Recent Articles
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 ...
Hala Alyan, author of the poetry collection
The Moon That Turns You Back, has also published two novels:
Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award; and
The Arsonists' City.
Her work is part of a flourishing Palestinian American literary scene. For a further taste of poetry, one might try ...
Throughout his collection of poems
Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves, J. Drew Lanham explores the restorative effect of immersing himself in nature. His particular passion, however, is birds. Humans have long been fascinated by the freedom, grace, and beauty of our feathered friends, ingraining them in mythology and symbolism for ...
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...
May, the matriarch of Rachel Khong's
Real Americans, is born into a poor rural Chinese family in the 1950s. Her fate is foretold by her mother's life: wake before dawn to cook breakfast, clean up after the men in the family, head to the rice paddies and toil until the time to head home to cook supper, rinse and repeat. It is backbreaking....
As Erik Larson recounts in
The Demon of Unrest, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12th, 1861. Thirty-six hours later, Union Major Robert Anderson and his small force surrendered with no loss of life. Ironically, the only casualties sustained came ...
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 ...
Despite its original ancient Greek definition of 'a woman who serves,' the word 'doula' has come to mean 'one who mothers the mother.' In caring for mothers and their newborns, doulas advocate, listen, advise and comfort. They are professionally trained to provide emotional and informational support during pregnancy and labor as well as ...
During World War II, the constant threat of German bombs falling on London and other key cities forced many English families to make an incredibly painful choice: whether to keep their children with them in this dangerous area or to separate from them, sending them away to places where they could hopefully live more safely and normally. ...
In 1893, Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí met for the first time with the exiled general Antonio Maceo Grajales in San José, Costa Rica. Martí, who had spent much of his life in peripatetic exile, had founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party on 10
th April, 1892, and Maceo had fought two failed wars fighting...
Music and poetry are a central part of
Song of the Six Realms by Judy I. Lin. They are cornerstones of life in the kingdom of Qi and the Celestial world beyond it. Music may entertain but it also expresses feelings Lin's characters can't express with words. Xue'er cannot bring herself to confess she is falling in love with Duke Meng, so ...
Douglas Westerbeke, author of the debut novel
A Short Walk Through a Wide World, did not start his career as an author. In fact, he is a librarian in Ohio, at one of the largest libraries in the United States. After spending the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, he decided to try his hand at ...
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 ...
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 ...
In
The Forgotten Girls, journalist Monica Potts revisits her declining Arkansas hometown and her childhood best friend Darci, who is locked in a struggle with drug addiction that traditional interventions—stigmatization, directing the victim to God for help—have failed to cure. While Darci's struggle involves a pattern of ...
In Courtney Summers'
I'm the Girl, much of the plot focuses on the mysterious, imposing Aspera resort. Part of what gives Aspera its exotic and vaguely menacing atmosphere is the fact that its luxurious interiors are heavily decorated with deer antlers (the book's endpapers also contain images of antlers). For Matthew Hayes, the owner of ...
In the introduction to her biography of Elinor Glyn, author Hilary A. Hallett acknowledges that one of the biggest challenges she faced in writing the book 'was not to let [Glyn's] many fascinating friends—and the many places they traveled—carry away the narrative for too long.' Among the most intriguing of the secondary ...
Where Coyotes Howl is set in the young and growing town of Wallace, Wyoming in 1916, following a couple named Ellen and Charlie's path as they set out to build a ranch on the High Plains. Author Sandra Dallas provides a slice-of-life picture of homesteading and ranching in Wyoming through the various characters. Many of Ellen's friends ...
We may think of Sicily today as merely an extension of the Italian mainland, but the island has its own unique history that dates back thousands of years and reflects the cultural, political, and economic influence of numerous civilizations.
Because of its convenient location in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily has long been...
It was May of 1851 when 54-year-old Sojourner Truth took the stage. Truth, who would become one of the most famous women of any race of the nineteenth century, spoke her personal testimony to the mostly white audience at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. She was the only speaker who had been enslaved and the room was ...
While it's impossible to determine for sure how ancient Greeks sounded, Ferdia Lennon asserts that, despite what one hears and reads in many works depicting this era, they didn't echo the tones of Oxford scholars. In his novel
Glorious Exploits, set in 5th century BCE Sicily, the narrator Lampo converses in a contemporary Hiberno-English,...
Spice Road, the debut novel by Maiya Ibrahim, features the Shields, a group of warriors sworn to protect the desert city of Qalia from magical beings and monsters. These warriors are gifted with magical abilities to perform their duties, but these powers only manifest when they drink misra, an ancient tea gifted to the people of Qalia. ...
Climate change is an international problem but its impact can already be felt more intensely in certain areas. This is particularly true in locations that are warm and coastal, which are more susceptible to the effects of increased temperatures, rising sea levels, worsening tropical storm systems and erosion. Florida is one such example, ...
...a beyond the book article for
Icarus
The titular protagonist of K. Ancrum's young adult novel
Icarus denies that his name is an allusion to the famous character from Greek mythology and reveals that his mother christened him after the scientific name of a beloved fern,
Icarus filiformis. Nonetheless, Icarus's denial of this reference only draws more attention to the ...
In 1783, Marie Antoinette made a terrible faux pas—she dressed like a commoner. Painted by her favorite portraitist, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the queen was depicted in a loose cotton dress, comfortably tied at the waist with no corset. Although one may think this would have endeared her to the citizenry, it only ...
Eve J. Chung's debut novel
Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Chung has spoken about how she was motivated to write the book by her maternal grandmother's experiences of that period of history.
However...
In Caoilinn Hughes'
The Alternatives, Olwen is a geologist profoundly concerned with the effects of climate change. As in other sciences, women remain underrepresented in geology, even though they have been very much part of its development over the centuries.
St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a scholar of precious stones, to ...
The coastal California setting of
The Witches of Bellinas is often beset by fierce and powerful winds. As the strong gusts rage, Mia, Bellinas's unofficial matriarch, explains to main character Tansy that wind has often been associated with magic. She gives the example of a peculiar, and largely forgotten, bit of history.
Hundreds...
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 ...
Zoe Schlanger's popular science book
The Light Eaters goes in-depth on several remarkable plants, one of which is the climbing vine
Boquila trifoliolata. This woody vine, found in the temperate rainforests of Chile and Argentina, has a unique strategy for hiding from herbivores—in order to blend in, it changes the shape of its ...
