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Blind Runners (11/16)
'I don't need a saint to run with, just someone willing and able and most of all, fast.' When Parker, the main character in Eric Lindstrom's debut novel Not If I See You First, begins to contemplate making the switch from running on her own in an empty field at the crack of dawn to joining the track team, she knows she'll need ...
The Challenges of Genius (11/16)
In A Doubter's Almanac, Hans Andret, a mathematical genius, checks into a rehab facility, seeking treatment for his addiction. In a counseling session, his therapist, Matthew, asks Hans why he suddenly brought his addiction out in the open and suggests that Hans wished to be caught.
When Hans protests that such a notion would be ...
America's First Ransom Note (11/16)
In People of the Broken Neck, a series of mysterious messages, scribbled in salt, follow the Sawyers as they flee from the authorities all across the country. Cryptic communications, especially when interlinked with crimes, have always been intriguing, and the ones in this novel reminded me of ransom notes even if they make no overt ...
Bat Mitzvah (11/16)
One of the stories in Robert Oldshue's November Storm is about a 12-year old girl who is about to become a Bat Mitzvah. Most people have heard of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah – a Jewish rite of passage; a time when boys and girls are formally welcomed into the adult community. The word mitzvah means commandment or law, as well as good deed; ...
Parenting a Prodigy (11/16)
In Gilly Macmillan's The Perfect Girl, seventeen-year old Zoe Maisey is a musical prodigy. Her genius, Zoe says, is 'temptingly bright' to other people but she sounds a strong note of caution: 'Be careful what you wish for, because everything has a price.' Her mother and stepfather, she explains 'are disguising a level of ambition for ...
Shakespearean Insults (10/16)
'You taught me language. And my profit on't is, I know how to curse.' That's the lament of Caliban, the resident savage of Shakespeare's The Tempest, but it's also the the savvy modern reader's takeaway of Shakespeare's plays. Among the linguistic legacies of Shakespeare, eloquent and eclectic cursing and insults must certainly be ...
Perfecting Humanity - The British Eugenics Movement (10/16)
As mentioned in Anna Hope's historical novel The Ballroom, just over 100 years ago in 1912, London hosted the first International Eugenics Conference, an event attended by people who believed in the prevention of those deemed inferior – whom they labeled 'feeble-minded' – from reproducing. It was a categorization ...
What Defines a Novel? (10/16)
Many of the reviews of Strout's latest novel,
My Name is Lucy Barton, have called it a 'slim volume.' Some might even say that its length of just over 200 pages makes it a novella not a novel. This raises the question, what page/word count defines a novel?
Opinions on this differ widely. For example,
Writer's Digest suggests to ...
The Tridevi in Hinduism (10/16)
The Opposite of Everyone is peppered with elements from Hinduism, most prominently with references to the goddess Kali who is widely revered among Hindus for her ability to quell chaos during dark times (read '
Beyond the Book' for
The Strangler Vine to learn more about Kali).
According to the tenets of Hinduism, the Supreme Being ...
Nuclear Waste in Yucca Mountain (10/16)
In Gold Fame Citrus, the Yucca mountain, which is located in the deserts of Nevada, an hour northwest of Las Vegas, has officially become a nuclear waste depository: 'The white bullet trains come in and out thrice daily, soundless, only a slight pressing and unpressing of the air. One day the repository will be filled and it will be ...
Kurt Cobain (10/16)
In 'Nirvana,' the opening story in Adam Johnson's
Fortune Smiles, the main character's wife, Charlotte, is paralyzed from the shoulders down. She lies in bed and listens to the rock band Nirvana, as if the band's frontman, Kurt Cobain, was the only person who could understand her despair.
'It's not you,' she says. 'I just need my ...
The Thorne Rooms (10/16)
In The Making of Home, Judith Flanders argues that it can be difficult to know what ordinary homes throughout history looked and felt like, in part because museums with 'period rooms' tend to devote precious space to recreating the opulent homes of wealthy figures from the past. Perhaps it's much more fun to look at ceilings replete ...
The Yakhchal (10/16)
Long before the advent of the refrigerator, around 400 BCE, the ancient Persians had figured out a way of making ice and having it readily available even over the summer. At its most basic, the solution took advantage of the low humidity and cool desert nights, especially in winter, to make ice and then store it in an insulated building ...
Wallace Stevens (10/16)
The title of the story collection,
Thirteen Ways of Looking, is a reference to a poem,
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. This poem, a stanza of which prefaces each chapter of McCann's novella, was written by Wallace Stevens in 1923.
Stevens, an American poet, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879. A Harvard graduate and ...
Cyprus: Divided Loyalties (10/16)
One of the many historical events that are featured glancingly in A Strangeness in My Mind is the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
For a long time Cyprus was a part of the Ottoman Empire, which arguably explains why Turkey considered it its own, even after the Ottoman Empire handed over governance of the island to Great Britain in ...
Childhood Food Novels (10/16)
When my sister, Meridith, was little my parents' frequent dinner table entreaty was that she stop playing with her food. But she was an unstoppable force (a picture of her as a baby shows her pointing a crooked finger at the camera as if to warn the world to beware because she had lots of things to say and do). Mom and Dad soon gave up on...
Eccentric British Noblemen (10/16)
William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, 5th Duke of Portland and the eponymous 'Dead Duke' of Piu Marie Eatwell's book, was undeniably eccentric. He was extremely reclusive, never inviting anyone to his home at Welbeck Abbey and prohibiting his servants and workmen from acknowledging his presence in any way (any who did were immediately ...
Anegada - BVI (10/16)
Set on the remote British Virgin Island (BVI) of Anegada,
Sun, Sand, Murder is a mystery novel that owes much to its setting.
Anegada is the northernmost island of the BVI archipelago chain (click map for larger image). Of the inhabited islands, Anegada is the only one made of coral and limestone, instead of being volcano-created like...
Struwwelpeter (10/16)
In
The Gustav Sonata, Gustav and Anton share a love of the German children's book,
Struwwelpeter, which was written by Dr Heinrich Hoffmann in 1844. NPR
noted that
Struwwelpeter 'set the stage for children's book classics like
Where the Wild Things Are and the beloved
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.'
There have been countless ...
Criminal Justice Theories (09/16)
In the second half of her memoir,
Riverine, Angela Palm uses terms she learned from her college criminal justice classes as headings to organize the material. Here's a closer look at a few:
The Broken Windows Theory
In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling
proposed the broken windows theory to explain why ...
Hollywood's Margaret Herrick Library (09/16)
If you live in or near Los Angeles, you're guaranteed to have at least one Hollywood experience, be it a TV show taping, a star sighting, tickets to a premiere, or some crazy confluence of circumstances that gives you something you never expected.
Up until late summer 2012, I lived in the Santa Clarita Valley, 30 minutes north of ...
Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs' Children (09/16)
Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of being Soviet spies, are at the center of Jill Cantor's novel, The Hours Count. After their marriage in 1939 the Rosenbergs moved to New York City's Knickerbocker Village where they lived with their two sons, Michael and Robert (renamed John and Richie in the book), until their arrests on ...
Nigeria's Stance Against Homosexuality (09/16)
Over the course of Under the Udala Trees, the heroine, Ijeoma, discovers she's a lesbian, at first fighting her inclinations and trying to fit in, but later accepting that she's different from many of her peers.
Although homosexuals have gained more acceptance over the past decade in the United States and other Western countries, ...
Novelist as Method Writer (09/16)
The Novelist by W.H. Auden
Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none...
Geoffrey Pyke's Genius (09/16)
Geoffrey Pyke, the subject of The Ingenious Mr Pyke, was a man of many talents; his interests were as varied as they were obsessive. To understand them, we need look no further than two of his most successful projects, The Malting House School and the development of a remarkable substance which became known as 'pykrete.'
The Malting ...
Haiku (09/16)
at my feet
when did you get here?
snail
- Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828)
It's no coincidence that Elisabeth Tova Bailey chose Kobayashi Issa as one of several selected poets to gently ease us into the passages of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. The haiku poet's simplicity and grace complement Elisabeth Tova Bailey's quiet ...
Uplifting Books (09/16)
It is difficult to write an uplifting book about death and dying but it seems that Anna McPartlin has succeeded in doing so.
We featured a dozen uplifting books about a variety of topics in a recent
blog post and invite you to add them to your reading list and share recommendations of your own.
Hoverflies as Expert Masqueraders (09/16)
In his memoir, The Fly Trap, Fredrik Sjöberg writes: 'hoverflies are meek and mild creatures, easy to collect, and ... appear in many guises. Sometimes they don't even look like flies. Some of them look like hornets, others like honeybees, parasitic ichneumon wasps, gadflies, or fragile, thin-as-thread mosquitoes so tiny that ...
Art Inspired by 9/11 (09/16)
The events of September 11, 2001 changed the world in many ways and naturally, that change has been reflected in the arts and humanities. In film, fiction, theatre and more, artists from across the globe have responded to the tragedy in many ways and on many levels.
'After 9/11,' writes Jill Bialosky in her novel The Prize, 'many ...
Homeless By Choice (09/16)
U.S. Marine veteran Peter Ash in The Drifter is homeless – well, houseless. By choice. While he has little money he is not a vagrant. He has skills and does odd jobs. Outdoor jobs. Because Peter is incapable of staying indoors for any amount of time. This incapacity is a consequence of his military tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan ...
The Kibbutz (08/16)
Atwood's experimental Positron/Consilience project in The Heart Goes Last shares many similarities with the kibbutz movement in Israel, which began in the early 20th century as a way for Jews to develop and settle the land.
The basic philosophy behind the kibbutz embodied Karl Marx's maxim: 'from each according to his ability, to each ...
The Flannery O'Connor Award and Bread Loaf Conference (08/16)
Most of us are familiar with high-profile book recognitions such as the Man Booker Prize or the National Book Award. There are many lesser known writing awards and programs that are prestigious and well known in literary circles. Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade, can include two such recognitions as part of her biography: The ...
Julian Assange (08/16)
In
Purity, Andreas Wolf, who starts The Sunlight Project to expose corruption worldwide, is often compared to Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks.
A computer scientist by training, Assange was named to
Forbes magazine's 'Most Powerful People'
list in 2010 for being the 'genius provocateur behind Wikileaks, hard at work providing ...
Animals in Literary Fiction (08/16)
In an
interview with
The Globe and Mail in 2009, David Wroblewski, author of
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, said: 'I thought that 'dog stories' had been juvenilized over the course of the 20th century, and that was wrong.'
Like Lauren Holmes, whose short story 'My Humans' - in the collection
Barbara the Slut and Other People - charts...
Pulau Bidong Refugee Camp (08/16)
In Dragonfish, Suzy writes about leaving Vietnam with her daughter, and arriving on an island before finally being resettled in the United States. She was one of many boat people, and this aspect of the story might well be modeled after Vu Tran's real-life experiences where he and most of his family were refugees at Pulau Bidong ...
René Descartes: I Think, Therefore I Am (08/16)
Western philosophy since the Renaissance has been governed by an idea so simple it could appear on a bumper sticker: 'I think, therefore I am.'
The idea – originally expressed in French but more often rendered in Latin ('Cogito ergo sum') – came from a French philosopher of the 17th century named René Descartes, ...
Who were Ghazali and Ibn Rushd? (08/16)
Those versed in Muslim philosophy and theology have probably heard of both Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, but when I first read Two Years Eight Months Twenty-Eight Months I thought they were fictional. When I discovered they were real people who had written the books Rushdie talks about, I decided to find out more about them.
Ghazali of Tus, ...
Mysteries Set in Far Flung Places (08/16)
Jade Dragon Mountain is the start of a new mystery series that proved a hit with the members who reviewed it for First Impressions. Here are some other recently published, or soon to publish, mysteries set in far flung locations to add to your 'must-read' list:
The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger
Apr 2015. 432 pages. ...
Hampstead Heath (08/16)
After his wife's death in Owen Sheers novel I Saw a Man, Michael Turner moves from their home in Coed y Bryn in Wales to a flat in London owned by the very friend that informed him of Caroline's death. While he is reluctant to do much of anything after her death, he knows he must inch himself forward and the noncommittal ...
Operation Pied Piper (08/16)
In Crooked Heart, Noel Bostock, aged 10, is evacuated from London during World War II. The evacuations that took place in British cities at this time constitute the biggest and most concentrated mass movement of people in the country's history.
Known as Operation Pied Piper, the planned evacuation began in September 1939. Britain and ...
Chechen Painter Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets (08/16)
A fictional nineteenth-century pastoral painting by real-life Chechen painter, Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets, features in one of the stories in The Tsar of Love and Techno.
Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets was born in 1816 during the Caucasian War, which was the subject of historical fiction from Tolstoy, Lermontov, and Pushkin. In 1819 the three...
Kibera (08/16)
Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of the largest slums in the world; in Africa, it is second only to South Africa's Soweto, with a population of anywhere from 200,000 to over a million depending on who is doing the measuring. Early in
Find Me Unafraid, Jessica Posner writes:
In Kibera, hundreds of thousands of houses made from ...
PTSD: The Drone Pilot Version (07/16)
Societal awareness of PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – has certainly increased over the past several years. What was once a term familiar mostly to combat veterans and survivors of abuse, and their therapists, is now much more widely recognized. For most people outside the military and medical communities, the term ...
Two Haunted Houses in England (07/16)
You might not find Slade House in the real world, but England, where the novel is set, boasts of haunted houses with their own sinister histories. Here are two of them.
The Borley Rectory
The rectory in the village of Borley in Essex was built in the 1860s for the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull. After his death in 1892 his ...
Flights to the West: Soviet Defections during the Cold War (07/16)
When Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph's Stalin's only daughter, took the impulsive decision on 6 March, 1967, to enter the American Embassy in New Delhi and request political asylum, she took the world by surprise. Becoming an instant celebrity, she was feted in the United States (her adopted country), and was widely reported on in the world's...
Mnemosyne, the Mother of the Muses (07/16)
The title of Jonathan Galassi's novel Muse, refers to the fictional poet that the story centers on, Ida Perkins, who provides inspiration to the literary world.
A set of Ida's narrative poems is titled 'Mnemosyne,' whom Paul quickly recognizes as 'the Titaness Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the Muses.' The powerful ...
The Synagogue Made With Molasses (07/16)
Much of The Marriage of Opposites is set in the town of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, and concerns the main characters' Jewish heritage and traditions.
The Virgin Islands were 'discovered' by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. Many European explorers visited the islands in the ensuing decades and ...
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (07/16)
In
Bull Mountain, one of the main characters is a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, commonly known as the ATF.
The ATF
website states the organization is the oldest tax-collection agency in the United States. It was initially part of the U.S. Treasury and traces its roots back to 1789, when ...
A Glimpse of Beryl Markham (07/16)
Paula McLain's new historical fiction,
Circling the Sun is the story of Beryl Markham, an aviatrix whose incredible flight accomplishments took a back seat to the more famous Amelia Earhart. A number of books have tried to shine the light on this British daredevil who, in many ways, was ahead of her time –
Straight on Till Morning ...
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