Recent Articles
In Tom Lin's
Babylon, South Dakota, Saul and Mei migrate from China to America with only some gold and a packet of chrysanthemum seeds. Once rooted in the soil, the flowers become almost a character in the story, taking over the land, refusing to be cut down or pruned, and surviving even the harshest of winters.
It was in China that ...
...a beyond the book article for
As If
Isabel Waidner's novel
As If focuses on two men who look uncannily like one another. Doppelgängers—unrelated people who look near-identical—have been a subject of fascination for centuries, and remain one today.
The word doppelgänger comes from German folklore, and translates to "double goer." It ...
...a beyond the book article for
Earth 7
The title of
Earth 7 raises the question, right away, of more than one Earth. 'Earth 7' is not another planet, however; in the book, that name refers to a collection of Earth 'traces,' the preserved genetic materials of various Earth lifeforms. The people of Mars are intent on collecting these traces, so they might be able to mimic Earth-...
In the early 1990s, when director Roger Allers went to Kenya, he heard the phrase 'hakuna matata' from one of the safari guides. Upon his return, he told lyricist Tim Rice about the breeziness of the phrase and Rice anchored
it in a quirky song for the movie
The Lion King, as a turn in the plot from grief to humor. Audiences of
The Lion ...
In
The Dry Season, Melissa Febos seeks out stories of creative women who might serve as models for the kind of artistic life she hopes to pursue following a period of self-enforced celibacy. One of these forebears is the abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. In Martin, Febos encounters a creative visionary whose own inspiration ...
R.F. Kuang's
Katabasis is part of a long lineage of stories about traveling into the underworld; in fact, the novel's title is the Ancient Greek name for these stories. These are journeys that test the hero, reshape their understanding of life, and force them to confront questions of mortality and meaning; the hero's descents are never ...
...a beyond the book article for
Puck
One of the most interesting choices in Samantha Allen's
Puck is to not only turn Puck and Robyn into two separate characters, but a romantic pairing. It is almost like an inside joke about the original text between the author and readers, many of whom will know that in the source material, Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck and...
The protagonist of Dave Eggers's novel
Contrapposto is Cricket Dibb, a talented young man who wants a career as an artist. Throughout the book he relays his sheer bliss in creating a work of art he knows is good. In spite of his ability, he runs into roadblocks; galleries won't hang his work because they don't feel it's ...
...a beyond the book article for
Mad Eden
In
Mad Eden, Morgan Thomas constructs a story that is nonlinear, circuitous, and sometimes downright diversionary, thinking outside the narrative box. One of Ro's most charming qualities as a narrator is their tendency toward reference and allusion—to poems, books, scientific studies, and more. Below I explore some of the references...
Allie Rowbottom's novel
Lovers XXX is set in early 1980s Los Angeles against the backdrop of the adult film industry, during the waning days of what has since been called the 'golden age' of adult cinema. For a brief time, from the early 1970s through the early 1980s, hardcore porn films achieved a kind of cachet, earning splashy red-...
...a beyond the book article for
Land
In the early nineteenth century, Ireland was newly under British rule due to the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished Ireland's parliament, and led the British government to have an interest in recording Irish tenement valuations for taxation purposes. In 1824, a historic ordnance survey commenced—Ireland was about to become ...
...a beyond the book article for
Endling
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 ...
Malcolm X rose to public prominence as one of the faces of the Nation of Islam, which is a Black nationalist and religious movement and organization. The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930 by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, although he was soon succeeded by Elijah Muhammad, who grew the small group into an influential nationwide movement—...
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 ...
In
We Could Be Anyone, one of the main characters, Lola, is turning into a tree, and she references instances from mythology where this happened to a female character. It's a surprisingly common phenomenon when looking at myths of various cultures. It is often specified what kind of tree a woman becomes, but it's generally unclear whether...
Daniel Kraus's novel
Angel Down is set on a WWI battlefield in France. After a particularly brutal shelling, Private Cyril Bagger is sent along with a small group of others to "take care of" someone shrieking nonstop in No Man's Land. Instead of a wounded comrade, however, he discovers what appears to be an angel. One of...
In Emily St. James's debut novel,
Woodworking, the protagonist, Erica, must travel more than an hour each way, from Mitchell to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to attend a support group for transgender people. The group is small—seven people is 'a good turnout'—but it's there, and over the course of the book, the group's existence ...
In 1963, Jimmy Breslin chronicled the death of John F. Kennedy from the point of view of the man who dug his grave. Instead of joining the big names in journalism in awaiting statements of grief from world leaders, he went to the cemetery where the US president was to be buried in order to write '
It's an Honor,' a piece that told the ...
Writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris have established themselves as leading names in the UK and beyond when it comes to writing about nature. Their work aims to foster reverence for the world around us and inspire us to defend it.
The seed of their first collaboration was planted when Oxford University Press removed several...
In 2012, queer audiences the world over celebrated a bisexual James Bond reveal in
Skyfall—when he is sexily threatened by a villain played by Javier Bardem, Daniel Craig's Bond retorts, 'What makes you think this is my first time?' The homoerotic scene proved popular among viewers, although the studio had previously
tried to cut ...
Seduction Theory is framed as a student's creative writing MFA (Master of Fine Arts) thesis, and the book's main characters are instructors in the program. MFA programs can serve as uniquely effective settings for stories. Many authors have been through them themselves, and can portray the experience in an authentic way. The often-...
Christina Baker Kilne's latest novel,
The Foursome, is a fictionalized version of the story of Sarah Yates, one of two sisters who married one of the original 'Siamese twins,' Chang and Eng Bunker. As the wife of a conjoined twin, Sarah must navigate not only the emotional complexities of her marriage but also the complications of a ...
When speaking about book bans, it rarely takes long for the 2019 graphic memoir
Gender Queer to enter the conversation. Its author Maia Kobabe, who is also the first contributing author to
Banned Together, never imagined that writing a memoir about eir experience growing up and coming out as nonbinary and asexual would lead to national ...
One of the main characters in
Pool House is a celebrity actress who lists her lavish home on a short-term rental site to make ends meet. She had purchased it at the height of her fame and landed in hot water when the roles stopped coming. In real life, too, many well-known stars have spent beyond their means and gone from unimaginable ...
Much of Ethan Joella's novel
The Top of the World is set in the mid-1970s at the Red Maple Inn, a fictional couples-only resort in the Pocono Mountains. Located in northeast Pennsylvania, the Poconos are a rugged wilderness area that stretches some 2400 square miles. Today, it's an exceptionally popular vacation spot; at just two ...
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 ...
...a beyond the book article for
1873
In his book of economic history
1873, Liaquat Ahamed connects much of the modern world to the events of 1873, which saw a stock market crash after years of frenzied speculation and, in the aftermath, the first international financial crisis. What made the crisis so impactful was not simply the bursting of the bubble but the Western ...
In
The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue by Zoulfa Katouh, art becomes more than a creative outlet for Jihad. As she struggles with the death of her mother and the challenges of being a visibly Muslim teenager, art allows her to express emotions that often feel too overwhelming to say aloud. With elements of magical realism, Jihad's drawings ...
In
The Door in Penrose Forest, the Penrose in question, lending his name to the forest, the city near it, and the ruined mansion at the heart of the intrigue, was Cornelius Penrose, a robber baron from the Gilded Age who used his vast fortune to enrich the area surrounding Penrose (then called Williamsville) before a massive flood ...
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 ...
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