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The Vietnam Women's Memorial (12/24)
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 ...
Emergency Powers (12/24)
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 ...
Midwifery in Colonial America (12/24)
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 ...
The Highland Clearances (12/24)
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 ...
US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (12/24)
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 ...
The History of Grog (12/24)
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...
Fort Sumter Today (12/24)
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 ...
Reimagining the Classics from a New Perspective (12/24)
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 ...
Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong (12/24)
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...
History of the Summer Camp (12/24)
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 ...
The Classics Discipline (12/24)
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 ...
Cuneiform and Ashurbanipal's Library (12/24)
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 ...
George Oppen (12/24)
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 ...
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (12/24)
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 ...
The Dangers of Roundup Ready Seeds (12/24)
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 ...
The History of the Sin-Eater (12/24)
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...
The History of the American Pharmacy (12/24)
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 ...
The Filipino Manongs and the Delano Grape Strike (12/24)
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 ...
The Cinema Rex Fire (12/24)
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...
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri and The Epistle of Forgiveness (12/24)
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 ...
What Is Moral Injury? (11/24)
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,"...
The American Diet Industry (11/24)
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 ...
The History of the Everglades (11/24)
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 ...
Barikamà: An Italian Workers' Co-operative (11/24)
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...
Books About Native Residential School Experiences (11/24)
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 ...
How to Read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (11/24)
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 ...
Unnamed Press (11/24)
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 ...
Radio Astronomy and the Big Bang (11/24)
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 ...
Christianity in Nigeria (11/24)
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 ...
Why Is Insomnia on the Rise? (11/24)
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 ...
Leos Janacek's Piano Works (11/24)
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,...
Nasser's Expulsion of the Jews from Egypt (11/24)
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 ...
Novels Set on Vacations (11/24)
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 ...
The 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis (11/24)
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 ...
What's the Story with the Online Platform OnlyFans? (11/24)
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 ...
Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project (11/24)
Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.
Ringelblum was born in ...
Protesting Operation Alert (11/24)
Alice McDermott's novel about the humanitarian efforts of American corporate wives living in Vietnam in the early '60s, Absolution, takes a detour to New York City in the previous decade, where Tricia, the protagonist, and her radicalized friend Stella participate in sit-ins against the compulsory Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
In ...
The 2023 Spiel des Jahres: Dorfromantik (11/24)
In his section on European games in Around the World in Eighty Games, Marcus du Sautoy discusses the Spiel des Jahres ('Game of the Year'), the most prestigious award in tabletop gaming, awarded annually since 1979 by a jury of journalists who write about games. The Spiel des Jahres carries no cash prize, but certainly the winners (which ...
Traian Popovici: The Man Who Saved Jews in Czernowitz (11/24)
The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold tells the story of Frederieke 'Rieke' Teitler, a young Jewish girl trying to survive the atrocities of Nazi-controlled Romania. Throughout the war, many of Rieke's friends are deported to Transnistria, a small country to the east where Jews were sent to live in camps and ghettos. Rieke and her family, ...
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) Navy (11/24)
The plot of Mark Helprin's novel The Oceans and the Stars imagines the United States at war with Iran. At one point the heroes of the book end up in the Indian Ocean searching for an Iranian vessel, ultimately battling a force the US captain refers to as the NEDSA, the naval arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (Sepah-e Pasdaran-e ...
Buffalo Bill and His Wild West Show (11/24)
In Maylis de Kerangal's new short story collection, Canoes, a woman moves from Paris to Golden, Colorado, a mining town in the foothills of the Rockies. At the top of Lookout Mountain, overlooking Golden, Buffalo Bill is buried—which surprises the woman, who thought Buffalo Bill was a fictional character.
Who was Buffalo Bill...
Playwright John Webster (11/24)
In her memoir My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss conjures up an imaginary wolf spirit to support her childhood self. She claims the idea came from a line in one of the first poems she memorized, "A Dirge" by English dramatist John Webster, widely regarded as the last of the great Elizabethan playwrights, second only to William ...
Development and Habitat Loss in Florida (11/24)
In August 2024, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) (under direction from the governor) proposed to clear land in nine state parks to make room for tourist-friendly developments—pickleball courts, golf courses, lodges, etc. Called the 2024-2025
Great Outdoors Initiative, it was anything but great. Here's just ...
Writers' Experiences with Aphasia (11/24)
In
Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, a combination of popular science and memoir, linguist Julie Sedivy shares that one of her worst fears is that an illness or injury will cause her to
develop aphasia, a type of disorder that impacts a person's ability to use both spoken and written language. After this confession, she goes on to ...
The Ghanaian Tradition of Day Names (11/24)
There are many different tribes and cultural influences in Ghana; therefore, Ghanaian culture shouldn't be assumed to be a monolith. However, the tradition of naming children after the day they are born is a common practice in the country. It originates from the Akan people — the largest ethnic group in Ghana, making up 47.3% of the...
The Picaresque (11/24)
In The Book of George, Kate Greathead covers the life of her eponymous hero in 14 chapters depicting key moments from his first 40 years. In doing so, she draws on elements of the picaresque, an episodic literary genre in which an outsider moves from adventure to adventure while satirizing the society of the day.
The picaresque is ...
Primary Sources: Stories of Palestinian Life (11/24)
Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message implores readers to consider listening to marginalized people speak on their own experiences. This seems uncontroversial until Coates sheds light on his findings that a startling amount of what the average American knows about Palestine does not come from Palestinians themselves. In the spirit of Coates' body...
Book Tours Behind the Scenes (11/24)
In The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, readers get a taste of what authors go through in the rite of publishing passage known as 'the book tour.' For new or established authors, a book tour usually includes an (often hectic) travel schedule to bookstores, schools, and writing conferences; book signings; and readings from their work. For ...
Bolivia's Cerro Rico and the Mining God El Tío (10/24)
During the height of the Spanish colonization of Latin America in the 16th and early 17th centuries, conquistadors forced enslaved workers to extract vast amounts of silver from mines in Cerro Rico ('rich hill' in Spanish) near the city of Potosí (in what is now Bolivia), which once held the largest silver deposits on Earth. As many ...
The MANIAC Computer (10/24)
The title of Benjamin Labatut's novel The MANIAC refers to the computer—the fastest of its kind at the time—developed by the Hungarian American physicist John von Neumann. During the Second World War, von Neumann was a consultant on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he focused on the detailed mathematical ...
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