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Author Homes in Massachusetts (09/24)
One of the topics explored in Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel is Herman Melville's home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Arrowhead, which he went into significant debt to purchase but where he spent what seem to have been the happiest and most productive years of his life. Dayswork additionally mentions the homes of Nathaniel ...
The Beginnings of British Ballet (09/24)
Lucy Ashe's The Dance of the Dolls is populated by historical figures whose presence in the fictional narrative enmeshes the story within the real history of British ballet. Long associated with the royal courts of France and Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, the art form only became established in Britain in the early 20th century. ...
Monarch Butterfly Habitat Restoration on Roadsides and Beyond (09/24)
As Ben Goldfarb notes in Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, we're in the midst of an insect apocalypse. It's largely agreed now that our planet is experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, and insect species are among the most imperiled.
Habitat loss is a critical component, driven by road construction ...
Free People of Color and Their Roles in the American Slave Trade (09/24)
In Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend, one of Annis's enslavers is a woman. Typically, when people think about enslavers and those perpetuating slavery as a system, they often think about white men. Some may find it surprising that women played a significant role in the slave trade, too. Furthermore, white people were not the only ones who ...
The Carville National Leprosarium (09/24)
King of the Armadillos by Wendy Chin-Tanner takes place partly in a federal institute in Louisiana where young protagonist Victor Chin is sent to be treated for Hansen's disease — commonly known as leprosy — in the 1950s.
This inpatient center, often referred to simply as Carville, was built on the site of an abandoned ...
The United Fruit Company: The Scourge of Central and South America (09/24)
In Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, ...
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (09/24)
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead is largely based on Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) wrote 15 novels during his career, the eighth of which he ponderously dubbed The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone ...
The Santo Tomas POW camp (09/24)
In Valiant Women, author Lena S. Andrews features the true stories of women serving in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II. Among the women profiled is Navy nurse Dorothy Still, who was working in the Philippines when World War II broke out. She was taken prisoner by the Japanese and sent to Santo Tomas internment camp, where she ...
The World of Food Delivery App Work (09/24)
One story in Jamel Brinkley's collection Witness is about a woman who keeps receiving friendly notes from the same food delivery person and drafts long, personal letters in reply. In her letters, Gloria, a room service server at a hotel, reflects that food delivery apps are responsible for eliminating jobs like hers, but expresses ...
1940 U.S. Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie (09/24)
The Golden Gate by Amy Chua begins with the murder of Walter Wilkinson, who is a fictionalized version of Wendell Willkie, a Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkinson and Willkie both died in 1944, but their cause of death was vastly different — Willkie died of a heart attack instead of ...
Ted Bundy and the Myth of the Charming Serial Killer (09/24)
Jessica Knoll's Bright Young Women, a fictionalized take on the crimes of Ted Bundy, portrays its Bundy-inspired killer as an unimpressive man sensationalized as a charming genius. This echoes real-life critiques of the way Bundy has been cast by the media and law enforcement over the years.
Bundy was one of the twentieth century's ...
Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone Energy Accumulator (09/24)
In Edan Lepucki's novel Time's Mouth, one of the time travelers enhances their power using an obscure invention by a Viennese psychologist, Wilhelm Reich.
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was born in what is now Ukraine to Jewish parents, both of whom died when Reich was a child. After enlisting in the Austrian army during World War I, he ...
The Women's National Book Association (09/24)
In The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss talks about one of the few women in the book trade in the early 20th century: Madge Jenison, who opened The Sunwise Turn bookshop in Manhattan in 1916. A year later, she joined 20,000 other women in a protest for women's suffrage, marching with her fellow female booksellers....
Comet Hale-Bopp and the Heaven's Gate Cult (09/24)
A central event in Ruby Todd's debut novel, Bright Objects, is the sighting of a comet in the atmosphere. Comet St. John appears in January of 1997 over Sylvia's small town in Australia, causing its residents, along with the rest of the world, to stargaze and ponder the mysteries of the universe.
While Comet St. John is a ...
Slate Mining in America (09/24)
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 ...
Weather, Film, and Television in Sunny Los Angeles (09/24)
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...
The Civil Rights Movement in Maine (09/24)
Rachel Eliza Griffiths' debut novel Promise is set in Maine at a time when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was spreading to that state. Racial tensions were rising as white folks who resented calls for equality began viewing the presence of Blacks, no matter how few, as a threat to their existence.
Although racism...
American Entertainers Visiting the Vietnam Warfront (09/24)
In California Golden, Mindy has a transformative experience touring Vietnam during the war that makes her question her chosen career in show business. The Vietnam War was a transformative experience for America in the 1960s, impacting virtually everyone in some way. While the involvement of the United States in Vietnam was a profoundly ...
Bookshare and Accessible Reading Sources (08/24)
In
The Country of the Blind, Andrew Leland sings the praises of
Bookshare, an electronic repository of accessible-format books for the disabled. Bookshare was launched in 2001 by Jim Fruchterman, the leader of Benetech, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit that develops technologies to assist those with physical and learning disabilities. The ...
A'isha bint Abu Bakr (08/24)
In Jamila Ahmed's Every Rising Sun, Shaherazade remembers a story from the life of A'isha, third wife of the Prophet Muhammad. While traveling with her husband, she was separated from the group and became lost in the desert. Another man found her and helped her back to Medina, but she was unjustly accused of adultery as a ...
Trepanation: An Ancient Form of Brain Surgery (08/24)
In Theodore H. Schwartz's book, Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery, the author traces the history of neurosurgery. His account begins with the work of Dr. Harvey Cushing, whom he calls the 'undisputed founding father of neurosurgery,' in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. If one considers any deliberate operation on the brain to ...
The Mary McLeod Bethune Statue at the U.S. Capitol (08/24)
As Noliwe Rooks rightly asserts in her book A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune was a woman of many 'firsts.' Even though she died in 1955, Bethune made another historic first on July 13, 2022, when she became the first Black person to have a state-commissioned statue in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary ...
Sarah Manguso: The Fragment and the Aphorism (08/24)
Sarah Manguso is a poet, essayist, and novelist who is known for, among other things, her short compositional units: all of her non-poetry books are made up of short sections—sometimes just a line; sometimes a longish paragraph—separated by the white space of a line break. Her first few books take the form of a series of ...
The Launch of Sputnik 2 (08/24)
Though the story unfolds largely through flashbacks, the present-day events of The Most occur on November 3, 1957, which is the day the Soviet Union launched its satellite Sputnik 2 into space. This date was chosen at the behest of Premier Nikita Krushchev to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Occurring at the...
Pets and Poverty (08/24)
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 ...
Ultra-Processed Foods (08/24)
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...
"The Goose Girl," Dorothea Viehmann, and the Brothers Grimm (08/24)
'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 ...
Literary Late Bloomers and Prizes Honoring Their Achievement (08/24)
Tessa Hadley, author of After the Funeral and Other Stories, did not have a book published until age 46. In interviews, she has been frank about the fact that her first four or five novels, written in her twenties and long since discarded, didn't measure up. 'I am so glad I didn't publish a debut novel at 25, because [the books] were dead...
Mark Twain's Publication of Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs (08/24)
As recounted in Jon Clinch's The General and Julia, Samuel Clemens (who wrote under the alias Mark Twain) met President Ulysses S. Grant in the White House, introduced by a senator from Nevada. When the men crossed paths again after the end of Grant's presidency, they developed a friendship. Clemens frequently encouraged Grant to ...
The Legacy of the Fourteenth Amendment (08/24)
In All the Sinners Bleed, as Titus Crown, first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia, faces down a group of Confederate Army reenactors parading through his town, he '[feels] his skin begin to crawl' and considers that 'the Fourteenth Amendment had passed over a hundred years ago' and 'racism was alive and well.' The juxtaposition of ...
Young Adult Novels That Address Gentrification (08/24)
In
Like Home by Louisa Onomé, Nelo fights the forces of gentrification and change in the neighborhood that she loves so dearly. Gentrification has become an increasingly popular topic in recent young adult novels, and there are now a variety of titles offering different points of view on the subject.
This Side of Home by Ren&#...
The Zapatistas (07/24)
In Jess Row's novel The New Earth, the character Zeno's mother was a Zapatista in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, where she was killed. The Zapatistas are an indigenous peasant movement from Chiapas named for the Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata. They formed in 1983, organized secretly for 10 years, and then gained ...
The Portrait of Mao at Tiananmen Square (07/24)
Though Chairman Mao Zedong's legacy is a contentious subject in China, his portrait still presides over the gates of Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heartland of the nation. The enormous oil painting, measuring 6.4 by 5 meters and weighing 1.5 tons, was first put in place in 1949, shortly after Mao's Communist Party wrested power from the ...
Technology and Memory (07/24)
In her novel The Memory of Animals, author Claire Fuller features the use of a fictional device that allows people to revisit memories in vivid detail, as though physically embodying their past selves. Though this may sound like a radical concept existing firmly within the realms of science fiction, the use of technology to document ...
Blood and Ink: Writing Materials Through the Ages (07/24)
In Emma Törzs's Ink Blood Sister Scribe, the first word of the title plays an important role: By mixing blood with herbs, people can make ink with magical properties. In the real world, writing has been done with a variety of materials throughout history — including, from time to time, blood.
Evidence points to ink first ...
Keep America Beautiful and the "Crying Indian" Ad (07/24)
David Lipsky's history of climate change denial, The Parrot and the Igloo, exposes many of the strategies deniers have used to prevent governmental action on environmental issues. One of the key approaches has been to shift responsibility for pollution off of industries and onto individuals. An excellent example of this strategy in action...
Minorities in Birding (07/24)
The viral video of Christian Cooper confronting a white woman who threatened to call the police on him while he was birdwatching in New York's Central Park helped drive the 2020 protests stemming from the police murders of Black Americans. Yet Cooper has done much beyond this video to raise awareness about racism in general and within the...
Stolen Relics (07/24)
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 ...
Suicides Among Cab Drivers (07/24)
Abdul Saleh was fifty-nine when he
died at home in Brooklyn in 2018 after working as a cab driver for thirty years. His roommate found him hanging from an electrical cord. His shifts had lasted as long as twelve hours but financial difficulties plagued him. It was hard to stay afloat in the era of Uber, Lyft, and rideshare companies that ...
The Thunderous Òrìṣà Ṣàngó (07/24)
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 ...
Graphic Novels in Translation (07/24)
Our Beautiful Darkness by Ondjaki has been translated into English from the original Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann. The process of translating a graphic novel differs somewhat from that of a more traditional prose novel. This is due to the importance of the interaction between the text and images, with each component needing to work ...
How Mothers Affect Daughters' Body Image (07/24)
In Age 16 by Rosena Fung, we see body image issues play out across generations. Characters make disapproving comments about their daughters' bodies or encourage them to diet because they think they are being helpful. Lydia models diet culture for her daughter by criticizing her own body and openly counting calories.
As is apparent...
New Perspectives in 21st-Century Arthuriana (07/24)
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 Heist of the Century: The Antwerp Diamond Heist (07/24)
It's been called the heist of the century, despite happening only three years after the turn of the millennium. At the start of the business day on February 17, 2003, police were called to the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) by frantic jewel traders claiming their highly secure vault had been breached. Investigators found the ...
The "Foul Days" of Bulgarian Folklore (07/24)
Genoveva Dimova's debut novel, Foul Days, takes place over a twelve-day period known in Bulgarian culture as the 'Unclean Days,' 'Dirty Days' – or, indeed, 'Foul Days.' In the first chapter, in a pub on a dark, wintry New Year's Eve, one of the characters explains: 'The Foul Days have begun. The New Year was born, but it hasn't been...
The Birkin Bag (07/24)
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 ...
Cinéma Vérité (07/24)
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 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (07/24)
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 ...
Capability Brown and the English Garden (07/24)
In The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing traces the evolution of gardens and the different meanings they have taken on in society. One major European development she addresses is the work of Capability Brown and the advent, in the mid-18th century, of a style that came to be known simply as the English garden.
Lancelot '...
The Women of the Ku Klux Klan (07/24)
Timothy Egan's book A Fever in the Heartland mentions the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, a group of women who were actively aligned with the mission of the KKK during its 1920s resurgence. In 1923, the WKKK formed in Little Rock, Arkansas. The WKKK had chapters in every state and at least 500,000 members over the course of its existence. ...
