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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...
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 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
...
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 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, ...
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-...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
