Note: The key icon
indicates member-only content.
Learn more about membership.
The 2004 Tsunami and Its Effects on Sri Lanka (01/14)
Wave is not a linear account of the tsunami, and because the author's stark focus is internal, the disaster and events in the months and years that followed, are often hazy. Because of this, it's worth taking a look at the magnitude and nature of the tsunami the author survived.
A tsunami is a series of giant waves caused either by an ...
How to Keep a Commonplace Book (01/14)
Min's narrative-through-objects reminded me of a 'commonplace book' I kept in high school at the urging of my (wonderful) 10th grade English teacher. Commonplace books became very popular during the Renaissance, used as a kind of intellectual filing system, whereby one collected poems, proverbs, quotes, and other material around a ...
Who Speaks For Me? (01/14)
Hamlet says, at the opening of Shakespeare's play:
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
By the final act, he says:
...
Prison Pen Pal Programs (01/14)
In Annabel Pitcher's YA novel, Ketchup Clouds, the protagonist, a fifteen-year-old English girl who uses the pseudonym 'Zoe,' tells her story through secret letters she writes to a death row inmate. Mr. S. Harris lives thousands of miles away in Houston, Texas and is one of the only people who might understand Zoe's situation; he knows ...
Fiction as Social Catalyst (01/14)
In 2012, Susan Nussbaum won the
PEN/Bellwether for Socially Engaged Fiction. This award, which was established in 2000 by Barbara Kingsolver, was created to 'promote fiction that addresses issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships.' The award is given to an author of a not yet published novel ...
Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea (12/13)
Anne Morrow Lindbergh is, of course, the aviator's wife in the new novel of the same name by Melanie Benjamin. She is also the author of the widely acclaimed book, Gift from the Sea, which was first published in 1955. Anne Lindbergh wrote it while in Florida, on Captiva Island, and she used the shells on the beach – as a metaphor ...
Dignitas (12/13)
At the center of Me Before You is an intensely emotional and ethical debate about assisted suicide; and in particular, of the assisted-death organization, Dignitas, which plays a primary role in the story. Dignitas, founded near Zurich, Switzerland in 1998, has as its motto 'to live with dignity – to die with dignity.' The ...
Alice Munro's Canada (12/13)
Alice Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, a small town that is close to the shores of Lake Huron. This region of southern Ontario is west of Toronto and east of Michigan, and includes the industrial cities of London and Windsor, though much of the land is countryside. While Munro did occasionally live in Vancouver, most of her life has ...
Cold Antarctica, a Tourism Hot Spot (12/13)
Where'd You Go Bernadette has much talk about Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, driest desert continent on earth. Located around the South Pole, Antarctica covers an area of 5.1 million square miles (larger than the US, as well as the continents of Europe or Australia) and has a thick ice cap that has built over millions of years.
...
Animals in Contemporary Literary Fiction (11/13)
Even if the book might not quite be
about them,
Magnificence, like much of Millet's fiction, features animals prominently. When asked about her use of animals in her novels, Millet said, in an
interview with
Bookforum:
'We lose the subject of animals when we move out of childhood. In childhood animals are all around us, and then we ...
Amy McNamara (11/13)
Amy McNamara is a Midwesterner who moved to Brooklyn where she lives with her husband, the artist Doug McNamara, and their two children.
She has an MFA in Poetry and was published first as a poet, but was a writer of prose before all of that. At eight she wrote her first story about a cricket hanging onto the hood ornament of her ...
BookBrowse Interview with Jim Crace (11/13)
Harvest seems to be set in an era when English society is evolving from use of land to grow crops to enclosed pastures for animals. What about this specific time period did you find compelling as a setting for your novel? Could it have been set in any other time and place?
The time period isn't all that specific, in fact. I wasn't ...
Thinkers Whose Theories are Critical to Burkeman's The Antidote (11/13)
The Antidote introduces readers to numerous intriguing thinkers, past and present. Here is a short sampling with brief introductions:
Daniel Wegner – professor of psychology at Harvard and director of the Mental Control Laboratory at the University. Wegner's studies concentrate on what he calls 'the precisely counterintuitive ...
Detroit's Memorable Murals (11/13)
Even as Detroit City might be having a rejuvenation of sorts by attracting increasing numbers of artists, it is worth looking back to the Great Depression when a Mexican mural artist, Diego Rivera, created the city's most iconic art: the set of murals known as Detroit Industry.
Back in the early '30s Edsel Ford (son of Henry Ford) was ...
Restitution and Restorative Justice (11/13)
Tara Conklin's novel The House Girl weaves two stories together: 17-year-old Josephine, a slave who flees a tobacco farm in West Virginia in 1852, and Lina, a lawyer seeking reparations for the descendants of African American slaves in 2004. While the idea of reparations is not new, it has gained more of a spotlight within the last decade...
Roddy Doyle (11/13)
Born in 1958 in Dublin, Roddy Doyle is a prolific Irish writer who has found over two decades-worth of material in the humorous, tender, and fraught life of the family. Americans may be most familiar with Doyle's wise-cracking dialog and its lilting Dublin intonations from the popular film adaptations of his
Barrytown Trilogy:
The ...
The Electric Car in Its - Old and New? - Heyday (11/13)
Before there was Henry Ford's Model T, there was the Detroit Electric Car Company's Tornado. It is protagonist Will Anderson's pride and joy in D. E. Johnson's Detroit Shuffle. Johnson's fictional Anderson is supposedly the son of the actual founder of Detroit Electric, William C Anderson. Even today, the company is touted as one of the ...
The Canadian Expeditionary Force and the Battle of Vimy Ridge (11/13)
In her introduction to The Cartographer of No Man's Land, P.S. Duffy states that the WWI Battle of Vimy Ridge is 'as iconic to Canadians as Bunker Hill is to Americans.'
The Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) was formed in 1914 to provide support to the British battling overseas. 619,363 Canadians enlisted, of whom 60,661 – ...
Paul Auster's Brooklyn (11/13)
Paul Auster is well-known as a Brooklyn writer. In Winter Journal, he writes of first moving to Brooklyn in 1980 after enduring stints in suburbia and an overpriced rental in Manhattan: 'Why hadn't you thought of this in 1976? you wondered … but the fact was that Brooklyn had never ever crossed your mind back then, for New York was ...
Mnemonics (10/13)
In Matt Greene's Ostrich, protagonist Alex Graham is obsessed with mnemonic devices. How did mnemonics get their start?
Simonides of Ceos was a Greek poet in the sixth century B.C. As the story goes, he was asked to recite an ode at a nobleman's banquet. Simonides began his speech, as was customary, by thanking the gods – in this...
The Tasmanian Tiger (10/13)
When Hannah, the narrator of Lois Nowra's
Into That Forest, encounters her first Tasmanian tiger, she is mesmerized:
I turned and there, on the bank not more than ten yards from us, were a wolf creature with yellow fur and black stripes. It were about the size of a real large dog…It had a long muzzle and stripes on its sides like...
Contemporary Movements Based in the Past (10/13)
Jared Diamond's question, 'What can we learn from traditional societies?' is one Westerners have been asking in a Utopian spirit for generations, looking for ways to revivify our cultural practices and trying revisionist experiments to reverse the damage civilization does to our health and psyches. It's a tricky exercise, since there are ...
The Impetus for and Implemenation of A Free Man (10/13)
A Free Man is journalist Aman Sethi's first book. It grew out of a research project and interviews he conducted in 2005 as research for an article about healthcare for homeless workers. In an August 2012
Publisher's Weekly interview, Sethi explains why he chose to write his book:
When I started as a reporter in 2005, I was surprised by ...
The Musical Legacy of St. Hildehard von Bingen (10/13)
St. Hildehard von Bingen was an incredibly gifted writer and music composer. Her music is known for its soaring registers and flourishes. As a child, she was exposed to music at the monastery when she heard others take part in the
Divine Office. She listened and learned from the interplay between words and sound. The monastery provided a ...
The Great Migration (10/13)
The Great Migration describes a large-scale movement of African-Americans out of the South between 1910 and 1970. Hattie, moving from Georgia to Philadelphia, would have no doubt agreed with Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson's
assessment of the Great Migration as 'six million black Southerners moving out of the terror of Jim Crow to...
Henrietta Leavitt, a Pioneer in Astronomy (10/13)
Neil Shubin describes
The Universe Within as a 'timeline' covering great events and processes of the history of the cosmos, the planet and life on earth. But his is also a timeline of scientists and scientific discoveries that enlarged our understanding of the world. One scientist who stood out for me was
Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921).
...
Is the Warrior Gene a Predictor of Violence? (10/13)
Early on in The Dinner, we discover the reason Paul and Claire are meeting Serge and Babette for dinner: they are to discuss a problem facing their children, Michel and Rick. We know the boys have done something wrong. Then Paul mentions a genetic test that could—through amniocentesis—identify a mysterious and unnamed condition ...
Ashley X (10/13)
One of the stories Solomon tells in Far From The Tree is about Ashley X (the last name is to protect identity), a disabled girl whose story generated a lot of controversy about disability and its treatment.
Ashley X, born in 1997, was diagnosed in infancy with static encephalopathy, a brain disorder that is similar to cerebral palsy. ...
The Real Schroder: Clark Rockefeller (10/13)
In the interview at the close of the novel, Gaige reveals that an Associated Press snippet about the Clark Rockefeller case was the seed idea for her story. Though Gaige states she chose not to research in detail this tale of a con man turned kidnapper, a great deal of information is readily available via
news stories.
Rockefeller, ...
Back to the Future in the Kitchen (10/13)
While Consider the Fork is filled with delicious nuggets about the history of kitchen implements, some geeky gourmands are looking back to the future and revolutionizing the idea of exactly what we consider a kitchen tool.
Molecular gastronomy, the precision cooking that uses emulsification, gellification and other techniques to ...
American Names and Their Native American Origins (10/13)
When reading Sherman Alexie's stories it's hard to not think about the ways that Native American language has been adapted and used by white settlers and contemporary multicultural America. Many American place names originated in Native American languages, though spelling, pronunciation, and other linguistic qualities have been adjusted ...
Arvid Jansen: A Familiar Face (10/13)
In It's Fine By Me, on his first day at Veitvet School in 1965, 13-year-old Audun Sletten meets Arvid Jansen – a young man who would become his best, and one of his only, friends. 'A few girls were skipping rope, and coming straight towards me was a boy on crutches… I glanced left and right, but there was no one else by the ...
Google's Books Project (10/13)
I don't think it's giving too much away to note that the process of book scanning plays a significant role in the plot of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. At the center of the novel's plot is the high-speed book scanning process used by Google in its Books project.
Setting aside any of the controversy around Google Books and ...
The Royaumont Abbey, France's Treasure (10/13)
The Royaumont Abbey, where much of In Falling Snow is set, is located approximately 18 miles (30 kilometers) north of Paris in Val-d'Oise.
Dedicated in 1228 CE, the structure was commissioned by King Louis IX as a Cistercian abbey. The Cistercian order was established by a group of Benedictine monks in the Cîteaux Abbey around ...
The World of Fanfiction (10/13)
In Fangirl, Cath's story is interspersed with snippets of her fan fiction (or 'fanfic') starring characters who, in Cath's world, are as well known as Harry Potter is in ours. This hugely popular (primarily online) genre of amateur writing is inspired by existing fictional characters, settings, and themes.
Writers of fanfic are part of...
The Ojibwe (10/13)
Known as the Chippewa; Ojibway; Ojibwa; and in their own words, the Anishinabe, (meaning 'original man' and alluding to a creation story); the Ojibwe are thought to have migrated from the northeast (perhaps from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, according to late nineteenth-century history). They then settled in Southern Canada as well...
China's One-Child Policy (10/13)
The scavenger in The Scavenger's Daughters adopts many unwanted Chinese girls and adds them to his growing family. The casting away of girls has been noted as one of the many devastating impacts of China's one-child policy.
More than 30 years ago, China implemented a program where couples were allowed to have only one child with some ...
Marksville, Louisiana (09/13)
In Venice, Italy, where it is believed he was from, he was Marco Litche, a trader. In America, he became Marc Eliche. In 1794, a broken wagon wheel stranded him 62 miles north of Lafayette. But the environment was nice, and so were the Avoyels, a small Native American tribe that lived there; also he was a trader, so there was business to...
Craquelure (09/13)
As Chloe Aridjis explains in Asunder, a painting too must obey the laws of physics - in that it slowly - ever so slowly - descends from 'order' (the finished painting) into disorder. This 'disorder' is brought about by a series of cracks in the paint or varnish that forms a network over time. This network is called craquelure (pronounced ...
A Look at A. S. King (09/13)
Amy Sarig King was born in Reading, PA in 1970. No, I won't go into lots of detail about her younger years, suffice it to say she is a Pisces and, as she says, she 'believes in that stuff.' I will say that as a child she spent a good deal of time in her 'office' (aka her closet) staying up late and reading books.
King did not go to ...
Blaxploitation Movies (09/13)
In Telegraph Avenue, Luther Stallings, Archy's dad, was once a star in blaxploitation films that were all the rage in the '70s. Even though the term appears to be a loaded word, blaxploitation movies were actually powerful vehicles of self-identification for many blacks. Understandably this view was not held by all. Many black ...
Body Swap Fiction for Younger Readers (09/13)
David Levithan might take an unusually philosophical approach to the idea of occupying someone else's body in
Every Day, but he's hardly the first person to explore it in fiction. Here are just a few other great examples, which run the gamut from light-hearted to more serious:
The classic book in the 'body swap' genre is, of course,
...
What Defines Dystopian Fiction (09/13)
Dystopian themes have appeared in literature throughout history, but the first use of the word is credited to John Stuart Mill. In 1868, during a speech to the British House of Commons, he played upon the well-known word, 'utopia' (adding 'dys,' which is derived from a Greek word meaning 'bad') and used it to criticize legislators who ...
Autism (09/13)
In
Black Fridays, the main character, Jason Stafford, has primary care of his son, who is autistic.
Merriam Webster's Concise Encyclopedia
defines autism as a 'neurobiological disorder that affects physical, social, and language skills. First described by Leo Kanner (1894 -1981) and Hans Asperger (1906 - 1980) in the 1940s, the ...
Wendell Berry (09/13)
Wendell Berry is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and editorial, as well as a cultural critic and a farmer. Frances O'Roark Dowell's The Second Life of Abigail Walker begins with an epitaph taken from one of his poems. Berry lives in north central Kentucky on a 125-acre farm called Lane's Landing. The intersection of humanity and ...
New Jersey's Demographic Shifts (09/13)
Junot Díaz's characters have a strong link back to their home country,
the Dominican Republic, as they make northern New Jersey (aka North Jersey) their new home. These Dominican-American communities have a strong presence in Díaz's writing, even if specific cities or neighborhoods are not always referred to by name. Due to the ...
The Tenets of Communism (09/13)
Communism is an economic and philosophical theory that can be summed up by a phrase made popular by the 'father of communism,'
Karl Marx: 'From each, according to his ability, to each according to his need.'
In its ideal form, all property is held in common; there is no private ownership. There are also no class divisions, and equal ...
America's Commercial Bail Bond Business (09/13)
In The Prophet Adam Austen is a licensed commercial bail bondsman. It is a profession unique to only two countries in the world, the United States and the Philippines (a former U.S. colony).
Other countries use a variety of methods to ensure that defendants will show up for a court date. For example, in the UK, in the case of ...
The Current Ice Age (09/13)
Today's climate discussions are often so focused on global warming that it can be easy to forget that dramatic changes in climate, including extensive periods of global cooling, have been a hallmark of earth's history for billions of years. In fact, we're in an ice age right now. Currently, earth is in what's called an interglacial period...
.png)
