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In a key scene in Florence Knapp's novel
The Names, two characters are in an art gallery viewing an exhibition. The author writes:
'They stop in front of a hideous image, a painting on loan from a gallery in Madrid. It shows a naked man, frenzied and wild-eyed, consuming a smaller figure, its bloodied, headless body ...
The magnificent rose windows of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris are considered masterpieces of engineering for their artistic beauty, mathematical precision, and structural stability. Amazingly, the
windows remained intact after the debilitating Paris fire of 2019.
The windows were created for medieval viewers, many of whom were ...
Four stories from Sarah Braunstein's
Baby in a Box were first published in
The New Yorker, a magazine with a 101-year history of showcasing excellent short fiction from the likes of John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and William Trevor.
While short stories can be difficult to ...
...a beyond the book article for
Whistler
In Ann Patchett's novel
Whistler, a pivotal scene occurs between the primary character, Daphne Fuller, and her former stepfather, Eddie. In it, they discuss Eddie's beliefs about the afterlife, which he says he formed in part by reading
The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the English title for a ...
In
Palaces of the Crow, four children escaping war in a Lithuanian forest are aided and protected by a flock of intelligent crows. While the actions of the birds in the story are remarkable, they're really not that far off the mark from what modern crows can accomplish.
There are two types of crows in the European region where the ...
It's been called the heist of the century, despite happening only three years after the turn of the millennium. At the start of the business day on February 17, 2003, police were called to the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) by frantic jewel traders claiming their highly secure vault had been breached. Investigators found the ...
...a beyond the book article for
Gliff
In Ali Smith's
Gliff, two children living in a sinister surveillance state in the not-too-distant future return home to find a line of red paint circling their house. In this dystopian society where all-pervasive technology tracks and controls every aspect of people's lives, these red painted lines are used to flag those who have been ...
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 ...
...a beyond the book article for
Fox
Edgar Allan Poe looms over
Fox—quite literally, in fact. Mr. Fox has a large bronze bust of Poe with a raven on his shoulder, a prize for winning a poetry contest, displayed in his office. But even beyond the bust, Poe recurs throughout the narrative. Not only does
Fox become a detective story,
a form Poe invented, Mr. Fox idealizes...
Djamel White's debut novel
All Them Dogs follows gangster Tony Ward, who returns to Dublin after years away, and reintegrates himself into the crime scene that raised him. It's one of many novels set in Dublin's gangland, and the prominence of Irish crime novels can be seen as a reflection of a familiar cultural landscape for the books' ...
...a beyond the book article for
Prophecy
Perhaps no current event better embodies
Prophecy's concerns about prediction, Big Tech, and ethics than the rise of prediction markets. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi have raked in billions of dollars with the idea of placing bets on the future, from the outcome of football matches to the front lines of war. What are they, and how ...
Born in the early 1500s in Kent, England, Elizabeth Barton was known throughout her short life by various sobriquets: while her supporters called her the 'Nun of Kent' and the 'Holy Maid of Kent' both during and after her life, her detractors labeled her the 'Mad Maid of Kent' after she confessed to having fabricated her visions. But what...
Something I found especially compelling while reading
Entangled States by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan was the way it questions rigid categories, both in physics and in how we understand people and the world around us. The double-slit experiment captures this beautifully: matter and light behave as both waves and particles, resisting any ...
The smell of cut grass is a ubiquitous scent of summer, but did you know it's actually a cry for help? What we smell is a volatile organic compound (VOC) released by grass blades to signal that they're under attack. This is just one manifestation of how plants use chemical signals to communicate, and humans have only recently begun to ...
...a beyond the book article for
Hotshot
In
Hotshot: A Life on Fire, author River Selby states more than once that their favorite firefighting tool is a Pulaski. The implement is similar to an axe one might use for chopping wood, but it terminates in a two-sided head, with an axe blade on one side and an adze or mattock on the other. (An adze is similar to a hoe, with the ...
...a beyond the book article for
Hot Air
The novel
Hot Air begins with a hot air balloon falling from the sky into a backyard pool. Hot air balloons have a long history dating back to the eighteenth century, significantly predating the airplane. The hot air balloon was invented by French paper manufacturers (and brothers) Joseph Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, who were ...
Erika J. Simpson's
This Is Your Mother is an unconventional memoir about the author's mother Sallie Carol. Below we highlight some other recommended memoirs in which an author reflects on their relationship with their mother, often (but not always) after her death.
Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou: Angelou's seventh volume of ...
Family businesses provide fruitful ground for writers. The interpersonal dynamics at play are uniquely high-stakes, and there's a lot of room for things to go fascinatingly wrong.
Returns and Exchanges by Kayla Rae Whitaker focuses on a family that owns a chain of discount stores. Here are five other books that use fact and fiction to ...
Eve J. Chung's historical novel
The Young Will Remember explores the history of the Korean War through the perspective of a Chinese American journalist who finds herself in North Korean territory after a plane crash. Falling between World War II and the Vietnam War, both of which were heavily publicized in American media, the Korean War ...
If you think about internet influencers, you might first consider your favorite cookbook blogger, Instagram fashion icon, or YouTube content creator. But, as Sophie Gilbert notes in a chapter on the rise of reality television in her book
Girl on Girl, the very first person who might stake a claim to that title is a woman who, back in 1996...
Korean immigration to the US occurred in three waves: first from 1903-1949, second from 1950-1964, and third from 1965 on. The first wave was mostly comprised of laborers who were brought in from Korea to Hawaii to work on pineapple and sugar plantations. The second wave began after Korea's liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 and ...
In Fran Fabriczki's debut novel
Porcupines, Sonia's father is a retired diplomat. His job deeply influenced her family's lifestyle, as they divided their time between their home country, Hungary, and the United States, specifically Washington, DC, where he was posted. Part of the story takes place during the 1980s in Budapest, the capital...
The main horror of
Eat the Ones You Love comes from a ravenous orchid that can only be truly satisfied by human meat. It's a myth that some orchid species consume meat, but other carnivorous plants do exist. There are more than 600 known species that survive on insects and other animals; carnivory is such an efficient adaptation that it ...
Wally Lamb's novel
The River Is Waiting centers on the experiences of Corby Ledbetter, who is responsible for an unthinkable accident while intoxicated. Addicted to alcohol and lorazepam (an anti-anxiety medication in the benzodiazepine family), Ledbetter begins attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings to help him remain clean and ...
Veronica Roth's latest novel,
Seek the Traitor's Son, is a dystopian fantasy featuring extensive character development, a mysterious prophecy, and deep explorations of grief and guilt. Roth is an old hand at writing dystopian novels: she began drafting the dystopian YA novel
Divergent in the early 2000s when she was a senior at ...
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 ...
...a beyond the book article for
Odessa
In her debut novel,
Odessa, author Gabrielle Sher reimagines the legend of the golem to explore historical persecution of Jews, as well as notions of power and control. In traditional Jewish folklore, a golem is a being formed of earth or clay, given life by its creator using ritualistic incantations and scripture.
The word 'golem' comes...
While Megan Eaves-Egenes travels the world in search of the night sky in
Nightfaring, the encroaching threat of light pollution looms over the proceedings. It's hard for it not to: as she explains in the first chapter, the light from LEDs can travel '30 to 40 kilometers (about 20 to 25 miles),' while 'the cumulative skyglow from a big ...
