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Trans People Have Always Played Sports: Women Breaking Barriers (07/25)
In Hot Girls with Balls, author Benedict Nguyễn chooses to depict her protagonists, two star athletes who happen to both be Asian trans women, as competitors in the professional men's volleyball league rather than the women's. This choice is a gesture toward the manufactured controversy surrounding trans women competing against ...
A Brief History of Close Protection Agencies (07/25)
In Richard Osman's thriller We Solve Murders, a series of murders surrounds Maximum Impact Security, a close-protection agency, or a company that provides bodyguards to paying clients. The concept of employing a select group of individuals to guard an important person isn't a new one by any means. Many believe that this sort of quid pro ...
En Puntas by Javier Pérez (07/25)
During a pivotal scene in R.O. Kwon's novel Exhibit, a character mentions a short film he's viewed. In it, a ballerina performs atop a piano lid in customized pointe shoes; long kitchen knives have been attached to them, so she is literally dancing on points. This real-life film is the video-installation piece En Puntas ('on tips'), ...
Flag Bearers of the Civil War (07/25)
Anders, the protagonist of Dennard Dayle's How to Dodge a Cannonball, describes himself as a 'flag-twirler': he twirls flags for the Union, then the Confederacy, then the Union again. Throughout the novel, Anders name-drops increasingly baroque flag-twirling maneuvers, including the Sumter Two-Step, the Jackson Lift, and the Delaware ...
Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space (07/25)
Joan Goodwin, the protagonist of Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel Atmosphere, applies to NASA to be one of America's first female astronauts and is accepted to the program as part of Group 9. Group 8 (both in the book and in reality) included Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel into space.
Sally Kristen Ride was born in 1951 in ...
Miranda July: The Essential Works (07/25)
Miranda July is an artist who works successfully in multiple mediums, perhaps equally well-known for her films and her fiction. Born in 1974 in Barre, Vermont, and raised in Berkeley, California, July dropped out of college in her early twenties and moved to Portland, Oregon, where she began exploring performance art before becoming a ...
Montreal in Literature (07/25)
Much of Frankie Barnet's novel Mood Swings takes place in Montreal. Nestled in the southwest of Canada's francophone province of Quebec, Montreal is a multicultural and largely bilingual city with a thriving arts scene, which makes it an appealingly unique backdrop for all sorts of literature. Below are some notable books that have been ...
Nicky Calma, aka Tita Aida (06/25)
In Caro de Robertis' work of transcribed oral history, So Many Stars, one of the interviewees is Nicky Calma. She shares the story of how, along with others at the Filipino Task Force on AIDS, she created the drag persona of Tita Aida in order to educate the people in her community about HIV/AIDS.
Born in 1967 to a Catholic family in ...
Books About Magical Portals (06/25)
In Megan Giddings' novel Meet Me at the Crossroads, magical doors appear around the world, offering an entry into another dimension. The modern portal fantasy genre, where a magical entryway leads to another world, dates back to classic works like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Alice in Wonderland. But as novelist and ...
Collier Heights, Atlanta's Black Enclave (06/25)
In These Heathens, set in 1960, 17-year-old Doris Steele visits a friend of her former teacher, who lives in the Collier Heights area in Atlanta, Georgia. Collier Heights was established in 1952 as an all-Black neighborhood, at a time when redlining meant that Black Georgians were significantly restricted in terms of housing. They were ...
The Widespread Appeal of Boxing (06/25)
A central element of The Slip by Lucas Schaefer is Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas, which serves as a hub connecting the story's characters. The gym, attracting individuals from diverse backgrounds, illustrates a universal appeal: boxing is a sport that can be found in every city across the nation and in many countries ...
Washington State Authors (06/25)
Jess Walter, the author of
So Far Gone, is based in Washington, a state that has produced a number of well-known writers. Below we feature a small selection of Washington State authors and books.
Many of
Sherman Alexie's early works are set on the Spokane Reservation, where he grew up. His linked short story collection,
The Lone ...
The Handover of Hong Kong (06/25)
Ghost Girl, Banana takes place partly in Hong Kong in the summer of 1997, a setting intentionally chosen by the author for symbolic reasons, representing the inner conflict of the main character who is of Hong Kong descent but grew up in the UK, raised by her English father. This was the summer Hong Kong was 'returned' to the rule of the ...
The Fires of 1970s New York City (06/25)
In her novel Remember Us, author Jacqueline Woodson draws from her own experiences growing up in 1970s New York. Her protagonist's hometown of Bushwick is plagued by housefires, landing it the callous nickname 'The Matchbox.'
Bushwick wasn't the only community affected by numerous fires at the time. Records show that by mid-1974, the ...
The Sociological Work of Pierre Bourdieu (06/25)
In addition to being a novelist, Édouard Louis, author of Change, is a scholar of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Louis's scholarly work has explicitly informed his novels, which are about the violence and indignity of poverty, the racism and homophobia of his working-class childhood, and the difficult act of moving between ...
Epilepsy (06/25)
In Women and Children First, the debut novel from Alina Grabowski, teenager Lucy Anderson has epilepsy, a neurological disorder involving recurring seizures. Lucy has to deal not only with her distress at experiencing the seizures themselves but also with the stigma associated with the condition.
Epilepsy is one of the most common...
Boquila trifoliolata, the "Chameleon Vine" (06/25)
Zoe Schlanger's popular science book The Light Eaters goes in-depth on several remarkable plants, one of which is the climbing vine Boquila trifoliolata. This woody vine, found in the temperate rainforests of Chile and Argentina, has a unique strategy for hiding from herbivores—in order to blend in, it changes the shape of its ...
An Interview with Carvell Wallace (06/25)
Carvell Wallace's debut memoir, Another Word for Love, explores how spirituality and embracing his queer identity helped him heal from childhood trauma. The journalist and podcaster is known for co-writing basketball player Andre Iguodala's 2019 memoir The Sixth Man and for his Peabody Award–nominated podcast series Finding ...
Superfund Sites: How the Environmental Protection Agency Cleans Up Waste (06/25)
In her book Murderland, Caroline Fraser examines the lead-crime hypothesis, the theory that children exposed to high levels of lead have neurological changes that lead to increased aggressiveness in adulthood. Ted Bundy serves as Fraser's example of a child exposed to high levels of lead who proceeded to live a life of very violent crime....
Community-Based Resources for Aging in Place (06/25)
In Awake in the Floating City, Bo is an artist who supports herself by working as a caregiver to home-bound elderly clients. Remaining in one's own home, often living alone and having caregiver help, is referred to as 'aging in place,' and is frequently preferable to living in a nursing home or assisted living facility; according to the ...
The Artist's Assistant (06/25)
One of the many questions about the art world probed by Hari Kunzru in his new novel Blue Ruin is the notion of provenance in the context of a working relationship between a well-known artist and his paid assistant. Does an assistant's creative output in any way belong to them? Or does it belong solely to the artist for whom they work...
Painter Agnes Martin (06/25)
In The Dry Season, Melissa Febos seeks out stories of creative women who might serve as models for the kind of artistic life she hopes to pursue following a period of self-enforced celibacy. One of these forebears is the abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. In Martin, Febos encounters a creative visionary whose own inspiration ...
Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong (06/25)
Eve J. Chung's debut novel Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Chung has spoken about how she was motivated to write the book by her maternal grandmother's experiences of that period of history.
However...
Saint Thomas Christians (06/25)
One of the overarching themes in Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water is faith, in all its various guises. For the character Big Ammachi and her family, it is their proud history as Saint Thomas Christians that sustains them in their bleakest hours.
The novel refers to the legend of Saint Thomas, one of the twelve disciples of ...
Contemporary Mexican Literature in Translation (06/25)
The Accidentals is a collection of short stories by Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel, translated from Spanish to English by Rosalind Harvey. Nettel's novel Still Born, also translated by Harvey, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
Here are some more examples of contemporary Mexican literature in translation worth ...
Wind Knots (06/25)
The coastal California setting of The Witches of Bellinas is often beset by fierce and powerful winds. As the strong gusts rage, Mia, Bellinas's unofficial matriarch, explains to main character Tansy that wind has often been associated with magic. She gives the example of a peculiar, and largely forgotten, bit of history.
Hundreds...
Reimagining The Great Gatsby (06/25)
In 1925, a few months after the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from T.S. Eliot in which the poet—already renowned for The Waste Land—described the novel as 'the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.' Fitzgerald received the praise with enthusiasm, especially since...
Romance Novels with Complex Themes (06/25)
In many ways, Emily Henry's Great Big Beautiful Life is about the complex bond between mothers and daughters that prompts mothers to act in strange, counterintuitive ways. While the novel is quite unabashedly a romance, thoroughly embracing the genre's tropes, it is much more than a happy, breezy read with a satisfying end. Going against ...
Plague in the 21st Century (06/25)
Thomas Levenson begins So Very Small, his history of the development of germ theory, with an account of the Great Plague that struck London in 1665. Although this was the last major outbreak to hit England, Yersinia pestis, the bacterium which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, has survived—and indeed thrived—well into the ...
South Philadelphia Over the Years (06/25)
After Michael Deagler's protagonist Dennis Monk in Early Sobrieties is ejected from his parent's house in suburban Bucks County, he drifts, as many former small-town and suburban kids do, to the nearest big city. As much as Early Sobrieties is a book about new starts to life, it is also an ode to South Philadelphia, which officially ...
Cyanide Toxicity: How It Works (05/25)
Death in the Jungle tells the true story of Jim Jones, the preacher-turned-cult-leader who founded the infamous Jonestown settlement, a socialist community that became a site of mass murder. Jones was interested in 'revolutionary suicide' and asked Jonestown doctor Larry Schacht to find a method for it; Schacht began researching the use ...
A Short History of the Cooking Show (05/25)
In Lessons In Chemistry, the main character is the reluctant host of a popular TV cooking show.
Gordon Ramsay, Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray are just a few of the many modern TV chefs who’ve become household names. Cooking shows are now not only daytime television staples; they're featured in the primetime lineup. Such was not ...
The Mommy Wars (05/25)
In It. Goes. So. Fast., Mary Louise Kelly shares her struggles to balance work and family life. Although for Kelly there was never a question of whether or not to give up work permanently in favor of parenting, the difficulty of finding the balance she seeks makes that question a perennial topic of interest—and conflict—among ...
Olivia de Havilland and the Studio System (05/25)
In the novella "Eve in Hollywood," in Amor Towles's Table for Two, Eve Ross becomes close friends with the actress Olivia de Havilland. It is 1938, and de Havilland's popular new film The Adventures of Robin Hood has just been released. All is not well in paradise, however, for the young star falls prey to blackmailers, ...
Queens of Rock: Women in Geology (05/25)
In Caoilinn Hughes' The Alternatives, Olwen is a geologist profoundly concerned with the effects of climate change. As in other sciences, women remain underrepresented in geology, even though they have been very much part of its development over the centuries.
St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a scholar of precious stones, to ...
Alison Bechdel's Early Work: Dykes to Watch Out For (05/25)
Alison Bechdel's new graphic novel
Spent revisits several of the beloved characters that Bechdel made somewhat famous in her long-running comic strip
Dykes to Watch Out For. Though it was never published in mainstream publications, the strip was a mainstay in gay and lesbian publications for over 25 years.
Dykes to Watch Out For ...
Memoirs about Mothers (05/25)
Erika J. Simpson's
This Is Your Mother is an unconventional memoir about the author's mother Sallie Carol. Below we highlight some other recommended memoirs in which an author reflects on their relationship with their mother, often (but not always) after her death.
Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou: Angelou's seventh volume of ...
Self-help Cults (05/25)
Self-improvement is having a big moment. Life coaching is a multi-billion-dollar industry with more than 100,000 coaches practicing around the globe, self-help books are all over the bestseller lists, and "therapy talk" terms like "gaslighting" and "boundaries" are now firmly a part of the modern vernacular. ...
The Reality of Writing Workshops (05/25)
Several stories in Lori Ostlund's Are You Happy? follow characters who are either teachers or students in writing workshops. Writing workshops are intended to help students strengthen their writing process through guidance and feedback from professionals and within a community. Outsiders don't always get much insight into what these ...
The Nation of Islam (05/25)
Malcolm X rose to public prominence as one of the faces of the Nation of Islam, which is a Black nationalist and religious movement and organization. The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930 by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, although he was soon succeeded by Elijah Muhammad, who grew the small group into an influential nationwide movement—...
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (05/25)
In The Corruption of Hollis Brown by K. Ancrum, Walt, a ghost who was born in approximately 1916, shares a body with Hollis, a teenage boy he possesses in order to survive. As the two are still working out how to exist as one person, communicating through their shared mind with tensions and resentments lingering between them, Walt peers ...
Librarians-Turned-Novelists (05/25)
Douglas Westerbeke, author of the debut novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World, did not start his career as an author. In fact, he is a librarian in Ohio, at one of the largest libraries in the United States. After spending the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, he decided to try his hand at ...
The Promise and Peril of the Haber-Bosch Process (05/25)
As Ferris Jabr describes in Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, he and his spouse discovered an all-too-common problem when they tried to plant a new garden—ruined, lifeless soil. Despite our millions of acres of farmland, the intensity of modern agriculture, grazing, deforestation, and land disturbance have severely ...
The Lost Continent of Lemuria (05/25)
Amy Carlson, the leader of the Love Has Won cult, claimed to have been many different figures in past lives—Jesus, Cleopatra, and Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few—but one of her most eyebrow-raising claims was that she was once the Queen of Lemuria, an ancient, hyper-advanced kingdom that originated the human race before ...
Fan Culture and Parasocial Relationships (05/25)
For those living in the dystopian world of Soyoung Park's Snowglobe, the main source of entertainment is reality television shot within a climate-controlled dome. The lives of the actors on these shows are on 24-hour display to be consumed obsessively by the fans in the icy world beyond the dome's barrier. Every detail of the stars' lives...
Fusion Science as a Clean Energy Source (05/25)
Joe Mungo Reed's novel
Terrestrial History begins with a fusion scientist named Hannah, who has retreated to her cottage in the Scottish Western Isles to finish a review of 'computing challenges in confinement models.' Upon reading this, I realized I had no idea what it meant to be a fusion scientist, what a 'confinement model' would be...
How to Become a WWE Star (05/25)
BJ, one of the characters in Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness, aspires to become a professional wrestler for World Wrestling Entertainment — more commonly known as the WWE.
Merriam-Webster defines professional wrestling as 'a form of athletic theater where performers engage in staged mock combat, emphasizing entertainment ...
A Women in Resistance Reading List (05/25)
Suzanne Cope's Women of War details the efforts of four female resistance fighters in Italy during World War II, but it also highlights the efforts of countless unnamed women who supported revolutionary efforts. For those interested in learning more about the role of women in resistance movements, the following books explore stories ...
"Native American" Is Complicated (05/25)
In the 1960s and 1970s, the term 'Native American' was popularized. It became the politically correct way to refer to the hundreds of tribes that make up the Native population in the United States, often replacing 'Indian.' But many Indigenous people resent the classification of Native American because it was a name given to them by white...
