Recent Articles
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
...
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...
One of the protagonists in
The Antidote is Cleo Allfrey, a photographer dispatched by the Resettlement Administration to document life in Nebraska's Dust Bowl. She and others in the book mention a similar, real-world project: a documentary titled
The Plow That Broke the Plains.
The Plow That Broke the Plains was a controversial, ...
Charles Dickens' works have been adapted and retold in countless forms. In the case of
Oliver Twist, the most notable adaptations have been straightforward retellings of the original storyline. For example, the West End musical adaptation
Oliver! largely adheres to Dickens' plot, although it omits the events before Oliver ends up at the ...
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 ...
While commenting on Chloe Dalton's memoir
Raising Hare, about her experience rescuing a wild baby hare, some of our First Impressions reviewers mentioned the common misperception that a hare is a kind of a rabbit. So what exactly
is a hare?
Hares and rabbits are related, but not the same. The hare is in the genus
Lepus and falls into ...
...a beyond the book article for
Wifedom
Readers might be forgiven if, in reading George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia, they miss the fact that his first wife, Eileen Blair, was in Spain with him, working for the Republican resistance against Franco's fascist forces. As Anna Funder points out in
Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, when George does refer to her, he does not ...
...a beyond the book article for
Held
The friendship between Hertha Ayrton and Marie Curie is explored in Anne Michaels's multigenerational novel
Held. Although Marie Curie is a household name, Aryton's fascinating life is likely unfamiliar to most readers.
Born in 1854 in Portsea, England, Hertha Ayrton was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks. Levi Marks, a clockmaker from...
Emily Howes' enthralling debut novel,
The Painter's Daughters, features a fictionalized version of the lives of Molly and Peggy Gainsborough. Their father, Thomas Gainsborough, was one of the most influential British painters of the 18th century.
Gainsborough, born in 1727, was the youngest of John and Mary Gainsborough's nine ...
...a beyond the book article for
Leaving
Roxana Robinson's novel
Leaving begins with the protagonists meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House during a production of
Tosca. This opera is a tragedy, set in Rome in 1800, during the Napoleonic Wars.
The drama centers around three main characters: Mario Cavaradossi, a painter and Napoleon supporter; Baron Vitellio Scarpia, the ...
The Years is the last of Virginia Woolf's novels to be published during her lifetime, in 1937. Beginning in 1880 and following three generations of the Pargiter family across five decades to the 'present day,' it captures intimate moments between characters and internal monologues against the backdrop of historical events and changes in ...
In
Hunchback, protagonist Shaka considers writing her dissertation on Tomoko Yonezu, a women's liberation and disability rights activist. Yonezu may be most known for attempting to spray paint the
Mona Lisa when it came to Tokyo in 1974, as a protest against the museum refusing access to disabled people who needed assistance. But she's ...
...a beyond the book article for
Nesting
Ciara Fay, the protagonist of Roisín O'Donnell's novel,
Nesting, is the victim of emotional abuse, although she remains unaware of this for most of the book. Also referred to as psychological abuse or psychological aggression, this behavior erodes another person's sense of self-worth until they develop a psychological dependency on ...
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
Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted, Londoner Viv meets the infamous clairvoyant Madame Sosostris while she is giving readings at the Cholmondeley Room of the House of Lords. Guests are frightened and awed by the accuracy of her gift, calling her "the most dependable clairvoyant in the country," as she has...
David Grann's
The Wager is a nonfiction book about events surrounding the 1741 wreck of the British ship the
HMS Wager, which met its doom while rounding Cape Horn, a rocky headland at the southernmost tip of the Chilean archipelago Tierra del Fuego, where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans meet. With this book, Grann sheds light on one ...
...a beyond the book article for
Eve
In March 2019, NASA was due to launch the first all-women spacewalk from the International Space Station. It was to be a milestone in space exploration. Astronauts Christina Koch and Anne McClain were to walk outside the ISS to replace lithium-ion batteries; Mary Lawrence and Kristen Facciol were to be lead flight director and lead ...
...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 ...
A crime that occurred in the summer of 1986 in New York City inspired Cynthia Weiner's
A Gorgeous Excitement. On August 26, a cyclist discovered 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in New York City's Central Park, dead due to strangulation and half naked behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, badly bruised and with cuts on her face. She had been ...
In
Stop Me If You've Heard This One, the main character, Cherry, chases her dreams of becoming a successful clown. The unusual career path actually requires a lot more work—and financial investment—than one might assume. If you're considering trading in your 9-to-5 for a bright red nose, here are some steps you might ...
COVID-19 has had an immense impact on people of all ages, in all stages of life, and in all parts of the world. Mahogany L. Browne's novel
A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe focuses on the various effects on young people's lives, which are still being felt and studied today. Along with the widespread death, disability, and ...
In Sarah Harman's
All the Other Mothers Hate Me, Florence, an ex-pop star, clings to a notion: that one day, just like Mariah Carey, she will have what she calls her
Emancipation of Mimi moment. I immediately knew what she meant, because
The Emancipation of Mimi was one of my most impactful musical albums; it was the first CD I remember ...
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 ...
Emily J. Taylor's sophomore novel,
The Otherwhere Post, is an academic young adult fantasy filled with haunting secrets, a fascinating magic system, and a sweet slow-burn romance. Taylor has
shared that the idea for the story struck in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Between quarantining and the sleep deprivation that ...
Laila Lalami's
The Dream Hotel takes place in a dystopian future in which government surveillance extends to dreams, and people can be arrested for being deemed a risk to society based on their supposed likelihood of committing a crime. The concept of 'pre-crime,' or the idea that crimes can be anticipated before they occur, was also ...
...a beyond the book article for
No Fault
The title of Haley Mlotek's debut
No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce is a reference to 'no-fault' divorce, which is a divorce granted without needing to prove wrongdoing by either spouse. For Mlotek, the legalization of no-fault divorce is an important moment in the history of marriage, as it raises questions about the significance...
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 ...
...a beyond the book article for
Theft
In Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel
Theft, multiple characters dream of seeing the world, but only some have the privilege of doing so in reality. Badar, whose economic situation puts travel out of reach, keeps a photograph of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul on the wall of his rented room as a symbol of that dream. The Blue Mosque is one of the most...
