulnerable—those who had had close ties to the US military were now under threat of being persecuted by the new communist regime. An estimated...
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. ...
The Love Letters of Mariana Alcoforado, a 17th Century Nun (07/25)
In the final novella of Room on the Sea, Aciman has Mariana, a student and scholar, relive her ill-fated love affair with Itamar, a womanizing painter also staying at the Italian Academy, by writing him a letter. In fact, this story is a reimagining of a story of another Mariana, one with a centuries-old literary precedent: Mariana ...
The Białowieża Forest (07/25)
In Jennifer Croft's The Extinction of Irena Rey, humans' domestic and professional concerns mix with those of the natural world against the background of the vast Białowieża Forest, beside which the titular author lives and hosts a personal entourage of translators. The Białowieża Forest is a complex of woodland ...
Tea's Role in World History (07/25)
Few plants have impacted world history as profoundly as Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. Jessica J. Lee, in her book Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, describes how tea is integral to both seemingly disparate halves of her family tree—her Welsh paternal grandparents and her Taiwanese maternal family all loved tea and ...
Southside, Virginia (07/25)
The area where author Henry Wise's Holy City takes place—Southside—encompasses a swath of counties in the southern portion of Virginia's Piedmont region. Southside stretches from the James River south to the North Carolina border and extends as far east as Isle of Wight and Southampton Counties, bounded along the western edge ...
The "Bury Your Gays" Trope (07/25)
The meaning behind Bury Your Gays' title becomes clear as soon as oily Harold Bros. executive Jack Hays orders protagonist Misha to do the bidding of the algorithm for the sake of his streaming TV show and kill off two lesbian characters. Author Chuck Tingle is commenting on the cynical use of queer representation in entertainment, ...
The Devil Personified: How He Shapeshifts in Literature (07/25)
The Hebrew word 'Satan' can be translated as 'adversary,' or 'accuser,' so in his nomenclature, he wasn't exactly set up for success. Satan, or the devil, is a figure who has origins in Abrahamic religions, well-known in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Conceptually, he has been depicted as a fallen angel, ghoulishly evil, as both an ...
Advertising for Brides in the 19th-Century American West (07/25)
The Californian Gold Rush, the American Civil War, and the lure of land expansion filled the 19th-century American West with men like Tom Rourke, the protagonist of Kevin Barry's
The Heart in Winter. These men came to work as miners, farmers, or ranchers—but they often lacked companions to help with farm work, ensure the continuity ...
Redefining the Role of the Mythological Bacchae (07/25)
In ancient Greco-Roman mythology, the Bacchae—also known as Maenads—were female followers of Dionysus (also known as Bacchus), god of wine and revelry. While some devoted themselves to him voluntarily, others were said to be possessed, driven mad and forced into servitude by his intoxicating power.
Dionysus journeyed ...
Weird Tales Magazine's Literary Legacy (07/25)
In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's
The Bewitching, Minerva refers often to stories published in a literary magazine called
Weird Tales. The magazine was launched in 1923 'to showcase writers trying to publish stories so bizarre and far out, no one else would publish them,' according to
its website. It was that very mission statement that led to
...
Edgar Allan Poe's Marriage to Virginia Clemm (07/25)
Edgar Allan Poe looms over
Fox—quite literally, in fact. Mr. Fox has a large bronze bust of Poe with a raven on his shoulder, a prize for winning a poetry contest, displayed in his office. But even beyond the bust, Poe recurs throughout the narrative. Not only does
Fox become a detective story,
a form Poe invented, Mr. Fox idealizes...
Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman (07/25)
In Girl, 1983, Linn Ullmann uses the tools of fiction to dissect a teenaged narrator's traumatic encounter with an older man. That narrator's biography has numerous parallels to Ullmann's own, including a turbulent adolescence divided among New York, Norway, and Sweden—the result of being the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and ...
The Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992) (07/25)
Ruben Reyes Jr.'s Archive of Unknown Universes explores the impact of the Salvadoran Civil War by contrasting one alternative timeline that shows a decisive victory by the government with another that shows the war ending with revolutionaries overthrowing the government. In reality, the Salvadoran Civil War lasted 13 years, from 1979 to ...
What's the Story with the Online Platform OnlyFans? (07/25)
In Margo's Got Money Troubles, Margo begins creating content on OnlyFans, which eventually becomes quite lucrative work. But what is OnlyFans? Is it a pornography hub? Is it even legal?
OnlyFans was started in London, England. It is a subscription-based online platform with messaging features. It basically acts as a video-hosting ...
Lolita's Publication History (07/25)
Vladimir Nabokov was born April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He left the country in 1919 and lived in England, Germany, and France before settling in the United States in 1940. In 1961 he relocated to Montreux, Switzerland, where he resided for the remainder of his life and died in 1977.
Nabokov began working on Lolita in 1948,...
The Seaside Resort Town of Bognor Regis (07/25)
The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff takes place in 1930 at the West Sussex seaside resort town of Bognor Regis on the south coast of England. The Stevens family is spending two weeks at the same holiday boarding house that they have been visiting since Mr. and Mrs. Stevens spent their honeymoon there two decades earlier.
For ...
The Blackwater Saga's European Revival (07/25)
When he died on December 27, 1999, Michael McDowell's name was barely recognized beyond the realm of horror aficionados. Despite Stephen King having once praised him as 'the finest writer of paperback originals in America,' his novels had fallen into relative obscurity by the end of the 20th century. In fact, the Washington Post titled ...
Don't Skip the Footnotes! Novels that Use Footnotes as a Narrative Device (07/25)
Alternate chapters in Kate Atkinson's novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum are 'footnotes' to the main narrative, ostensibly offering background information about specific objects but actually offering windows into the history of generations of the narrator's family. Atkinson is not the only novelist to play with footnotes or endnotes as...
Black Writers Inspired by Octavia Butler (07/25)
Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) is universally acknowledged as the first widely successful Black woman science fiction author, winning multiple awards for her short stories, novellas, and novels. Many other Black writers of speculative fiction have listed her as a major inspiration for their work.
N.K. Jemisin (b. 1972) is one of the...
The True Story of Grace Marks and Why Margaret Atwood Wrote About Her (07/25)
The novel Alias Grace, handsomely written by Margaret Atwood, is based on the true life story of housemaid Grace Marks, convicted of taking part in the murder of Thomas Kinnear, who employed Marks, and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery. The murders took place north of Richmond Hill, Upper Canada (now Ontario), on the farm Kinnear ...
A Percival Everett Starter List (07/25)
Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure was adapted for film as American Fiction in 2023, leading to director Cord Jefferson's Oscar win for Best Adapted Screenplay. The year after, Everett's new novel James scooped up major awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. While these exposures and honors gained him some ...
The History of Grog (07/25)
Hampton Sides' book The Wide Wide Sea records the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook and relays some of the exploits of his crew aboard the HMS Resolution. One of Cook's key decisions concerned an alcoholic drink known as "grog."
During the Age of Exploration—the 15th to 18th centuries—Royal Navy...
The 1926 Bingham, Utah Avalanche (07/25)
The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates is written as a series of vignettes based on twelve days in the life of the main character, which include personal moments and historical events, both famous and lesser-known. One of these happenings is an avalanche that Isaac survives at the age of eight with his sister in the ...
The Greek Myth of Eros and Psyche (07/25)
In the original Greek myth that The Palace of Eros retells, Psyche is the youngest daughter of a king and the most beautiful woman in all the land. She is mistaken for Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and worshiped accordingly. An envious Aphrodite commands her son, Eros, to shoot Psyche with his arrows of love and make her become ...
Japanese Yakuza Films (07/25)
Akira Otani's intense thriller The Night of Baba Yaga tells the story of two women trying to escape from a branch of the yakuza, a real-life organized crime group thought to have originated in the 17th century when many samurai left the service of lords and turned to banditry. Like the mafia in American movies, there is a long history of ...
A Shooting Star of American Astronomy: Maria Mitchell (07/25)
The central mystery of Sarah Perry's Enlightenment concerns an astronomer, Maria Văduva, and Thomas's uncovering of her hidden scientific contributions. Many real-life historical women partook in exploration of the night sky and space only for their discoveries to be similarly buried or forgotten. One such woman was the nineteenth-...
The Critical Reception and Rediscovery of Their Eyes Were Watching God (07/25)
While it's now considered a classic of American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was not especially well-received at the time of its publication in 1937. It was Hurston's second novel (after Jonah's Gourd Vine), and she had also published poetry, co-written a play with Langston Hughes, and received two ...
The Hanging Rock Mystery (07/25)
When Joan Lindsay's novel Picnic at Hanging Rock was first released, readers had a pressing question: was it based on a true story? The book's prologue suggests that it might be: "Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen ...
Martin Amis: A Reading List (07/25)
Martin Amis (1949–2023) was an acclaimed English novelist and critic, known for his 'bleak comedy,' pyrotechnical prose, and his interest in vulgarity and profanity: creating 'a high style to describe low things,' as Dwight Garner put it in his
obituary of Amis for the
New York Times. His writing was witty, exuberant; he was, ...
Could Mind Uploading Become a Reality? (07/25)
In Jayson Greene's novel UnWorld, people can create sentient copies of their memories. The concept of creating a digital afterlife may sound strictly from the realm of science fiction, but attempts are already underway to make it a reality. It's known as 'mind uploading' and is a form of transhumanism, a movement that advocates using ...
The Dybbuk of Jewish Folklore (07/25)
Taffy Brodesser-Akner's Long Island Compromise follows the Fletcher family, with their Jewish identity acting as one of the central themes. When someone in the family faces a mishap, they allude to a 'dybbuk' as the driving factor. A 'dybbuk,' or 'dibbuk,' in Jewish folklore is an evil spirit that takes possession of a person's body, and ...
Cetacean Trivia (07/25)
Much of biologist Hannah Stowe's memoir,
Move Like Water, records her experiences on sailing vessels researching cetaceans – an entirely aquatic group of mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Some interesting trivia regarding these magnificent creatures:
- The fossil record shows the first cetaceans ...
Communal Utopias in Nineteenth-Century America (07/25)
In The House on Buzzards Bay, Dwyer Murphy's gothic thriller, a group of former college roommates reunite for their summer vacation in a beachfront mansion. The house, owned equally by all six friends, was built by the local Spiritualist community in the nineteenth century as a home for the many people coming to join the sect. As ...
Novels About Reality Television (07/25)
Aisling Rawle's debut novel The Compound takes place on an unnamed reality competition television show, where contestants live together, compete in challenges to earn rewards, and gradually get banished until only one remains to win the grand prize. As it borrows recognizable elements from popular reality shows like Survivor and Love ...
