The Zapatistas (06/23)
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 ...
Crossing the Pyrenees Mountain Passes Between France and Spain (06/23)
In The Postcard, Jeanine Picabia, the author's grand-aunt, is a leader in the French Resistance movement. When she is betrayed, she becomes "one of the most wanted female fugitives in France." In December 1942, she flees to England by way of Spain, which she enters by crossing over the Pyrenees mountains. She takes a ...
Denmark: A Brief Overview (05/23)
Amulya Malladi's A Death in Denmark takes place in the country of Denmark in the north of Europe, which is comprised of the Jutland peninsula and an archipelago of over 400 islands. To the south, Denmark shares a border with Germany. On its west side, it is separated from the United Kingdom by the North Sea. The Baltic Sea and Sweden lie ...
Muskiiki: The Four Sacred Ojibwe Medicines (05/23)
In Firekeeper's Daughter, Daunis is interested in how her fellow Ojibwe tribe members use medicinal herbs. She chooses to study pre-med courses and plant biology at college so that she may go on to study ethnobotany through an indigenous lens, and also learns directly from her tribe's Elders.
Traditional medicine is an important part ...
Saint Thomas Christians (05/23)
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 ...
Clytemnestra (05/23)
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 ...
How Drug Cartels Became a Potent Force in Mexico (05/23)
One of the main areas of focus in Blood Gun Money is the role of drug cartels in criminal activity in Mexico. In particular, two organizations are cited multiple times: Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel. Both are known for the number of enemies they've dispatched and their brutal methods of doing so. As stated in the book, guns, many of ...
Small Aircraft Transport in Alaska (05/23)
Small airplanes are a common form of transport in Leigh Newman's collection of short stories, Nobody Gets Out Alive, set primarily in Alaska. Several of the stories take place on a lake where homes boast 'seaplane docks.' Alaska is a vast, sparsely populated region where it's estimated that around 80% of communities exist beyond the reach...
Brujería: Latin American Witchcraft Past and Present (05/23)
In Lorraine Avila's The Making of Yolanda la Bruja, Yolanda's mother and grandmother guide her as she becomes fully absorbed in her family's traditional religious practices. While she's lighting candles, reading tarot cards and immersing herself in her grandmother's bath mixes, Yolanda's rituals celebrate her spirituality and bruja ...
The Bribri (04/23)
Like brothers Max and Jay, the protagonists of her debut young adult novel Saints of the Household, author Ari Tison is Bribri American, descended from an Indigenous group native to the Talamanca region of Costa Rica. The characters' grandfather was raised among the Bribri people and their matriarchal society. His gentle, loving nature ...
The Real Birnam Wood (04/23)
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 ...
The Malaga Island Eviction of 1912 (04/23)
Paul Harding's novel This Other Eden takes place on Apple Island, where a Christian missionary arrives and becomes a catalyst for the destruction of a flourishing community of vulnerable people who did not, and could not, fit into societal norms. Harding's novel is inspired by true events that took place in the early 20th century on ...
The Ramayana and Vijayanagara (04/23)
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 ...
Religious Sectarianism in Glasgow: Then and Now (04/23)
One theme of Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo is the quotidian experience of violence. In part, this violence comes from warring sectarian gangs, whose vicious rivalry wreaks havoc in Glasgow's East End. Enmity between Protestants and Catholics has a long history in Glasgow, as well as Scotland more generally. It can be traced back to the ...
Edgar Allan Poe and Gothic Fiction in 19th Century Philadelphia (03/23)
By 1838, Edgar Allan Poe had earned a reputation as a sharp literary critic and skillful editor while based in Richmond, Virginia. To make the most of his talents, he had to move to a bigger and better arena. Boston was the center of book publishing, and New York led the nation in daily journalism and newspapers. But the magazine trade ...
Historic Black Communities in the United States (03/23)
Jamila Minnicks' debut novel
Moonrise Over New Jessup takes place in an all-Black town in 1950s Alabama. Residents are wary of integration, preferring to exist in their own space rather than being left to contend with racism in a white-dominated society. In an
interview with
The Rumpus, Minnicks explains that she wanted to write about...
A Quick Tour Through South Australia's Wine Region (03/23)
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, ...
Cultural Diversity in 15th Century North America (03/23)
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 ...
Korean Military Brides (02/23)
Franny Choi's The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On delves into how Korean women were treated before, during and after the Korean War, as well as the generational trauma and isolation resulting from this treatment. One aspect of this is the experience of military brides, or Korean women who married members of the American military...
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Talented Tenth (01/23)
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 ...
Who Really Has Your Back? Queerness and the Black Community (01/23)
In Nobody's Magic, a novel about three different black women with albinism who are on journeys of self-discovery, the social circles readers become privy to serve to normalize some of the characters' queerness. There are multiple queer moments throughout the novel; in Suzette's story, a character named Drina struggles with telling Suzette...
Segregation and Integration in Northern Irish Education (01/23)
The history of mostly separate education for Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland is a complicated one, existing alongside discriminatory and segregated employment, marriage and housing laws. In Michelle Gallen's Factory Girls, school is one of the most significant areas where the period of intense sectarian conflict between ...
North Korean Immigrants in the United States (01/23)
In City Under One Roof, some characters living in the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska are hiding their status as undocumented North Korean immigrants. If their secret is discovered, they will face deportation. Their fear of being found out, and their general situation, is based in real-life troubles of North Korean immigrants in the ...
Jacob Riis Beach (01/23)
In the essay 'We Swarm' from their debut collection How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler reflects on their experience finding comfort and kinship in New York City's queer community. The primary setting of this essay is a part of the beach at Jacob Riis Park in the borough of Queens, which, they explain, 'had been a gay haven as early...
Iranian Americans (01/23)
Susanne Pari's In the Time of Our History focuses on an Iranian American immigrant family between New Jersey and San Francisco in the 1990s. The novel is inspired by the author's own family's experiences following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. While people of Iranian descent have lived in the United States since at least the 1930s, ...
The Four Yugas (01/23)
Deepti Kapoor’s novel
Age of Vice takes its title from the Hindu term
Kali Yuga. In Hindu scripture and mythology, humanity is destined to cycle repeatedly through four great eras, known as yugas. Opinions as to the length of a single cycle (Kalpa) vary greatly — from around four million to four billion years — suffice...
Escalating Anti-Muslim Sentiment in India (12/22)
At the time of the
partition in 1947, what was once the British colony of India was split, separating the predominantly Hindu Dominion of India (modern-day Republic of India) from the predominantly Muslim Dominion of Pakistan (modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh). Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru envisaged India as a secular socialist ...
Colonization and the Irish Language (12/22)
In Audrey Magee's The Colony, one of the characters dedicates his career to salvaging a language that is under threat of extinction: Irish. The source of his research is a multi-generational family, the oldest of whom speaks Irish exclusively, while the youngest is very much Anglicized. This family's linguistic patterns are representative...
The Los Angeles Aqueduct (12/22)
In Marianne Wiggins' novel, Properties of Thirst, one of the main characters is in an ongoing battle with the Los Angeles Department of Water over their aqueduct installation in California's Owens Valley.
Los Angeles was officially founded on September 4, 1781 as part of Spain's colonization of California. As the town grew so did its ...
China and Taiwan: A Short Primer (12/22)
In Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, Zhuqing Li writes of how her two aunts' lives were shaped by the events of the Chinese Civil War. One of them, Jun, ended up living in Taiwan after the war, married to a general from the losing side, the Nationalists, who ruled the island after the Communists took over the mainland.
The ...
Dala Horses (12/22)
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
...
Simchat Torah (11/22)
Human connections are arguably at their most powerful when experienced through communal dance, music and other communication beyond words. Events such as these are highlighted numerous times in Isaac Blum's debut young adult novel, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, which creates a picture of Orthodox Jewish life that sears into one's ...
Multiculturalism and Racism in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, Wales (11/22)
Nadifa Mohamed's novel
The Fortune Men takes place in Tiger Bay, the dockland district of the city of Cardiff, Wales. According to
the BBC, Tiger Bay, now known as Butetown, is considered Wales' oldest multi-ethnic community and people from over 50 countries have settled there. While she was working on her novel, Mohamed explained in an
...
Svalbard, Norway (10/22)
Svalbard, formerly known as Spitsbergen, is a mountainous, snowfield-covered Norwegian archipelago located above the Arctic Circle that provides the primary setting for Sven's adventures in The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller. As described in the novel, there are three primary seasons in Svalbard: sunny winter, a period ...
Perth (10/22)
Perth features as the primary location in Rebecca Handler's debut novel Edie Richter Is Not Alone, about an American expatriate who relocates to Perth following the death of her father.
Located on the southwest coast, Perth is Australia's fourth-most populous city, with a population of around two million in the greater metropolitan ...
The Legacy of Slavery at Monticello (10/22)
In the novella that makes up the second half of My Monticello, survivors of a white nationalist uprising seek shelter at Thomas Jefferson's estate. Jefferson's former residence and plantation located just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and currently operates as a museum dedicated to the third U.S. ...
Cabramatta, New South Wales, Australia (10/22)
Tracey Lien's debut novel,
All That's Left Unsaid, follows a Vietnamese Australian family in Cabramatta, which is a suburb of Sydney, capital of the state of New South Wales. The presence of a migrant hostel in the area in the 1960s and '70s made it a hub for Southeast Asians fleeing the Vietnam War. By the mid-1990s, around a quarter ...
Stolpersteine (10/22)
In
Those Who Forget, author Géraldine Schwarz relates a visit her father paid to his parents' former home in Mannheim, Germany, looking for a specific 'Stolperstein' installed outside the apartment.
The word 'Stolperstein' (plural 'Stolpersteine') means 'stumbling stone' or 'stumbling block' in German. These small ...
Who Are the Cossacks? (10/22)
In The Amur River: Between Russia and China, Colin Thubron engages with people from a variety of cultural backgrounds. One of these individuals is Alexei, an Amur Cossack who proudly meets the author decked out in his ceremonial uniform, yelling exuberantly 'the Cossacks are coming back!' But who are the Cossacks?
First, the term '...
The Churel (09/22)
In Melody Razak's novel
Moth, one of the characters is fascinated by the legend of the churel, and the mythological being is mentioned several times throughout the plot.
A churel (also spelled 'chudail,' 'churail' and as other variations) is a
staple of South Asian folklore, encountered most frequently in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh...
Harlem and the End of the Civil Rights Era (09/22)
Harlem, a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, was a crucial setting during the Civil Rights Era, which spanned approximately 1950 to 1964, arguably culminating with the passage of the controversial Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Great Migration in the early 20th century brought a considerable number of Black residents to the neighborhood, and...
The Kumhar Caste (09/22)
In Anuradha Roy's The Earthspinner, one of the central characters is Elango, who, despite his college education, chooses to practice pottery like his ancestors. Elango belongs to the caste of potters known by various names including Kumhar, Kumbhar, Moolye, Odari and Kulal. As per India's caste system, since Elango was born into this ...
Eshu: The Yoruba God of Mischief (08/22)
Eshu (also spelled Esu, and also known as Elegba) is a powerful deity in the Ifa religion of the Yoruba people of Western Africa. He is an orisha, a figure that can be a representation of human or divine characteristics or concepts, as well as aspects of nature, such as rivers. A primordial orisha, Eshu represents mischief. However, he is...
Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon (08/22)
Located on the Mediterranean Sea, tiny Lebanon has the highest per capita population of Syrian refugees in the world, hosting an estimated 1.5 million who have fled from its war-torn neighbor. To put this in perspective, Lebanon is about half the size of Massachusetts with a population of just under eight million as of 2019. It has long ...
The Seven Sisters: How to Build an Old Girls' Network (08/22)
In Karin Tanabe's novel A Woman of Intelligence, some characters attend all-women's colleges. The narrator Katharina graduated from Vassar and another lead, Ava, graduated from Mount Holyoke. Katharina's occasional babysitter, Sarah Beach, studies at Barnard. These colleges and four other historically women's colleges — Bryn Mawr, ...
Nomadic Housing: Somalia and Beyond (08/22)
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that in 2020 there were more than
82 million people displaced from their homes due to human rights issues such as violence and persecution worldwide. And, for as long as humans have existed, people have lived as nomads in various parts of the world, including Somalia, as detailed in Shugri Said ...
The Swastika Before and After Nazism (08/22)
Ru Freeman uses the swastika symbol outside of its prevailing cultural narrative in the landscape of
Sleeping Alone's 'The Wake,' a story about a cult leader who believes he is an incarnation of Christ. He spends his last days in a modest New York City apartment with an ordinary family, in a room called 'the Swastika Room.' Freeman ...
The Bolla in Albanian Folklore (08/22)
Pajtim Statovci's novel Bolla takes its name from a creature in Albanian folklore. The narrative is interspersed with a reimagined version of this feared monster's origins, with thematic parallels to his characters' lives that enhance the emotional impact of their story while commenting on the importance of storytelling as a means of ...
The Spirituality and Symbolism of Buddhist Art (08/22)
In today's world, art therapy has become an increasingly popular option. According to the American Art Therapy Association (AATA), this experiential treatment 'is used to improve cognitive and sensorimotor functions, foster self-esteem and self-awareness, cultivate emotional resilience, promote insight, enhance social skills, reduce and ...
