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How to Build an Emotional Safety Net (01/25)
Tessa Ensler wants her mother. The heroine of Suzie Miller's Prima Facie is in a panicky mess after a sexual assault, and, like many of us when things go sideways, she wants her mother's arms wrapped around her. She wants her mother's acceptance and kindness. When she confides that she 'had a bad experience' and has 'been to the police to...
Canadian Nurses in World War I (01/25)
Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts, in addition to focusing on the violence and trauma of the World War I trenches, is also about the female nurses who treated wounded soldiers.
Protagonist Laura's point-of-view sections devote ample description to the sordid day-to-day of serving as a hospital nurse in WWI. Already sent away ...
The Publication History of The Price of Salt, or Carol (01/25)
When Patricia Highsmith finished The Price of Salt in 1951, the manuscript was rejected by her publisher, Harper Bros., who had just put out her first hit novel Strangers on a Train. She sent the manuscript on to Coward-McCann (then an imprint of G.P. Putnam's Sons) using a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, and it was accepted for publication. (...
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction & Agatha Christie's Legacy (01/25)
In the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, people sought comfort and escapism in a world marked by chaos and uncertainty. Detective fiction offered a perfect outlet, with meticulously plotted mysteries that allowed the reader to regain a sense of control. After all, aren't detectives in these stories trying to restore the status quo, ...
Modern Perspectives on Giovanni's Room (01/25)
While rereading and reviewing Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, a book that has stayed with me for many years, I wanted to see what others have taken away from the novel, an early work of queer literature and a mid-century story of an American confronting his Americanness overseas. It was interesting to see recurrent themes and references...
Daphne du Maurier: A Brief History (01/25)
Author Daphne du Maurier belonged to a rich dynasty of storytellers and creatives. Her parents, Gerald du Maurier and Muriel Beaumont, both led successful acting careers. Her grandfather, George du Maurier, was a celebrated novelist and illustrator, while her uncle Guy de Maurier was a playwright. Du Maurier was the middle of three ...
The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon (01/25)
When we think about how pioneers changed the American frontier — or if we think about it — we may picture the hunting of bison herds as one of the biggest environmental changes wrought by settlers. The grainy photographs of thousands upon thousands of bison skulls piled unimaginably high, a near-extermination that seems mind-...
Marco Polo (01/25)
Although Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities concerns itself with two real people, it is far from historical fiction. The Marco Polo who describes city after fantastical city to Kublai Khan broadly resembles the Venetian merchant and explorer of the 13th century: both traveled the Eastern world and (allegedly, in the real Polo's case) served...
Sufism and the Hippie Movement (01/25)
In the novel Hideous Kinky, a young mother living in Morocco becomes interested in Sufism and takes her daughter with her to study at a zaouia, or Sufi mosque. Sufism is a form of Islamic mysticism or asceticism popular in some African countries, including Morocco and Senegal, where it is seen as a mystical form of Sunni Islam.
...
TikTok's Impact on Book Sales (01/25)
In 2024, Dostoevsky's short story White Nights became popular on BookTok, the corner of TikTok populated by readers. BookTok users post videos of themselves recommending books, discussing books, crying at the endings of books, and showing off their color-coordinated bookshelves, tagging these videos with the hashtag #BookTok. BookTok ...
Civil War in the Republic of Georgia (01/25)
In Leo Vardiashvili's Hard by a Great Forest, young Saba and his brother and father flee their home in Tbilisi, Georgia, when the city erupts in violence. "We heard gunfire by night and saw brass twinkling on the pavement in the mornings, as though it had rained shell casings all over Tbilisi," Saba says. "[W]hen a ...
Toni Morrison & The Bluest Eye (01/25)
Toni Morrison is the author of 11 works of fiction as well as a number of books and essays. She's best known for her novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 (the first Black woman to win the award) and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom —...
Beloved Criminals (01/25)
In A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage, Fox and Hazel are an attractive, wealthy, glamorous couple who kill others for sport. (But they only kill evil men, like rapists and child abusers—making them, in the reader's eyes, less serial killers and more vigilantes.) Their wealth and beauty offer them an inconspicuousness that lets them...
Novels Within Novels (01/25)
Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author includes an example of a type of metafiction known as an 'embedded narrative'—in other words, the novel contains another novel (in this case a futuristic science fiction narrative) within its pages. This technique has been around for hundreds of years, in works like Shakespeare's Hamlet and A ...
The Work of Heather O'Neill (01/25)
Novelist, essayist, and contributor to NPR's This American Life, Heather O'Neill is a literary powerhouse in Canada, where she was born and raised and lives today. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals was published first in the US (Harper Perennial, 2006) before going on to win notable Canadian literary awards Canada Reads and ...
This Historical Deed: The Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan (01/25)
Adam Ross's novel Playworld takes place between 1980 and 1981, during which time the characters follow with interest the election, presidency, and attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
The attempted assassination of Reagan took place in March 1981, just a few months after he was inaugurated for his first term. The would-be ...
The Ballet Giselle (01/25)
City of Night Birds centers on a performance of Giselle, which a world-famous ballerina is going to perform as her first foray back to the stage after a forced hiatus. Giselle is a romantic ballet in two acts that tells the story of a German peasant girl from the countryside. Giselle falls in love with a nobleman, Albrecht, who has ...
The Long and Exhausting Journey for Central American Migrants (01/25)
For seven years, anthropologist Jason De León followed low-level smugglers to understand the motivation, culture, hopes, and dreams of those guiding migrants to the US-Mexico border and beyond. De León documents their stories, some of which ended in death, in
Soldiers and Kings. While his work is centered
on the smugglers, a ...
The History of the International Space Station (01/25)
Samantha Harvey's Booker Prize–winning novel
Orbital takes place aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite,
Sputnik 1, into space. According to
NASA's website, the event "had a 'Pearl Harbor' effect on American public opinion. It was...
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri and The Epistle of Forgiveness (01/25)
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 ...
The Djinn in Islamic Folk Culture (01/25)
In Shubnum Khan's debut novel The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, set amidst the Indian diaspora of South Africa, fifteen-year-old Sana and her father move into a dilapidated house by the sea that is haunted by a djinn. The djinn is the link between past and present, a connection between the 21st-century tenants and the immigrant family who ...
Iran Air Flight 655 (01/25)
On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a Navy missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, saw on its radar an Iranian aircraft. This aircraft was a passenger airplane, flying from Tehran to Dubai with 290 civilians on board, including 66 children. But the crew of the USS Vincennes identified the airplane as a fighter jet and fired two ...
Glassworks by Philip Glass (01/25)
In Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland, the protagonist, Adina, has a visceral reaction to a song that plays at the end of a movie she sees at the planetarium. 'At the end of the film, they pan through the universe. A song begins. Made out of choppy, repetitive phrases, sturdy in the middle and fragile around the edges, so ...
Abortion in Ireland (01/25)
In 2018, in a culturally and historically significant move, the Irish public voted in favor of overturning the country's long-held ban on abortion, with more than 66% supporting the repeal. This victory for improving access to healthcare for millions was by no means an overnight success, however.
On the contrary, the fight to legalize ...
A Moby-Dick Reading List (01/25)
Whether you love Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, hate it or have never read it, you may find yourself unable to escape it. Even for a classic, it shows surprising reach, having inspired and influenced numerous authors, artists and scholars, historical and contemporary. Published in 1851, it continues to be deconstructed, reconstructed, ...
Enslavement in Canada (01/25)
The nonfiction book Flee North recounts how activist and writer Thomas Smallwood encouraged the enslaved individuals he helped escape to relocate to Canada, where slavery was illegal, rather than remaining in the United States, where they might be returned to captivity if caught. Smallwood himself settled in Toronto with his family in ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 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...
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 ...
