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Hertha Ayrton (03/25)
The friendship between Hertha Ayrton and Marie Curie is explored in Anne Michaels's multigenerational novel Held. Although Marie Curie is a household name, Aryton's fascinating life is likely unfamiliar to most readers.
Born in 1854 in Portsea, England, Hertha Ayrton was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks. Levi Marks, a clockmaker from...
"Pre-Crime" in The Dream Hotel and Real Life (03/25)
Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel takes place in a dystopian future in which government surveillance extends to dreams, and people can be arrested for being deemed a risk to society based on their supposed likelihood of committing a crime. The concept of 'pre-crime,' or the idea that crimes can be anticipated before they occur, was also ...
Fish and Chip Shops (03/25)
In Colm Tóibín's novel Long Island, one of the main characters owns a chip shop in Enniscorthy, Ireland – a carryout restaurant that sells fish and chips (french fries in the United States). The dish is a staple of the British Isles, and hundreds of chip shops (aka 'chippies') can be found in the Republic of Ireland, where...
Artist Ana Mendieta (03/25)
The title character in Xochitl Gonzalez's Anita de Monte Laughs Last is closely based on the artist Ana Mendieta. Although Mendieta's shocking death at the age of thirty-five has overshadowed her artistic legacy in the public imagination, Mendieta was a rising star at the time of her death, and her creative work continues to hold ...
The Highland Clearances (03/25)
In Clear, the third novel from Carys Davies, an impoverished presbyterian minister reluctantly takes part in the Highland Clearances, a series of mass evictions that took place in the north of Scotland between 1750 and 1850, driven in part by the restructuring of British society during the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of the ...
No-Fault Divorce in the US (03/25)
The title of Haley Mlotek's debut No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce is a reference to 'no-fault' divorce, which is a divorce granted without needing to prove wrongdoing by either spouse. For Mlotek, the legalization of no-fault divorce is an important moment in the history of marriage, as it raises questions about the significance...
Thomas Gainsborough (03/25)
Emily Howes' enthralling debut novel, The Painter's Daughters, features a fictionalized version of the lives of Molly and Peggy Gainsborough. Their father, Thomas Gainsborough, was one of the most influential British painters of the 18th century.
Gainsborough, born in 1727, was the youngest of John and Mary Gainsborough's nine ...
A World Not Built for Women: Gender Bias in Medicine & Science (03/25)
In March 2019, NASA was due to launch the first all-women spacewalk from the International Space Station. It was to be a milestone in space exploration. Astronauts Christina Koch and Anne McClain were to walk outside the ISS to replace lithium-ion batteries; Mary Lawrence and Kristen Facciol were to be lead flight director and lead ...
The Erasure of Eileen Blair from Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (03/25)
Readers might be forgiven if, in reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, they miss the fact that his first wife, Eileen Blair, was in Spain with him, working for the Republican resistance against Franco's fascist forces. As Anna Funder points out in Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, when George does refer to her, he does not ...
Cape Horn (03/25)
David Grann's The Wager is a nonfiction book about events surrounding the 1741 wreck of the British ship the HMS Wager, which met its doom while rounding Cape Horn, a rocky headland at the southernmost tip of the Chilean archipelago Tierra del Fuego, where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans meet. With this book, Grann sheds light on one ...
Dala Horses (03/25)
In Shelby Van Pelt's novel
Remarkably Bright Creatures, Tova Sullivan treasures her collection of Dala horses brought to the United States from Sweden decades ago by her mother.
A Dala horse, also known as a Dalecarlian horse (or 'Dalahäst' in Swedish), is a type of hand-carved, painted statuette in Swedish culture. According to
...
Madame Sosostris in T.S. Eliot's Poetry (03/25)
In Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted, Londoner Viv meets the infamous clairvoyant Madame Sosostris while she is giving readings at the Cholmondeley Room of the House of Lords. Guests are frightened and awed by the accuracy of her gift, calling her "the most dependable clairvoyant in the country," as she has...
Mariah Carey's The Emancipation of Mimi (03/25)
In Sarah Harman's All the Other Mothers Hate Me, Florence, an ex-pop star, clings to a notion: that one day, just like Mariah Carey, she will have what she calls her Emancipation of Mimi moment. I immediately knew what she meant, because The Emancipation of Mimi was one of my most impactful musical albums; it was the first CD I remember ...
Popular Dances of the 1960s-70s and Ballet (02/25)
In The Swans of Harlem, Karen Valby explains how Arthur Mitchell sought to make ballet appealing and relevant to a Black audience. He and his dancers regularly visited schools to give talks and performances. Mitchell loved to point out how ballet could help the students in their daily lives. He'd tell the boys how much higher they could ...
Books of Stories Centering Black American Life (02/25)
Diane Oliver's Neighbors and Other Stories is a collection delving deep into the corners of Black American life in the 1950s and '60s that were not and are still not usually part of the public conversation. Historical and academic writing that discusses the situations of marginalized people often does not touch on the intricacies of their...
From Stagecraft to Spy Craft: Celebrity Spies (02/25)
The history of celebrities dabbling in espionage is a fascinating one. As Ronald Drabkin illustrates in Beverly Hills Spy, famous people often have opportunities to gather intelligence from high-value sources. Who would not want to socialize with a beautiful or handsome star?
One of the most audacious celebrity spies during World War ...
No-Tech Time Travel Books (02/25)
Exploring alternate realities through time travel is a familiar subject across fiction. Traditionally, the mechanism for making such a feat possible is the invention of a new technology: a time machine, a spaceship that can go faster than the speed of light, etc. Yet books built around these high-tech means often come with a mind-bending ...
Cats in Japanese Literature (02/25)
Japanese people have been writing about cats for a long time. In 889, Japanese Emperor Uda wrote in his journal: 'Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat.' He proceeded to then describe the animal in thoughtful detail, including a humorous remark that will resonate all too well with cat owners: 'I affixed a ...
A Brief History of Events Leading Up to the Russia-Ukraine War (02/25)
Victoria Amelina (1986–2023) was a Ukrainian novelist. She spent the last months of her life researching war crimes committed by Russian soldiers during their invasion of her country.
Those of us in the United States probably think of the Russia-Ukraine War as beginning on February 24, 2022, when Russian president Vladimir Putin ...
A Short History of Vienna After the Second World War (02/25)
The novel The Café with No Name is set in Vienna from 1966 to 1976. To fully immerse oneself in the atmosphere of the novel, it may be helpful to review a short history of Austria and its capital during and after the Second World War.
Austria was part of Nazi Germany from March 1938 until April 1945. When Hitler's troops ...
Dreaming About Video Games: The Tetris Effect (02/25)
In Dreamover, the dreamscapes Amber and Nico experience draw heavily from the imagery and mechanisms encountered in video games. In fact, within the past few decades, scientists and researchers have been investigating the relationship between video games and dreams.
One consequence of digital gaming on dreams is dubbed the Tetris ...
Is Tunisian Female Independence Slipping Away? (02/25)
The Republic of Tunisia is a small country in Northern Africa. It was the birthplace of the 2010-11 Arab Spring movement, which saw uprisings due to economic hardship and corruption. Though much of the world was taken off guard by the unrest, Tunisia has always been forward-facing. Once a protectorate of France, it gained its independence...
The Photography of Spencer Ostrander (02/25)
Thanks to the numerous photographs that accompany Paul Auster's prose, Bloodbath Nation reads like an extended photo essay, the combination of words and pictures creating a truly indelible work. The images were recorded by New York City–based photographer Spencer Ostrander, for whom this work is deeply personal.
Ostrander, who ...
The Memoir-in-Essays (02/25)
Compared to a traditional memoir, a memoir-in-essays allows for a more thematic approach and a diversity of styles and formats. It generally prioritizes ideas and memorable scenes or vignettes, and its essays might be linked or discrete. The essays in Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez appear in roughly chronological order, but a memoir-in-...
Mobilian Jargon (02/25)
Joe Barrow, the protagonist of Francis Spufford's
Cahokia Jazz, does not speak the titular city's common language, Anopa. He learns bits and pieces of it over the course of the novel, at around the same pace as the reader (heeding the
suggestion of his friend Alan Jacobs, Spufford does not include a glossary). We learn the words for ...
Escape and Evasion Maps (02/25)
In Lea Carpenter's Ilium, some of the spies have escape and evasion maps. Also known as escape maps or silk maps, these are scarves imprinted with maps that intelligence officers and soldiers have historically used when they've ended up behind enemy lines. They offer information about how best to escape or at least find somewhere safe to ...
Demeter and Persephone (02/25)
Rachel Lyon's novel Fruit of the Dead is based on the story of Demeter and Persephone from Greek mythology. In the original story, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, is devastated when her daughter Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, who intends to make her his wife. Demeter's grief is so great that it affects the ...
Sugar Beets (02/25)
In Beta Vulgaris — titled after the scientific name for sugar beets — workers come to Minnesota from across the country to work long shifts on big machines called pilers to harvest the crop. Is that what you picture when you hear the term 'sugar beets'? Me neither — I always imagined deep red or borscht, but as it might ...
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (02/25)
In Mona Acts Out, seasoned actress Mona Zahid is about to start rehearsals for her role as Cleopatra in Shakespeare's tragedy Antony and Cleopatra. Mona approaches the whole thing with trepidation, citing that she's "never actually seen a great Cleopatra," as the character is many-layered and must command the stage ...
De Ondergedoken Camera: A WWII Resistance Group (02/25)
Song of a Blackbird is a dual timeline narrative that follows the lives of two young women, one in modern day and one during WWII. In 2011, Annick goes on a search to find her family's true history, her only clues a set of prints featuring buildings around Amsterdam signed by a mysterious 'Emma B.' And in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, the ...
Harvard's Glass Flowers (02/25)
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's novel Glassworks begins with the heroine employing a Czech glass artist to create a collection of realistic flora and fauna for her university in Boston. In interviews, the author has stated that she was inspired by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father-and-son team who created thousands of remarkably detailed ...
The Harlem Renaissance (02/25)
Tia Williams' novel A Love Song for Ricki Wilde contains flashbacks to the Harlem Renaissance, considered a golden age for Black culture and art in the United States. This movement, centered in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood, took place between the 1910s and 1930s.
During the period known as the Great Migration, when large numbers...
Modern Perspectives on Giovanni's Room (01/25)
While rereading and reviewing Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, a book that has stayed with me for many years, I wanted to see what others have taken away from the novel, an early work of queer literature and a mid-century story of an American confronting his Americanness overseas. It was interesting to see recurrent themes and references...
The Publication History of The Price of Salt, or Carol (01/25)
When Patricia Highsmith finished The Price of Salt in 1951, the manuscript was rejected by her publisher, Harper Bros., who had just put out her first hit novel Strangers on a Train. She sent the manuscript on to Coward-McCann (then an imprint of G.P. Putnam's Sons) using a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, and it was accepted for publication. (...
Sufism and the Hippie Movement (01/25)
In the novel Hideous Kinky, a young mother living in Morocco becomes interested in Sufism and takes her daughter with her to study at a zaouia, or Sufi mosque. Sufism is a form of Islamic mysticism or asceticism popular in some African countries, including Morocco and Senegal, where it is seen as a mystical form of Sunni Islam.
...
Daphne du Maurier: A Brief History (01/25)
Author Daphne du Maurier belonged to a rich dynasty of storytellers and creatives. Her parents, Gerald du Maurier and Muriel Beaumont, both led successful acting careers. Her grandfather, George du Maurier, was a celebrated novelist and illustrator, while her uncle Guy de Maurier was a playwright. Du Maurier was the middle of three ...
The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon (01/25)
When we think about how pioneers changed the American frontier — or if we think about it — we may picture the hunting of bison herds as one of the biggest environmental changes wrought by settlers. The grainy photographs of thousands upon thousands of bison skulls piled unimaginably high, a near-extermination that seems mind-...
Marco Polo (01/25)
Although Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities concerns itself with two real people, it is far from historical fiction. The Marco Polo who describes city after fantastical city to Kublai Khan broadly resembles the Venetian merchant and explorer of the 13th century: both traveled the Eastern world and (allegedly, in the real Polo's case) served...
Toni Morrison & The Bluest Eye (01/25)
Toni Morrison is the author of 11 works of fiction as well as a number of books and essays. She's best known for her novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 (the first Black woman to win the award) and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom —...
TikTok's Impact on Book Sales (01/25)
In 2024, Dostoevsky's short story White Nights became popular on BookTok, the corner of TikTok populated by readers. BookTok users post videos of themselves recommending books, discussing books, crying at the endings of books, and showing off their color-coordinated bookshelves, tagging these videos with the hashtag #BookTok. BookTok ...
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction & Agatha Christie's Legacy (01/25)
In the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, people sought comfort and escapism in a world marked by chaos and uncertainty. Detective fiction offered a perfect outlet, with meticulously plotted mysteries that allowed the reader to regain a sense of control. After all, aren't detectives in these stories trying to restore the status quo, ...
Civil War in the Republic of Georgia (01/25)
In Leo Vardiashvili's Hard by a Great Forest, young Saba and his brother and father flee their home in Tbilisi, Georgia, when the city erupts in violence. "We heard gunfire by night and saw brass twinkling on the pavement in the mornings, as though it had rained shell casings all over Tbilisi," Saba says. "[W]hen a ...
A History of the Texas Rangers (01/25)
In Elizabeth Gonzalez James's novel The Bullet Swallower, a group of Texas Rangers pursue the protagonist, Antonio Sonoro, with maniacal zeal. The most dangerous member of the posse tortures and murders innocent civilians as a warning to Sonoro, crossing the Rio Grande and attacking Mexican citizens with impunity. Set in the mid-1890s...
US Military Mules in World War II (01/25)
One of the characters in Derek B. Miller's novel The Curse of Pietro Houdini is a limping mule named Ferrari. The author notes that mules were used extensively during World War II in the Italian theater, in areas where trucks couldn't go, such as mountain passes and forests.
Mules are remarkable creatures that have been used as pack ...
Canadian Nurses in World War I (01/25)
Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts, in addition to focusing on the violence and trauma of the World War I trenches, is also about the female nurses who treated wounded soldiers.
Protagonist Laura's point-of-view sections devote ample description to the sordid day-to-day of serving as a hospital nurse in WWI. Already sent away ...
How to Build an Emotional Safety Net (01/25)
Tessa Ensler wants her mother. The heroine of Suzie Miller's Prima Facie is in a panicky mess after a sexual assault, and, like many of us when things go sideways, she wants her mother's arms wrapped around her. She wants her mother's acceptance and kindness. When she confides that she 'had a bad experience' and has 'been to the police to...
The History of the International Space Station (01/25)
Samantha Harvey's Booker Prize–winning novel
Orbital takes place aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite,
Sputnik 1, into space. According to
NASA's website, the event "had a 'Pearl Harbor' effect on American public opinion. It was...
Enslavement in Canada (01/25)
The nonfiction book Flee North recounts how activist and writer Thomas Smallwood encouraged the enslaved individuals he helped escape to relocate to Canada, where slavery was illegal, rather than remaining in the United States, where they might be returned to captivity if caught. Smallwood himself settled in Toronto with his family in ...
Iran Air Flight 655 (01/25)
On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a Navy missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, saw on its radar an Iranian aircraft. This aircraft was a passenger airplane, flying from Tehran to Dubai with 290 civilians on board, including 66 children. But the crew of the USS Vincennes identified the airplane as a fighter jet and fired two ...
