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The Julia Tuttle Causeway Sex Offender Colony (07/12)
Lost Memory of Skin revolves around a colony of convicted sex offenders residing beneath the Archie B. Claybourne Causeway, which connects the city of Calusa, Florida with the bordering Great Panzacola Swamp. Banks's vivid descriptions bring these fictional locations to life, and though they are imaginary, both the city and the colony ...
The Gabra People (07/12)
The Names of Things is set in the Chalbi, a desert in northern Kenya near the border with Ethiopia (marked 'A' on the map below).
The Chalbi, which means 'bare and salty' in the local language, was once part of Lake Turkana, the largest permanent desert lake in the world. It is an immense flat expanse of clay and white salt stretching ...
Seafaring Terms (07/12)
While the terms used on a ship sound familiar to me, I often don't really know what they mean. Many people recognize that a cabin is a room, and a porthole is a window, but what exactly is a purser, and which direction is the stern? If you're not sure, the definitions of the seafaring expressions below - all used in The Cat's Table - ...
Literature of the American South (07/12)
With her vivid descriptions of 'the old home place,' a hundred-acre farm in Arkansas in the 1950s, and her knack for capturing the local dialect in her writing, Jenny Wingfield's debut novel, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, fits comfortably into the category of 'literature of the American South.'
This genre, also known as 'Southern ...
Southern Gothic (07/12)
A number of reviewers describe A Good Hard Look as 'Southern Gothic'.
Gothic fiction generally combines elements of horror and romance, and might include, among many other features, psychological or physical terror, mystery, the supernatural, gothic architecture, darkness, death and madness.
One of, if not the earliest ...
Achondroplasia (07/12)
In Rachel DeWoskin's novel, Big Girl Small, Judy Lohden has achondroplasia, a genetic bone growth disorder that results in short-limbed dwarfism (responsible for about 70% of all dwarfism cases). The word 'achondroplasia' literally means 'without cartilage formation,' however, the term is a bit of a misnomer as the body of a person with ...
Charles Jamrach, The Essex and The Custom of The Sea (06/12)
Jamrach's Menagerie borrows from a number of historical events and people including:
Charles Jamrach
Charles Jamrach's father was chief of the Hamburg River Police, a position that enabled him to establish himself as a dealer in wild birds and animals. When his father died around 1840, Charles moved from Germany to take over the ...
Freeganism (06/12)
In The Astral, the Quirk's daughter Karina is a practicing 'freegan' - a term that comes from a fusion of the words 'free' and 'vegan' (although not all freegans are vegans) - and as such, she chooses to eschew conventional consumerism.
Often referred to as 'dumpster divers,' freegans generally believe that western society throws ...
Radical Homemaking & Foxfire Magazine (06/12)
At various points throughout Once Upon a River, Margo forages for vegetables, traps muskrats and raccoons, pinpoints the change in seasons by minutely observing foliage, chops firewood, whitewashes her boat, skins fish, and shoots deer. While the men all praise her aim with a rifle and her self-reliance, she is not as much of an ...
Bengaluru (Bangalore), India (06/12)
Situated on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern Indian state of
Karnataka (aka Mysore), of which it is the capital, Bengaluru sits approximately 940 meters above sea level, and is one of India's largest and fastest growing cities.
Legend suggests that Bengaluru was named after King Veera Ballala of the Vijayanagara Kingdom (...
The Persecution of the Hazara People (06/12)
The Hazara people - a long-persecuted and long-suffering population - are an Iranian ethnic group living in central Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. First mention of the Hazara is believed to have occurred in the late 16th century when the term was used to describe the people of the geographic location bordered by Kabul, Ghor, and ...
Twenty-First Century Cities (06/12)
In
City, P.D. Smith observes that contemporary urban populations are steadily growing, and he predicts that by the middle of this century the majority of humankind will be living in urban areas that he terms 'eco-cities.' Some recent trends like
urban homesteading, community gardens, and
vertical farming provide a glimpse of what ...
Two Unlikely Spies: Mary Bowser and Elizabeth Van Lew (06/12)
Lois Leveen's debut novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, is based on the real-life story of Mary Bowser, a woman born into slavery in 1839 in Richmond, Virginia to John Van Lew, a merchant. After Van Lew passed away, his daughter, Elizabeth Van Lew, freed his slaves and paid for Mary Bowser to get an education. She also helped procure a ...
Van Morrison (06/12)
In Andrea Kayne Kaufman's
Oxford Messed Up, Rhodes Scholar Gloria Zimmerman (who has
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) and Henry Young (an underachieving, drug-addicted musician) become unlikely friends when they're forced to share a bathroom in the Oxford University dorms. Over time, these 'loo-mates' learn that, despite their differences, ...
The Macdonald Triad and the Madness of Evil (06/12)
In 1963, New Zealand forensic psychiatrist John Marshall Macdonald published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry called 'The Threat to Kill.' This paper described three behaviors - bedwetting past age 5, cruelty to animals, and the setting of fires - as 'red flag' indicators of sociopathy and future episodic, aggressive ...
H. G. Wells (06/12)
H. G. Wells is not only a prominent character in The Map of Time; he's also a famous novelist, sometimes called 'The Father of Science Fiction.' Born on September 21, 1866 in Bromley, a small town southeast of London, Herbert George Wells grew up quite poor but, after an incident in 1874 in which he broke his leg and was forced to rest in...
What the Heck is a Pneumatic Tube? (05/12)
One of the hats that Pepper wears is that of a meat slicer in the Marseille Department Store. There are no cash registers in the store. Instead, whenever a customer pays for something, the money is placed in a canister, which is inserted into a tube, and then the canister is shot by compressed air through a maze of tubing and lands at a ...
Suicide and The Golden Gate Bridge (05/12)
In the story 'The Bridge' from Daniel Orozco's collection of short stories
Orientation, one man is traumatized when he witnesses a woman commit suicide by jumping from the bridge he's employed to paint. Though the story is fictional, suicide jumping is an all too frequent occurrence in real life. The
Golden Gate Bridge, located in San ...
Alzheimer's Disease & Alice LaPlante (05/12)
Alzheimer's Disease
For more information about Alzheimer's, see the backstory to
Still Alice.
Alice LaPlante
Alice LaPlante's debut novel,
Turn of Mind has received an overwhelming amount of praise and has been selected by Indie Booksellers for the July 2011 Indie Next List.
Though this is her first novel, LaPlante is certainly ...
Thailand's Political Turmoil (05/12)
In Colin Cotterill's
Killed at the Whim of a Hat, protagonist Jimm Juree makes this tongue-in-cheek assessment of Thailand's political climate:
'Politics used to be a lot more complicated before the recent introduction of the English Premiership system of colored shirts, which helped no end to know who was who. The yellows, headed ...
Hank Williams's Last Days (05/12)
Speculation and myth swirl around accounts of 29-year-old country music legend Hank Williams's death in the back seat of a Cadillac on January 1, 1953. For years, Charles Carr, the only person who knew for sure what had happened that snowy day in the hinterlands of West Virginia, never talked about it.
A mere 17 at the time, Charles ...
The Translation Issue (05/12)
Novels and bestsellers written in English often get translated into many languages, yet the reverse is seldom accomplished in equal volume. According to the founders of
Three Percent, a resource for international literature based at the University of Rochester, 'Unfortunately, only about 3% of all books published in the United States ...
Struggle for Democracy in Post-Franco Spain (05/12)
Victor del Árbol's The Sadness of the Samurai begins in pro-Nazi Spain and takes place over three generations - the perfect political backdrop for the violence, betrayal, mystery and murder that takes place in the novel. Every nation struggles with its own demons, and 20th century Spain was no exception - experiencing civil war, ...
The "God Helmet" (05/12)
When Fred puts on the 'God helmet' in Luminarium he is participating in an experiment into Neurotheology, a fairly new scientific field of research into the relationship between the brain and spiritual experiences. The first investigations studied brain wave patterns in the late 1950s. As the technology for brain study advanced, so did...
What is Cerebral Palsy? (05/12)
Melody has cerebral palsy. So does Mark, my camp counselor friend. Both of them are in wheelchairs, and are unable to walk, and need aid to talk and eat. But one of the children at the camp where I worked has cerebral palsy and he can walk and talk and eat just fine.
So then, what is cerebral palsy exactly?
Cerebral palsy ...
Samuel Morse and The Gallery of the Louvre (05/12)
No review can do justice to the range of McCullough's book, the number of intriguing Americans he chronicles, or the important works they produced. Notable, memorable, and especially moving are McCullough's accounts of George Catlin, painter of Native Americans, and the group of Iowans who visited Paris with him; of P.T. Barnum and Tom ...
The Science of Lie Detection (05/12)
You can't read The Man in the Rockefeller Suit without wondering if Rockefeller would have conned you too. While Seal notes that a few people failed to believe Rockefeller's stories or personas, the majority of people Gerhartstreiter met were more than happy to call the eccentric aristocrat friend, neighbor, business partner, club member,...
Victorians and their Collections (05/12)
The Butterfly Cabinet opens with an aged nanny showing her grown-up charge an heirloom curiosity.
'It's your grandmother's butterfly cabinet: I've had it these years. The keeper of secrets, the mistress's treasure. Ebony, I think it is, very solid: four big balled feet on it... Twelve tiny drawers, every one with its own small ...
Baseball: An Early History (05/12)
Though The Art of Fielding is not about baseball per se, there are still large segments of the book devoted to the game. It is used as a metaphor for the human condition and is the frame around which the story is built.
Baseball has been referred to as the 'national pastime' of the United States since the mid-1800s, though it is ...
Charms Candies (05/12)
It seems that
Tootsie Roll Industries would have little to do with Mitchell Zuckoff's book
Lost in Shangri-La. However, since acquiring the Charms Candy Company in 1988, this business has been the producer of
Charms - the very food that provided the Gremlin Special's passengers with enough sustenance to survive in the jungle.
'...
The Nazi Invasion of Poland (05/12)
In Amanda Hodgkinson's
22 Britannia Road, Silvana and Janusz are plunged into war when Germany invades Poland in 1939. Though the invasion catches them (and their real-life counterparts) by surprise, Polish-German relations had been increasingly strained since the signing of the
Treaty of Versailles, which redrew European borders at the ...
The Symbology of Werewolves (05/12)
From the 1941 classic film
The Wolfman (see video clip below) to Michael Jackson's music video for 'Thriller,' from
Harry Potter's Professor Remus Lupin to Jacob Black in Stephenie Meyer's
Twilight series, the ancient symbol of the werewolf continues to play an active role in modern storytelling and carries a great deal of mythological ...
The Books of Melissa Fay Greene (05/12)
In the New Yorker review of Melissa Fay Greene's debut book, Praying for Sheetrock (1991), James Lardner writes, 'Greene's achievement recalls Jane Austen's description of her novels as fine brushwork on a 'little bit (two inches wide) of ivory'....' Greene is a gifted journalist with a novelist's eye for detail, and the four award-...
The Aura Estrada Prize (04/12)
In addition to memorializing and honoring Aura Estrada in his novel, Francisco Goldman also established a literary prize in 2008 in her name.
Aura Estrada was a published short story writer in several Mexican and Latin American magazines including Letralia, Letras Libres, and Gatopardo, and, among many other projects, she published ...
The Ramphos (04/12)
While journeying to find his parents, Ry took a train, a car, a plane and a boat. Four separate vehicles. But what if he could have simply taken one? What if there were such a vehicle? One that could operate on land, water and in the air?
There is! Check out the
Ramphos!
While it looks just ...
The Controversy Over Children in Theater and Art (04/12)
In his novel,
The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson seems to have hit upon an unexplored corner of the art world. There aren't many contemporary performance art pieces that involve children. One exception, by the Toronto-based artists' workshop Mammalian Diving Reflex, is
Haircuts by Children, in which 10- and 11-year-olds are given a few days' ...
Victoria's Dictionary of Flowers (04/12)
While researching the symbolism of various plants for her novel,
The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh discovered that, 'nearly every flower had multiple meanings, listed in hundreds of books, in dozens of languages, and on countless websites.'
This left her with the challenge of determining which meanings were most '...
Mercy Lavinia (04/12)
Though she led an extraordinary and highly public life, few people today are familiar with the main character of Melanie Benjamin's The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.
In 1841, Mercy Lavinia 'Vinnie' Warren Bump was born in Middleboro, Massachusetts to a long-time well-respected New England family whose lineage can, in part, be ...
Adultery in Literature (04/12)
The subject of Anne Enright's
The Forgotten Waltz is certainly not new to literature. Throughout the centuries, the concept of adultery has provided writers with rich fodder for wonderfully compelling stories.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850):
After being abandoned by her husband, Hester Prynne has a secret affair...
National 9/11 Memorial & Museum (04/12)
The search for the
World Trade Center Memorial design, which is now being built where the Twin Towers once stood, began in 2003. While honoring those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, the memorial also pays tribute to the seven people killed and thousands injured in the WTC attack on February 26, 1993. Memorializing these 3,...
Kyung-sook Shin (04/12)
International bestselling author Kyung-sook Shin has garnered unprecedented levels of success for her novel, Please Look After Mom. Originally published in South Korea in 2008 and having sold over a million and a half copies, it is the first of her books to be translated into English and has been published in nineteen countries worldwide....
The Collaboration Between Laura Resau and María Virginia Farinango (04/12)
In the author's note in The Queen of Water, Laura Resau tells the story of walking into María Virginia Farinango's small shop one snowy day. She had met María Virginia once before at the small community college where Laura taught English as a Second Language (ESL) and María Virginia was taking a class with Laura's ...
The Cambridge Five (04/12)
The Cambridge Five consisted of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, all Cambridge graduates, who made their careers in various British government agencies including the Secret Intelligence Service.
They were recruited to work for Stalin's NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) while students at ...
The Treetop Philosopher (04/12)
Although Nothing's protagonist, Pierre, seems to withdraw from the world, he is not necessarily a nihilist (one who believes in nothing). When he tells the other children he is 'contemplating the sky, and getting used to doing nothing,' and urges them to 'enjoy the nothing that is,' his attitude is reminiscent of the French novelist and ...
The Symbolism of Doves (04/12)
Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers shows us a world where doves, in addition to serving day-to-day purposes, represent so much more. Along with their close cousin, the pigeon, doves make up the bird family Columbidae. And while they're often thought of as bright white birds, with over 300 species, they actually come in all shapes and sizes....
The Mansions of Newport, Rhode Island (03/12)
During the
Gilded Age (1865-1914), America experienced a boom in railroad tycoons and oil barons, and a great deal of wealth was concentrated in the real estate of Newport, Rhode Island. Wealthy families like the
Vanderbilts and
Astors flocked to Newport each summer, and as their appreciation for the New England coast grew, they built ...
The Mothers' Bridge of Love (03/12)
Xinran founded a charity in 2004 called
The Mothers' Bridge of Love (MBL),
which aims to build understanding between adopted Chinese children growing up around the world, their adoptive parents and their birth culture. The following letter, abbreviated from the
original, written by an adopted girl to her unknown birth-mother, ...
Key Players in Afghanistan & Pakistan (03/12)
Some of the best parts of
The Taliban Shuffle are Barker's encounters with various Afghan and Pakistani high officials, all of whom are fairly eccentric characters. But, inevitably, it becomes difficult to keep track of their names and positions. Here is a short list of some of the figures met in the book.
...
The Unreliable Narrator (03/12)
In Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, Tony Webster admits that he may not be a reliable narrator. He acknowledges that it's probably impossible to tell, objectively, the story of your own life, and that it's therefore up to the reader to question or validate his authority.
The idea of the unreliable narrator has long been ...
Coxey's Army (03/12)
In John Sayles's
A Moment in the Sun, Hod Brackenridge's colorful past is marked most deeply by his participation in a working class uprising. A group of men, inspired by
Populist rhetoric, hijack a train car in an attempt to bring their economic grievances to the nation's capital.
Turn-of-the-century America was fraught with class ...
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