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Political Puppetry (07/19)
While staying at an island resort, the protagonist of the title story of Deborah Eisenberg's Your Duck is My Duck meets another artist, a puppeteer who is crafting a performance about their benefactors' mistreatment of the island's farmers. Eisenberg is drawing from a long history of puppetry as a political tool wielded by artists ...
The Legacy of Slavery and Prison Labor (07/19)
With a Trump-appointed Justice Department
pushing for harsher sentences after a brief period of relative leniency during the Obama Administration, the explosion of the prison population has become an increasingly relevant social and political issue. America has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world (with 2.3 million ...
Georgia: Crossroads of History (07/19)
In Lands of Lost Borders, author Kate Harris and her friend Melissa Yule bicycle through eastern and central Asia, stopping in the Eurasian nation of Georgia. Bordered by Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, Georgia was a member of the Soviet Union until the latter's dissolution in 1991, at which time it regained its independence. The ...
The Chanson Musical Tradition (07/19)
Alfred Busi, the protagonist of The Melody, is described by author Jim Crace as being a singer in the European chanson tradition. This lyrically-drive musical form originated in medieval France as the chanson de geste ('song of heroic deeds'), epic poems recounting the glorious tales of famous heroes set to music. The songs employed basic...
The History of Tiffany's (07/19)
Much of the action in M. J. Rose's novel Tiffany Blues takes place at Louis Comfort Tiffany's fabulous estate near Oyster Bay, New York. It's an 84-room mansion, standing on over 60 acres of lush landscaping, all conceived and designed by Louis himself. Since the late 1800s he had been the chief creative force behind the ...
#MeToo's Founder Tarana Burke (07/19)
While Kate Walbert's His Favorites takes place in the late 1970s, the novel's initial release in August 2018 was perfectly aligned to contemporary events, as stories about men in positions of power sexually harassing and assaulting women were breaking on a near daily basis. Certainly this was not a new phenomenon, and while the #MeToo ...
The Bureau of Land Management: Shifting Duties (07/19)
In Shadowlands, Anthony McCann's non-fiction account of the 2016 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover, one of the occupiers' chief targets is the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is responsible for the land on which the refuge sits.
The Bureau of Land Management, a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior, oversees ...
Literary and Pop Culture References in Southernmost (07/19)
In Silas House's Southernmost, Asher's estranged brother Luke sends him postcards with quotations from books, poems, and songs that serve as secret messages passing between them. Here's a closer look.
'Sandpiper': Asher's most recent communication from Luke is a postcard of a sandpiper with a line of poetry appended...
The Kodiak Bear (07/19)
In Tip of the Iceberg, author Mark Adams sets out to follow in the footsteps of Edward Harriman's 1899 expedition to Alaska. Harriman's expedition is remembered for the important scientific findings gathered by the more than 30 scientists, artists and writers who accompanied him, but for Harriman himself, the focus was primarily on ...
Qat (07/19)
As a young boy growing up in war-torn Mogadishu, the capital of the East African country of Somalia, Abdi Nor Iftin and his brother Hassan often looked for enterprising ways to support their family. They stumbled onto a lucrative business when they started selling the qat leaves they gathered from the ground around market stalls or stole ...
Samuel Pepys's Diary (07/19)
In
The Judge Hunter, Balty's brother-in-law, Samuel Pepys, an important historical figure in 17th century London, plays an integral role.
Written in shorthand, Pepys recounts his experience on the ship that returned Charles II to England as well as the king's coronation. The diary also contains his accounts of both the 1665 Great ...
Can Nonfiction Be Too Revealing? (07/19)
On May 24, 2013, Tiffany Sedaris, sister of writer David Sedaris, died by suicide. Shortly after, David penned an essay for the
New Yorker, entitled
Now We are Five. In true Sedaris fashion, the essay doesn't focus entirely on Tiffany or the circumstances of her death, but instead looks at the situation through the lens of ...
Witch Trials in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (07/19)
In 1599, the early days of Tom Hazard's long life, his quasi-immortality results in a charge of witchcraft leveled against both himself and his mother, and he is forced to witness the harrowing ordeal of her trial. The belief in witchcraft was common in England at this time, upheld both by Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and her successor ...
Gloria Steinem (07/19)
Though the character of Faith Frank in The Female Persuasion is an amalgamation of many '60s feminist icons, she appears to be drawn most heavily from Gloria Steinem. Steinem got her start writing articles for magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan on women's issue topics such as contraception and abortion. In 1963, she received ...
Climate Fiction: A Glimpse into the Growing Genre (07/19)
In Midnight at the Electric, it is the year 2065, and teenager Adri is part of a carefully selected group departing Earth forever to live on Mars. Although the story takes place less than 50 years from now, massive planetary destruction has already taken place. As Adri puts it early on, 'there's no Miami and hardly any Bangladesh and no ...
Books on Adoption (06/19)
In Little Fires Everywhere, an intense custody battle divides the idyllic suburban town of Shaker Heights, Ohio, into two when Bebe Chow, a Chinese immigrant, attempts to regain the rights to her daughter. The baby is now living with a white family after Bebe was forced to abandon her child during a period of desperation and poverty. ...
Rwanda Today (06/19)
Many of us remember reading about the events that Clemantine Wamariya experienced as a six-year-old girl in Rwanda in 1994, when over barely 100 days, Rwanda's Hutu ethnic majority went on a rampage, brutally murdering the ethnic Tutsi minority. The state-sponsored slaughter, a culmination of at least 30 years of unrest, took the lives of...
Emphasizing Stories by Indigenous Writers (06/19)
According to the
2010 U.S. Census, 5.2 million Native Americans currently live within the United States. But their stories are largely ignored by mainstream literature. In a world where literature is dominated by white male-driven narratives, it is even more important that we popularize and appreciate indigenous stories. I'd like to ...
Types of Stroke (06/19)
Most strokes are caused by blockages in blood vessels, either directly in the brain or traveling from elsewhere in the body to the brain; these are referred to as ischemic strokes. A minority are caused by ruptured blood vessels (hemorrhagic strokes). It is important for doctors to identify the specific type of stroke that a patient has ...
Love Potions in Literature (06/19)
What if love could be grasped with a single sip?
The idea isn't too absurd. Lisa Moore's YA novel Flannery tells the story of Flannery, a sixteen-year-old girl, who decides to see if she, along with her classmate and crush Tyrone, can create love potions for her entrepreneurship class. While planning, she concocts the idea ...
The Human Cost of War in Post-9/11 Conflicts (06/19)
The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the United States' subsequent military response fundamentally changed the political landscape of the Middle East/Central-South Asia. This landscape is the setting of Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif, who declared one of the goals of this project to 'take the readers by the hand to lead them out of the ...
Metals and the Human Diet (06/19)
Toby Fleishman, of Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, is a hepatologist, a doctor who specializes in treating the liver, gall bladder and pancreas primarily. At one point in the novel, he diagnoses a patient with a genetic disorder called Wilson's disease. This rare condition causes copper to accumulate in the liver, brain ...
STEM Fields Lack Diversity (06/19)
Esi Edugyan's Washington Black becomes an apprentice to a man of science and cultivates a far-reaching understanding of scientific and mathematical concepts – something that would never have been expected of a child born into slavery. He contributes his great mind to the aeronautical pursuits of his teacher as well as to the ...
Gender Bias in the Field of Law (05/19)
The protagonist of Jeanne Winer's
Her Kind of Case is a criminal defense attorney who has been in the legal profession for over 30 years.
While female lawyers aren't rare, law is still an area where women are underrepresented (as are minorities of both genders). According to a 2016
New York Bar Association report, women make up just 25...
Drive-In Theaters (05/19)
Realizing her dreams of becoming a Hollywood actress are dwindling, Tammy Treeborne - a central protagonist in Treeborne - decides to indulge her passion for the movies in another way, by opening her very own drive-in theater in Elberta, Alabama.
The drive-in theater is an American icon, itself immortalized in countless classic ...
U.S. Naval Observatory Master Clock (05/19)
You have a job interview at 9:30. You plan to leave at 8:50. It's really only a 10-minute walk, but the path cuts through pleasant tree-lined neighborhoods and you know you'll take extra time meandering. Right now, it is 8:45 – or around 8:45 anyway. The DVR time atop the TV says 8:46. The microwave and oven times both say 8:47. And...
Anthony Horowitz: Creating Across Medias (05/19)
Anthony Horowitz has had a prolific career writing across multiple media including
books, TV, film and stage plays. Since publishing his first novel in 1979, he has written over forty books for both adults and children, his screen credits include episodes of six TV series including
Poirot and
Midsomer Murders and creator and writer for ...
Ted Kaczynski, The Unabomber (05/19)
In The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner provides excerpts from Ted Kaczynski's journals to draw parallels between the Unabomber and her character Gordon Hauser, the man that teaches an English class at Stanville Prison. Ted Kaczynski was a reclusive U.S. domestic terrorist responsible for mailing or planting 16 bombs from 1978-1995, killing ...
World of Wonders (05/19)
In her memoir,
The Electric Woman, Tess Fontaine recounts her experiences working for a five-month long season with World of Wonders, the last traditional traveling sideshow in the United States.
As the name implies, sideshows are smaller acts that are part of a larger fair or circus. According to the
International Independent Showmen'...
Intersectional Representation in Young Adult Narratives (05/19)
Intersectionality is a term coined by
Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw almost three decades ago to explain how the oppression of African-American women was compounded by both race and gender. Essentially, she described the intersection of identities as affecting how much or how little power someone has within a society. It is a once-primarily ...
Unreliable Narrators and Ourselves (05/19)
American literary critic
Wayne C. Booth coined the term 'unreliable narrator' in 1961 in his most famous book,
The Rhetoric of Fiction, and the concept was later refined by Hamilton College professor and narrative theorist
Peter J. Rabinowitz: whether it is clear from the outset or revealed at the end, the unreliable narrator causes ...
Universal Basic Income (05/19)
Author Alissa Quart argues in her book Squeezed, that a Universal Basic Income is one possible solution for job insecurity, particularly for stay-at-home parents and domestic workers who are often shut out of the economy and for workers whose jobs may be phased out due to automation.
But what exactly is UBI? Basically, it's a program ...
Baltimore's Storied Past (05/19)
Clock Dance, like many of Anne Tyler's novels, takes place in Baltimore, Maryland. The largest city in the state, Baltimore is home to over 600,000 residents, or 2.8 million people including the entire metro area. Located just 40 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. on the Patapsco River close to where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, ...
The Mercy Seat: Historical Background (05/19)
The Mercy Seat is inspired by true events. In the acknowledgements, the author, Elizabeth H. Winthrop, says that the character Willie Jones is based loosely on two men: Willie McGee and Willie Francis.
Willie McGee, a young black man, was arrested in 1945 in Laurel, Mississippi when a white woman accused him of breaking into her house ...
The Art of the Flaneur (05/19)
The word
flaneur sounds like a term for a connoisseur of flannel fabric but, in fact, the Oxford dictionary
defines flaneur as 'A man who saunters around observing society.' It is derived from the French word
flâner which means 'saunter, lounge.'
According to an article in the New Republic, Charles Baudelaire gave birth to the ...
Literary Resistance in Sudan (05/19)
Leila Aboulela's books, including the story collection Elsewhere Home, illuminate modern life in Sudan, sharing bits of culture and geography alongside the experiences of faith and human relationships. The author joins in the tradition of Tayib Saleh and other fiction writers who've brought the Sudanese diaspora experience into Western ...
World War II Bombings at the BBC (05/19)
'Roughly speaking, for everything that could be considered an historical fact in this book, I made something up,' writes Atkinson in an author's note at the end of Transcription. One thing she did not need to augment with fiction were the amazing stories of the British Broadcasting Company during World War II, many of which are ...
India's Chipko Andolan (05/19)
In The Overstory, a few of the characters become environmental activists in order to save the wealth of forests in the American West and Pacific Northwest. In the novel, Richard Powers refers to many save-the-trees efforts around the globe, including the Chipko Andolan in the 1970s in the Himalayan region of India.
Chipko Andolan ...
Greyhound Racing (05/19)
In Michael Ondaatje's novel
Warlight, the narrator assists with 'importing a dubious population of unregistered foreign dogs' into England for the sport of dog racing.
Modern dog racing is an outgrowth of an older sport called 'coursing,' in which dogs hunt game by sight instead of using their sense of smell (hounds as a category are ...
The Flamingo Hotel (05/19)
The Flamingo Hotel, opened by Bugsy Siegel in 1946, where Esme spends her teenage years, was the third gambling establishment to open on the Strip. It is now Las Vegas' oldest hotel.
The hotel had been the brainchild of Billy Wilkerson, who envisioned a European-style hotel and casino, a far cry from the rustic, western-themed ...
Who Was Ngungunyane? (05/19)
One of the most interesting characters in Mia Couto's Woman of the Ashes never formally makes an appearance – the emperor, Ngungunyane, the Lion of Gaza. Who is this powerful figure who ruled the Gaza empire (which encompassed southeastern Zimbabwe and southern Mozambique.) What led to his triumphs and, finally, to his downfall?...
The Lewis and Clark Expedition (05/19)
Carys Davies' novella West, is set a decade after the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition. Protagonist John Cyrus Bellman's obsession with journeying into the West echoes the ambitions and objectives of the famous adventurers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark who desired to explore the unknown American frontier and detail what they found ...
Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations (05/19)
The title of M.T. Anderson's
Landscape With Invisible Hand, (and perhaps its protagonist's name), contains a reference to the theories of the Scottish economist
Adam Smith, whose landmark 1776 work
The Wealth of Nations laid the groundwork for modern free-market economic theory. To laypeople, Smith may be best known for his ...
The Intricacies of Interwoven Cultural Identities (05/19)
You Bring the Distant Near is successful, in large part, because of the way Mitali Perkins reveals the many, many intricacies of cultural identities, quietly challenging a western sense of the immigrant as stereotypical 'other.' She makes many references to Bengali culture, sometimes called Bangla culture, which plays a large part in how ...
The National Film Board of Canada (04/19)
The title of Heather Smith's novel,
The Agony of Bun O'Keefe, is inspired by a 27-minute documentary called
The Agony of Jimmy Quinlan [see full film below], which was produced by the
National Film Board of Canada in 1978. The film chronicles the effort of Quinlan, one of 5,000 people living on the streets in Montreal, to get ...
A Brief History of The New People's Army (04/19)
A large part of protagonist Geronima de Vera's backstory in Elaine Castillo's novel, America is Not the Heart, is entwined with the communist rebellion group, The New People's Army, a real-life collective that continues to forcefully oppose elected Philippine governments.
The New People's Army (NPA) is the armed wing of the Communist ...
Saddam Hussein (04/19)
Saddam Hussein, Iraq's dictator, ruled the country with an iron fist under the guise of numerous grandiose titles including President and The Knight of the Arab Nation, for nearly twenty-five years (1979-2003). In The President's Gardens, the character Ibrahim's most surreal job is to bury the people killed by the President...
The Unarmed Police Force of Norway (04/19)
In Derek B Miller's
American by Day, which takes place in 2008, Oslo Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård doesn't carry a gun. She is a member of Norway's unarmed police force, one of nineteen countries worldwide with cops who don't carry guns. This is despite the
fact that Norway falls eleventh among first world ...
Nat Turner's Rebellion (04/19)
One of Wideman's most vivid stories is centered around the confession of Nat Turner, an enslaved Virginia man who organized a revolt in 1831, involving upwards of 50 other slaves. The rebels killed 51 people (mostly slave owners and their families). The rebellion began in the late hours of August 21 when Turner and his fellow slaves ...
Cotopaxi - Ecuadorian Volcano (04/19)
Among other things, Crosley is a travel writer, and one of the most enjoyable essays in her new collection Look Alive Out There recounts her near-disastrous attempt to summit Cotopaxi, a volcano in Ecuador, more or less on a whim.
Cotopaxi, part of the Andes mountain chain, is the second-highest mountain in Ecuador (at 19,347 feet), ...
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