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The San Juan Mountains (04/24)
James McLaughlin's Panther Gap includes beautiful descriptions of the nature surrounding the novel's titular location in remote Colorado. Our First Impressions reviewers were taken with these landscape depictions, prompting some to imagine being or going there themselves. Luckily, this is possible…sort of.
In a recent ...
Romance of the Three Kingdoms (04/24)
Strike the Zither tells the story of Zephyr, a brilliant strategist working to help warlordess Xin Ren gain the throne of the realm. As she outsmarts foes human and supernatural alike, Zephyr must acknowledge her fate and decide how far she's willing to go to see Ren on the throne. Zither is a tale of strong females fighting for their...
The Kyshtym Nuclear Disaster (04/24)
While Chernobyl may be the first incident that comes to mind when someone thinks about nuclear disasters in the 20th century, this event actually had a precursor in the USSR: the 'Kyshtym disaster' of 1957. Basing her novel
The Half Life of Valery K on this event, author Natasha Pulley's fictional 'City 40' is modeled on Chelyabinsk-40, ...
Emma Goldman (04/24)
In Biography of X, author Catherine Lacey imagines a world in which Russian-born anarchist and progressive activist Emma Goldman had a legitimate political career in the United States, serving as governor of Illinois and then chief of staff to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this capacity, Goldman ushered in profound systemic ...
British Women in the Second World War (04/24)
Jacquelin Winspear's heroine, Elinor White, was a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) during the Second World War, one of several British organizations in which women enlisted to aid the war effort.
When war broke out in 1939, millions of men left the workforce in Great Britain to enlist, leaving behind their wives, sisters...
Adult Novels Focusing On Children During World War II (04/24)
Unsurprisingly, stories featuring the circumstances of child or teenage protagonists during World War II tend to appear prominently in the category of young adult literature, with classics like Lois Lowry's
Number the Stars existing as staples of historical fiction in schools and libraries all over. But as is the case with Jennifer Rosner...
What Is a Portacath? (04/24)
A portacath is a medical device used to assist with the treatment of ongoing conditions, most commonly cancer. It is composed of two key parts: the portal, which is a small chamber usually made of silicon that is placed just beneath the skin on a patient's chest; and the catheter, which is a flexible, hollow tube that is threaded into...
The Sociological Work of Pierre Bourdieu (04/24)
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 ...
Auditory Hallucinations (04/24)
Neely, the main character in Mindy McGinnis's Under This Red Rock, experiences auditory hallucinations (AHs). Since an early age, Neely has heard people clapping for her, children laughing and playing, and the voice of a young girl asking for water. She's developed techniques for managing her symptoms, but she still suffers emotionally ...
Acquired Savant Syndrome (04/24)
In Danielle Trussoni's The Puzzle Master, protagonist Mike Brink was once on his way to a promising football career until an injury fundamentally changed the way his brain worked, leading him away from the gridiron and into MIT. As Trussoni mentions in a brief author's note, Brink's diagnosis—acquired savant syndrome—is a real...
In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (04/24)
In Alice Winn's brilliant World War I novel, In Memoriam, the main characters often quote poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). Among others cited is one of his best-known works: In Memoriam A.H.H.
The subject of the poem is Arthur Henry Hallam, whom Tennyson met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829. The two young men were ...
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (03/24)
In A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani, teenage narrator Lara characterizes her mother Yevgenia's reading habits as something akin to a religious experience. She describes coming upon her at a time when she was utterly absorbed by Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls: '...a book she had read before, only this time she was reading the ...
A Short Glossary of Ballet Terms (03/24)
Dances by Nicole Cuffy is a novel filled with the mechanics of ballet. Through the first-person narration of her protagonist Cece, Cuffy portrays the everyday rhythms and realities of dance, creating patterns and scenes with its terminology. While the physicality of this language is an art to be enjoyed in itself, having even a cursory ...
The Real-Life Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (03/24)
Joel H. Morris's novel All Our Yesterdays imagines the lives of Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, before the events that unfold in Shakespeare's tragedy. Many are familiar with the tale but may not realize the couple are based on individuals who really did live in what is now Scotland during the eleventh century.
Scotland was...
Sad Music is Blue, Literally (03/24)
In Only the Beautiful, the historical novel by Susan Meissner, readers are introduced to Rosanne 'Rosie' Maras, a teenage girl who has lost her family and is placed under the care of her parents' former employers. To most, Rosie seems like a normal girl, but she's hiding a secret: when she hears sounds, she sees colors. When her secret is...
The Real Birnam Wood (03/24)
Eleanor Catton's novel
Birnam Wood and the guerrilla gardening group at its center draw their name from lines in Shakespeare's
Macbeth, serving as the novel's epigraph, in which one of the witches prophesies:
Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
Macbeth, in the ...
Clytemnestra (03/24)
Constanza Casati's Clytemnestra focuses on the life of the title character, known in mythology as the vengeful wife of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, Greece. In her novel, Casati paints a full and nuanced picture of this much-villainized figure.
Clytemnestra is the daughter of Leda, a princess who becomes a Spartan queen. According to ...
New Advances in Treating Vision Loss (03/24)
After a mysterious event that blinded the entire world population, the characters in Blind Spots use devices called vidders to see. In real life, many people are experiencing vision improvement through technology that might sound like something out of a science fiction novel. From smart glasses to implantable contact lenses, vision ...
Books about Magical Libraries (03/24)
Mark Lawrence's fantasy novel The Book That Wouldn't Burn centers on an incredible library, where the knowledge of millennia is guarded by magical assistants and dangerous labyrinths. For book lovers, reading about magical libraries can have a special appeal—a place that, in the real world, already feels enchanted and full ...
The Goiania Accident (03/24)
In the title story of You Glow in the Dark, scrap metal scavengers uncover a strange glowing capsule in the ruins of an abandoned hospital. Dazzled by the beautiful blue particles that glow in the dark, they spread radioactive poison throughout their community, leaving illness and death everywhere they go. When the accident is finally ...
The Białowieża Forest (03/24)
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 ...
A Brief History of the Police Procedural (03/24)
As most will know, a mystery novel is one that starts off with a conundrum – someone has been killed, something or someone has gone missing – and proceeds along a logical path until the puzzle is solved, generally with plot twists and red herrings along the way. There are many variations on this theme, and consequently many ...
Classical Culture and White Nationalism (03/24)
The hands of history have reshaped the Greek past for centuries, sculpting it into an idealized version credited with birthing a myriad of ideas and concepts, notably identity. Certain contemporary political currents claim that Hellenic identity was what we would today consider white, although Greece was a multiethnic society that did not...
Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (03/24)
The discovery of DNA is one of the greatest scientific achievements in the modern era, and possibly one of the most significant in history. The credit has long gone to James Watson and Francis Crick, who publicized the famous double-helix structure of DNA and the rest, as PBS
notes, 'is Nobel Prize history.'
The problem is this is an ...
Houston, We Have a Problem (03/24)
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 50 inches of rain on Houston, Texas. It was the biggest rainstorm in United States history and
the third major storm of its kind to hit the city in as many years. Huge swathes of Houston and its surrounding suburbs were submerged. Floodwater laced with toxic runoff, sewage and debris inundated ...
Hungry Ghosts in Art and Culture (03/24)
Kevin Jared Hosein's title Hungry Ghosts has its origin in Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism. According to the Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, hungry ghost, or preta "literally means 'one who has gone away from here' and is used to indicate the disembodied spirit of a dead person, especially during the first ten days after ...
Cultural Diversity in 15th Century North America (03/24)
Margaret Verble's novel,
Stealing, centers around Kit, a young girl who is part Cherokee. Set in the 1950s, she is removed from her home and sent to a Christian boarding school where a significant portion of the students are Native American. Not only are the indigenous children systematically stripped of their heritage but Kit observes ...
The Pendle Witches (03/24)
'Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and, turns breathing women into corpses...
Townsizing: Trendy or Timely? (02/24)
The city versus country trope is as old as Aesop's fabled mice, yet the debate continues to warrant new narratives. In Jas Hammonds' We Deserve Monuments, the protagonist, Avery Armstrong, puts this very debate to the test when she moves to the small fictional town of Bardell, Georgia. Raised in the cultural mecca of Washington, D.C., ...
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Talented Tenth (02/24)
Throughout
The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, historian Kerri K. Greenidge repeatedly refers to the postbellum "colored elite" to which the Black Grimke family members belonged, using the term "the Talented Tenth." Made famous by the American sociologist and writer
W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1903 ...
The Summerland Disaster on the Isle of Man (02/24)
In the novel Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli, photographer Quentin Morrow was scheduled to go on a photography retreat on the Isle of Man before his death. In the middle of the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is an island with its own parliament, customs, history and a population of over 80,000. While technically a Crown Dependency (owned by ...
The Uphill Climb for Sub-Saharan African Girls' Education (02/24)
In the short story 'Dark Matter' from Gothataone Moeng's collection Call and Response, which takes place in Botswana, childhood friends Tumo and Nametso love swimming in the river and they love school. Daughters of teachers, they are inseparable until Tumo's mother is transferred. The girls meet up again at university in Gaborone. In her ...
The Failure of Plastics Recycling (02/24)
Most of us are familiar with the mantra 'reduce, reuse, recycle,' and the effectiveness of this slogan inspired a generation of Americans to put plastics of all kinds into recycling bins rather than their trash. The problem is that, as contributor Nina Schrank points out in The Climate Book, 'this narrative is perhaps the greatest example...
Trail Names (02/24)
In Kristin Dwyer's The Atlas of Us, Atlas and her friends are given trail names by their program director; these nicknames allow Atlas (trail name Maps) to create a new identity and forge a new beginning, one unencumbered by her personal history. Names in Dwyer's novel serve a symbolic purpose, but there's a very real phenomenon of trail ...
The Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 (02/24)
In Muriel Barbery's novel One Hour of Fervor, her characters watch the television in horror as news breaks of a huge earthquake in Japan's Tohoku region and its resulting tsunami. Though they are safely on high ground far from the impacted area, they are immediately fearful for loved ones, and reminded all too starkly of just how quickly ...
Infamous Prison Insurrections (02/24)
In The Ascent, Adam Plantinga imagines what it would be like to climb through six levels of a prison in utter chaos: cell doors opening, guards hiding or dead, inmates murdering each other and so much worse. It does not require fiction, however, to imagine these hellscapes: history has many examples of such mayhem. Below are two of ...
Moon Art (02/24)
When you look at the Moon, what do you see? Since ancient times, the Moon has ignited our imaginations, as Rebecca Boyle demonstrates in her history of Earth's relationship to its closest neighbor. In mythologies and legends, it has been seen as a canvas depicting a rabbit and a jovial man's features, among other things. It has been with ...
Margaret Cavendish and Vitalist Materialism (02/24)
In her biography of 17th-century author Margaret Cavendish, Pure Wit, Francesca Peacock shines light on often-overlooked aspects of Cavendish's life and work, including her contributions to Western philosophy. From the beginning of her philosophical career, she believed in materialism. Simply put, this is the theory that everything that ...
Missing People in the U.S. (02/24)
The number of active missing persons cases in the U.S. has declined steadily since 1997. This is due in large part to improvements in connectivity and communication, with cell phones and other handheld devices making it considerably easier to track a missing person's potential whereabouts. While this decline is cause for celebration, it ...
A Quick Tour Through South Australia's Wine Region (02/24)
Jane Harper's third novel in the Aaron Falk series sees the Federal Police agent returning to the fictional town of Marralee, located in South Australia and home to an annual food and wine festival where a woman went missing the previous year. Harper is known for providing evocative descriptions and details for her Australian settings, ...
Adoption Outcomes for Birth Mothers (02/24)
Lola, the likeable and resilient protagonist in Bisi Adjapon's Daughter in Exile, finds herself in multiple difficult situations over a matter of years. At one point, pregnant without a partner after her husband dies, she is left to manage a toddler, her grief and an unborn daughter.
An active member of a parish community, Lola looks ...
The Freedom Summer Murders (02/24)
In Nyani Nkrumah's novel Wade in the Water, set in the early 1980s, one character's father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan who participated in the (real-life) murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner on June 21, 1964.
The 15th Amendment, passed in 1870, purportedly guaranteed Blacks the right to vote. The ...
Little Vienna, a Jewish Haven in Shanghai (02/24)
In Aleksandar Hemon's novel The World and All That It Holds, Rafael Pinto is a Sephardic Jew in Sarajevo at the beginning of the 20th century. When World War I erupts, he's flung east—first to Galicia, in what is now Ukraine and Poland, to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire; then to Tashkent, in what is now Uzbekistan, into a ...
The Ramayana and Vijayanagara (02/24)
The Ramayana, which translates from Sanskrit as 'Rama's Journey,' is one of the two great epic poems of India and a foundational text of Hinduism; the other is the Mahabharata, which is longer and means 'Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty.' The Ramayana was composed by the poet Valmiki, probably around the 5th century BCE, though sources ...
Consensual Non-Monogamy in Literature (02/24)
Recent research suggests about 4-5% of Americans are currently in relationships that break the convention of monogamy. While there is some fluidity to the terms used for different types of non-monogamy, an open relationship often refers to a couple being romantically and emotionally, but not sexually, monogamous, while polyamory often ...
Polycystic Kidney Disease (02/24)
In her collection of essays Transient and Strange, Nell Greenfieldboyce shares how her husband's diagnosis of polycystic kidney disease (PKD) affected their lives, especially as they decided to start a family. PKD is a genetic condition involving the growth of high numbers of cysts—fluid-filled sacs—in the kidneys and ...
Naloxone (Narcan) (02/24)
In Tracy Kidder's Rough Sleepers, the drug naloxone, commonly known by the brand name Narcan, saves the lives of multiple people in the throes of an overdose from opioids like fentanyl and oxycodone.
A relative of morphine, naloxone was first patented in 1961 by American scientists looking for a medication to treat constipation ...
The Life, Work and Trial of Oscar Wilde (02/24)
Born in 1854 Dublin to a pair of writers — a father who was a well-known surgeon but also published works on architecture and Irish folklore, and a mother who wrote poetry under a pseudonym — Oscar Wilde went on to himself become an acclaimed poet, playwright and novelist, though his tragic fate overshadowed his literary and ...
The Legacy of Sappho (01/24)
Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut novel After Sappho reimagines the lives of early 20th century lesbian authors and artists. The novel tells the story of how these women ignited a radical feminist movement inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, broke free from conventions to pursue their own desires and creativity, and flourished within...
A Brief History of Korean Relations in the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries (01/24)
In EJ Koh's The Liberators, Insuk's friend Robert is an activist passionately in favor of the reunification of North and South Korea. Korea was occupied by Japan from the early 20th century through 1948; when the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II, Korea was split along the 38th parallel by the United States. The northern ...
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