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Martha Ballard, the heroine of Ariel Lawhon's
The Frozen River and a real-life 18th-century midwife, left behind a diary that remains one of history's best sources on midwifery in late colonial America. In addition to this work of historical fiction, Ballard is the subject of historical monographs and of a
PBS special on her life. Along ...
In Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's novel
But the Girl, the main character and first-person narrator is writing her PhD thesis on the work of Sylvia Plath. Plath is an iconic writer whose poetry is considered canonical by many but who is also sometimes dismissed as being a mere preoccupation for disillusioned teenage girls and young women. It seems ...
Leoš Janáček (pronounced lay-osh YAH-NAAH-check) is widely considered the greatest Czech composer of the early twentieth century. Perhaps best known for his opera
The Cunning Little Vixen, Janáček created not only several operas, but also symphonic works, chamber music, choral pieces, compositions for piano,...
Maureen Sun's
The Sisters K was published by Los Angeles-based independent publisher Unnamed Press. Founded in 2014 by Chris Heiser and Olivia Taylor Smith, Unnamed Press was intended to be a publisher for international voices and translated literature but has since moved into domestic fare. The Press declares itself 'committed to ...
The narrator of
The Avian Hourglass wants to be a radio astronomer, a revelation that caused me to realize that I don't actually know anything about that kind of astronomy. (For a moment I thought it was astronomy done over the radio so you wouldn't get to actually see anything cool.) I've since learned that radio astronomy is the use of ...
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 ...
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...
Before the Mango Ripens by Afabwaje Kurian focuses on the tensions between residents of a Nigerian town and white American missionaries based there. The book's Nigerian characters have a widely diverse set of reactions to the church: some adamantly oppose Christianity and persecute their Christian family members, others go to church in ...
Throughout
Roman Year, André Aciman repeatedly and explicitly references the political policies of President Gamal Abdel Nasser as responsible for his Jewish family's refugee status in Rome for the period of the memoir's titular year. The number of Jews in Egypt is estimated to have been 75,000 to 80,000 at its height in 1948. From ...
Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay explores the lives of four generations of men in the Maghabol family. The family's patriarch, Francisco, leaves the Philippines to seek work in America in the 1920s. Francisco quickly discovers that the stories he's heard of a country full of acceptance and success for immigrants are fantasies. A ...
Martha Ballard, the heroine of Ariel Lawhon's
The Frozen River and a real-life 18th-century midwife, left behind a diary that remains one of history's best sources on midwifery in late colonial America. In addition to this work of historical fiction, Ballard is the subject of historical monographs and of a
PBS special on her life. Along ...
...a beyond the book article for
James
Percival Everett's
James is a reimagining of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved companion Jim. This kind of reconfiguration is a common source of inspiration for authors, as one can see in the following list of books that similarly provide new points of view on classic works of literature.
Beautiful ...
In
Hot Springs Drive, main characters Theresa and Jackie attend a dieting support group. In the United States, commercial diet plans like these are a big business. The research firm Custom Market Insights
estimates the industry was worth $135.7 billion in 2022 and predicts that it will continue to grow, with Herbalife, NutriSystem and ...
In Lynda Cohen Loigman's novel
The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern, the title character works in her father's pharmacy and aspires to become a pharmacist herself.
Both the pharmacy and the role of the pharmacist have changed dramatically in the United States over the centuries. Pharmacies were referred to as apothecaries back in the ...
In
My Friends by Hisham Matar, the classical Arabic poem
The Epistle of Forgiveness (
Risalat al-Ghufran) by the Syrian writer Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri makes multiple appearances. Main character Khaled refers to his copy of the work, given to him by his father when he left Libya for university in Scotland, as 'the most precious object I ...
Recent years have seen increased awareness of the ongoing trauma created by historical residential schools for Native children in North America, which were operated by government bodies and churches beginning in approximately the mid-1800s, and lasting until the 1960s in the United States and the 1990s in Canada. Hundreds of thousands of ...
...a beyond the book article for
Patriot by Alexei Navalny covers the Russian opposition leader's life from his childhood in the USSR in the 1980s to his final days in an Arctic penal colony in 2024. One important moment in the development of his political consciousness that he outlines in his memoir is the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, an event which eventually ...
...a beyond the book article for
Happy
A radish farm worker in Celina Baljeet Basra's
Happy relays a tale of injustice at his previous job: a group of exploited immigrants, an attack, and an uprising. This story is one we might imagine to be derived from a compilation of worker mistreatments, but the specifics are based on a true story of immigrant fruit pickers in Rosarno, in...
For thousands of years, the southern half of Florida was one of the most vibrant, unique ecosystems on Earth, composed of water flowing over land, interspersed with plant and animal life in a massive mosaic of wetlands. What came to be known as the Everglades was formed by fresh water spilling out from Lake Okeechobee and flowing slowly ...
Weike Wang's
Rental House takes place during a couple's two vacations — one to Cape Cod and the other to the Catskills. Here are a few other novels in which vacations are equally illuminating about the characters' personalities and relationship dynamics.
Cape Cod:
Sandwich (2024) by Catherine Newman: Cape Cod is thick with ...
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak begins with the story of King Ashurbanipal (c. 685–631 BCE) of Ninevah, an ancient city on the eastern bank of the Tigris in part of what is now Mosul, Iraq. Although cruel even by the standards of his day, Ashurbanipal valued learning, and sometime around 647 BCE he built a library to ...
Ian Fritz's memoir,
What the Taliban Told Me, chronicles the author's difficulties processing his role in events that resulted in death and injury to others. Not officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Fritz discusses a category of non-physical harm that military experts denote as "moral injury,"...
In Kristin Hannah's
The Women, nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath joins the Army Nurse Corps and is shipped overseas to serve as a combat nurse in the Vietnam War. Upon returning home, Frankie spends years running from her trauma until she eventually finds a way to share her experiences. At the end of the novel, she ...
...a beyond the book article for
Clear
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 ...
In
Margo's Got Money Troubles, Margo begins creating content on OnlyFans, which eventually becomes quite lucrative work. But what is OnlyFans? Is it a pornography hub? Is it even legal?
OnlyFans was started in London, England. It is a subscription-based online platform with messaging features. It basically acts as a video-hosting ...
Each of the five protagonists in M. L. Rio's novella
Graveyard Shift struggles, in some form, with lack of sleep.
Insomnia, which is a persistent difficulty in getting adequate quality sleep, can have a significant negative impact on both our physical and mental health, with effects including anxiety, depression, memory problems, a ...
In Elizabeth Strout's novel
Tell Me Everything, the author discusses the concept of the modern-day 'sin-eater.' In her interpretation, the term applies to a person who helps others unburden themselves of their guilt or emotional pain, allowing them to move forward with their lives. In England, Scotland, and Wales, however, 'sin-eater' was...
In Rivers Solomon's novel
Model Home, main character Ezri Maxwell reflects on Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play
A Raisin in the Sun — about a Black family living in Chicago after World War II, the Youngers, who make plans to move to an all-white neighborhood. Ezri's Aunt Jacqueline compares the situation of the Youngers to Ezri's ...
In Garth Greenwell's novel
Small Rain, the unnamed protagonist—facing a difficult and uncertain medical diagnosis—finds solace in a poem by the poet George Oppen. The poem is only a few simple lines, but the protagonist marvels at how much unfolds when one sits with Oppen's work and lets it quietly speak. 'I loved how, among ...
Becoming Madam Secretary by Stephanie Dray narrates the life of Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first woman to serve in the US Cabinet. Perkins was a tireless supporter of workers' rights and is credited with drafting and lobbying support for some of the most critical parts of the New ...
Liz Moore's mystery
The God of the Woods begins with the disappearance of a girl from fictional Camp Emerson, a summer camp for children in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
For many children, attending summer camp is a rite of passage. According to a 2023
Newsweek article, there are over 12,000 summer camps across the United ...
In Louise Erdrich's novel
The Mighty Red, a rural community in North Dakota grapples with common problems facing agricultural centers—the bankruptcy of small farms and resulting consolidation into mega-farms; job loss and depopulation; and increasingly brittle economies and ecosystems damaged by monoculture.
In Erdrich's ...
In Paul Lynch's novel
Prophet Song, the enactment of an Emergency Powers Act sets in motion a sequence of destabilizing events that will eventually lead to societal dissolution and civil war. The Act provides the legal justification for an authoritarian government, through its newly formed secret police force and military, to bypass ...
In the southwest of Iran lies a city called Abadan, over five hundred miles from the country's capital of Tehran, with a population of a little over 200,000. Despite its relatively quiet presence, it played a crucial role in sparking the Iranian Revolution of 1979. On August 19, 1978, Cinema Rex, a movie theater located in a working-class...
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 15
th to 18
th centuries—Royal Navy...
When you hear the word "classics," what jumps to mind? Literature over the centuries? Famous authors? For people entering university to study "classics," it means something quite specific. Classics is typically defined as the interdisciplinary study of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, their interactions and ...
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