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The History of Grog (07/25)
Hampton Sides' book The Wide Wide Sea records the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook and relays some of the exploits of his crew aboard the HMS Resolution. One of Cook's key decisions concerned an alcoholic drink known as "grog."
During the Age of Exploration—the 15th to 18th centuries—Royal Navy...
A Shooting Star of American Astronomy: Maria Mitchell (07/25)
The central mystery of Sarah Perry's Enlightenment concerns an astronomer, Maria Văduva, and Thomas's uncovering of her hidden scientific contributions. Many real-life historical women partook in exploration of the night sky and space only for their discoveries to be similarly buried or forgotten. One such woman was the nineteenth-...
Japanese Yakuza Films (07/25)
Akira Otani's intense thriller The Night of Baba Yaga tells the story of two women trying to escape from a branch of the yakuza, a real-life organized crime group thought to have originated in the 17th century when many samurai left the service of lords and turned to banditry. Like the mafia in American movies, there is a long history of ...
Black Writers Inspired by Octavia Butler (07/25)
Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) is universally acknowledged as the first widely successful Black woman science fiction author, winning multiple awards for her short stories, novellas, and novels. Many other Black writers of speculative fiction have listed her as a major inspiration for their work.
N.K. Jemisin (b. 1972) is one of the...
The 1926 Bingham, Utah Avalanche (07/25)
The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates is written as a series of vignettes based on twelve days in the life of the main character, which include personal moments and historical events, both famous and lesser-known. One of these happenings is an avalanche that Isaac survives at the age of eight with his sister in the ...
The Greek Myth of Eros and Psyche (07/25)
In the original Greek myth that The Palace of Eros retells, Psyche is the youngest daughter of a king and the most beautiful woman in all the land. She is mistaken for Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and worshiped accordingly. An envious Aphrodite commands her son, Eros, to shoot Psyche with his arrows of love and make her become ...
Lolita's Publication History (07/25)
Vladimir Nabokov was born April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He left the country in 1919 and lived in England, Germany, and France before settling in the United States in 1940. In 1961 he relocated to Montreux, Switzerland, where he resided for the remainder of his life and died in 1977.
Nabokov began working on Lolita in 1948,...
The Blackwater Saga's European Revival (07/25)
When he died on December 27, 1999, Michael McDowell's name was barely recognized beyond the realm of horror aficionados. Despite Stephen King having once praised him as 'the finest writer of paperback originals in America,' his novels had fallen into relative obscurity by the end of the 20th century. In fact, the Washington Post titled ...
Don't Skip the Footnotes! Novels that Use Footnotes as a Narrative Device (07/25)
Alternate chapters in Kate Atkinson's novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum are 'footnotes' to the main narrative, ostensibly offering background information about specific objects but actually offering windows into the history of generations of the narrator's family. Atkinson is not the only novelist to play with footnotes or endnotes as...
The Critical Reception and Rediscovery of Their Eyes Were Watching God (07/25)
While it's now considered a classic of American literature, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was not especially well-received at the time of its publication in 1937. It was Hurston's second novel (after Jonah's Gourd Vine), and she had also published poetry, co-written a play with Langston Hughes, and received two ...
The Seaside Resort Town of Bognor Regis (07/25)
The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff takes place in 1930 at the West Sussex seaside resort town of Bognor Regis on the south coast of England. The Stevens family is spending two weeks at the same holiday boarding house that they have been visiting since Mr. and Mrs. Stevens spent their honeymoon there two decades earlier.
For ...
The Hanging Rock Mystery (07/25)
When Joan Lindsay's novel Picnic at Hanging Rock was first released, readers had a pressing question: was it based on a true story? The book's prologue suggests that it might be: "Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen ...
The True Story of Grace Marks and Why Margaret Atwood Wrote About Her (07/25)
The novel Alias Grace, handsomely written by Margaret Atwood, is based on the true life story of housemaid Grace Marks, convicted of taking part in the murder of Thomas Kinnear, who employed Marks, and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery. The murders took place north of Richmond Hill, Upper Canada (now Ontario), on the farm Kinnear ...
Martin Amis: A Reading List (07/25)
Martin Amis (1949–2023) was an acclaimed English novelist and critic, known for his 'bleak comedy,' pyrotechnical prose, and his interest in vulgarity and profanity: creating 'a high style to describe low things,' as Dwight Garner put it in his
obituary of Amis for the
New York Times. His writing was witty, exuberant; he was, ...
A Percival Everett Starter List (07/25)
Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure was adapted for film as American Fiction in 2023, leading to director Cord Jefferson's Oscar win for Best Adapted Screenplay. The year after, Everett's new novel James scooped up major awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. While these exposures and honors gained him some ...
Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space (07/25)
Joan Goodwin, the protagonist of Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel Atmosphere, applies to NASA to be one of America's first female astronauts and is accepted to the program as part of Group 9. Group 8 (both in the book and in reality) included Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel into space.
Sally Kristen Ride was born in 1951 in ...
A Brief History of Close Protection Agencies (07/25)
In Richard Osman's thriller We Solve Murders, a series of murders surrounds Maximum Impact Security, a close-protection agency, or a company that provides bodyguards to paying clients. The concept of employing a select group of individuals to guard an important person isn't a new one by any means. Many believe that this sort of quid pro ...
Korean Language Loss Under Japanese Colonialism and Beyond (07/25)
In Susan Choi's Flashlight, main character Seok, later referred to as Serk, spends his childhood with his Korean family in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. He attends a Japanese school, where he speaks and learns to write Japanese. He believes he is Japanese until the occupation ends, leading to a humorous and emotionally ...
Could Mind Uploading Become a Reality? (07/25)
In Jayson Greene's novel UnWorld, people can create sentient copies of their memories. The concept of creating a digital afterlife may sound strictly from the realm of science fiction, but attempts are already underway to make it a reality. It's known as 'mind uploading' and is a form of transhumanism, a movement that advocates using ...
Novels About Reality Television (07/25)
Aisling Rawle's debut novel The Compound takes place on an unnamed reality competition television show, where contestants live together, compete in challenges to earn rewards, and gradually get banished until only one remains to win the grand prize. As it borrows recognizable elements from popular reality shows like Survivor and Love ...
Communal Utopias in Nineteenth-Century America (07/25)
In The House on Buzzards Bay, Dwyer Murphy's gothic thriller, a group of former college roommates reunite for their summer vacation in a beachfront mansion. The house, owned equally by all six friends, was built by the local Spiritualist community in the nineteenth century as a home for the many people coming to join the sect. As ...
Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434) (07/25)
In
The Original by Nell Stevens, Grace Inderwick, who lives a privileged but dreary existence with her aunt in England at the turn of the 20th century, dreams of making an independent life for herself as an art forger. In her endeavors to do so, one of the paintings she copies is Jan van Eyck's
Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife ...
Trans People Have Always Played Sports: Women Breaking Barriers (07/25)
In Hot Girls with Balls, author Benedict Nguyễn chooses to depict her protagonists, two star athletes who happen to both be Asian trans women, as competitors in the professional men's volleyball league rather than the women's. This choice is a gesture toward the manufactured controversy surrounding trans women competing against ...
Flag Bearers of the Civil War (07/25)
Anders, the protagonist of Dennard Dayle's How to Dodge a Cannonball, describes himself as a 'flag-twirler': he twirls flags for the Union, then the Confederacy, then the Union again. Throughout the novel, Anders name-drops increasingly baroque flag-twirling maneuvers, including the Sumter Two-Step, the Jackson Lift, and the Delaware ...
The Dybbuk of Jewish Folklore (07/25)
Taffy Brodesser-Akner's Long Island Compromise follows the Fletcher family, with their Jewish identity acting as one of the central themes. When someone in the family faces a mishap, they allude to a 'dybbuk' as the driving factor. A 'dybbuk,' or 'dibbuk,' in Jewish folklore is an evil spirit that takes possession of a person's body, and ...
Montreal in Literature (07/25)
Much of Frankie Barnet's novel Mood Swings takes place in Montreal. Nestled in the southwest of Canada's francophone province of Quebec, Montreal is a multicultural and largely bilingual city with a thriving arts scene, which makes it an appealingly unique backdrop for all sorts of literature. Below are some notable books that have been ...
En Puntas by Javier Pérez (07/25)
During a pivotal scene in R.O. Kwon's novel Exhibit, a character mentions a short film he's viewed. In it, a ballerina performs atop a piano lid in customized pointe shoes; long kitchen knives have been attached to them, so she is literally dancing on points. This real-life film is the video-installation piece En Puntas ('on tips'), ...
Miranda July: The Essential Works (07/25)
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 ...
Cetacean Trivia (07/25)
Much of biologist Hannah Stowe's memoir,
Move Like Water, records her experiences on sailing vessels researching cetaceans – an entirely aquatic group of mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Some interesting trivia regarding these magnificent creatures:
- The fossil record shows the first cetaceans ...
The Fires of 1970s New York City (06/25)
In her novel Remember Us, author Jacqueline Woodson draws from her own experiences growing up in 1970s New York. Her protagonist's hometown of Bushwick is plagued by housefires, landing it the callous nickname 'The Matchbox.'
Bushwick wasn't the only community affected by numerous fires at the time. Records show that by mid-1974, the ...
The Handover of Hong Kong (06/25)
Ghost Girl, Banana takes place partly in Hong Kong in the summer of 1997, a setting intentionally chosen by the author for symbolic reasons, representing the inner conflict of the main character who is of Hong Kong descent but grew up in the UK, raised by her English father. This was the summer Hong Kong was 'returned' to the rule of the ...
Epilepsy (06/25)
In Women and Children First, the debut novel from Alina Grabowski, teenager Lucy Anderson has epilepsy, a neurological disorder involving recurring seizures. Lucy has to deal not only with her distress at experiencing the seizures themselves but also with the stigma associated with the condition.
Epilepsy is one of the most common...
Boquila trifoliolata, the "Chameleon Vine" (06/25)
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 ...
An Interview with Carvell Wallace (06/25)
Carvell Wallace's debut memoir, Another Word for Love, explores how spirituality and embracing his queer identity helped him heal from childhood trauma. The journalist and podcaster is known for co-writing basketball player Andre Iguodala's 2019 memoir The Sixth Man and for his Peabody Award–nominated podcast series Finding ...
The Sociological Work of Pierre Bourdieu (06/25)
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 ...
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (06/25)
A main character in Charlotte McConaghy's novel Wild Dark Shore is employed as a caretaker for an isolated seed bank. The author has stated that the facility is based on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.
A seed bank's main ...
Nicky Calma, aka Tita Aida (06/25)
In Caro de Robertis' work of transcribed oral history, So Many Stars, one of the interviewees is Nicky Calma. She shares the story of how, along with others at the Filipino Task Force on AIDS, she created the drag persona of Tita Aida in order to educate the people in her community about HIV/AIDS.
Born in 1967 to a Catholic family in ...
The Widespread Appeal of Boxing (06/25)
A central element of The Slip by Lucas Schaefer is Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas, which serves as a hub connecting the story's characters. The gym, attracting individuals from diverse backgrounds, illustrates a universal appeal: boxing is a sport that can be found in every city across the nation and in many countries ...
Chernozem: The National Soil of Ukraine (06/25)
In Endling, Maria Reva centers Ukrainian identity, whether her focus is on romance tours or the snail conservation efforts of one of the central 'brides' named Yeva. Through Yeva's work, we learn about the topography and life forms that shape Ukraine. One detail that stuck with me was the discussion of chernozem, the rich black soil that ...
Books About Magical Portals (06/25)
In Megan Giddings' novel Meet Me at the Crossroads, magical doors appear around the world, offering an entry into another dimension. The modern portal fantasy genre, where a magical entryway leads to another world, dates back to classic works like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Alice in Wonderland. But as novelist and ...
Superfund Sites: How the Environmental Protection Agency Cleans Up Waste (06/25)
In her book Murderland, Caroline Fraser examines the lead-crime hypothesis, the theory that children exposed to high levels of lead have neurological changes that lead to increased aggressiveness in adulthood. Ted Bundy serves as Fraser's example of a child exposed to high levels of lead who proceeded to live a life of very violent crime....
Washington State Authors (06/25)
Jess Walter, the author of
So Far Gone, is based in Washington, a state that has produced a number of well-known writers. Below we feature a small selection of Washington State authors and books.
Many of
Sherman Alexie's early works are set on the Spokane Reservation, where he grew up. His linked short story collection,
The Lone ...
Collier Heights, Atlanta's Black Enclave (06/25)
In These Heathens, set in 1960, 17-year-old Doris Steele visits a friend of her former teacher, who lives in the Collier Heights area in Atlanta, Georgia. Collier Heights was established in 1952 as an all-Black neighborhood, at a time when redlining meant that Black Georgians were significantly restricted in terms of housing. They were ...
Community-Based Resources for Aging in Place (06/25)
In Awake in the Floating City, Bo is an artist who supports herself by working as a caregiver to home-bound elderly clients. Remaining in one's own home, often living alone and having caregiver help, is referred to as 'aging in place,' and is frequently preferable to living in a nursing home or assisted living facility; according to the ...
Reimagining The Great Gatsby (06/25)
In 1925, a few months after the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from T.S. Eliot in which the poet—already renowned for The Waste Land—described the novel as 'the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.' Fitzgerald received the praise with enthusiasm, especially since...
Classics of Queer Irish Literature (06/25)
Ireland has an undeniably rich literary history across a wide range of fiction, drama, and poetry—this abundant legacy includes a number of noteworthy pieces of queer fiction and memoir. One of the latest entries into this catalog is poet Seán Hewitt's debut novel Open, Heaven, a gay coming-of-age story that centers on ...
Romance Novels with Complex Themes (06/25)
In many ways, Emily Henry's Great Big Beautiful Life is about the complex bond between mothers and daughters that prompts mothers to act in strange, counterintuitive ways. While the novel is quite unabashedly a romance, thoroughly embracing the genre's tropes, it is much more than a happy, breezy read with a satisfying end. Going against ...
Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought (06/25)
In America, América, historian Greg Grandin references two major intellectual works of history and philosophy that influenced the worldviews of peoples in the Americas and in Europe. These two books offer much in the way of understanding the evolution of both the United States and Latin America in relation to one another and are ...
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