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Barbara Kingsolver’s novel
Demon Copperhead is largely based on Charles Dickens' novel
David Copperfield.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) wrote 15 novels during his career, the eighth of which he ponderously dubbed
The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone ...
In Edan Lepucki's novel
Time's Mouth, one of the time travelers enhances their power using an obscure invention by a Viennese psychologist, Wilhelm Reich.
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was born in what is now Ukraine to Jewish parents, both of whom died when Reich was a child. After enlisting in the Austrian army during World War I, he ...
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 ...
Characters in
Creation Lake frequently reference the French philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord, whose popularity has recently grown due to his work's relevance to digital culture.
Born in Paris in 1931, Debord had activist leanings early on while protesting France's war with Algeria. He also joined the Lettrists at age 18. They were ...
One of the first scenes in
Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell takes place in Professor Charlie Brunton's lecture hall at Howard University. Howard is one of the oldest HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), founded in 1867. Located in Washington, D.C., it has over the decades been a space safe from racial taunts and ...
In
Colored Television by Danzy Senna, Jane, a novelist turned aspiring TV writer from the East Coast, reflects on her inability to get used to the warm springs of Los Angeles while also considering their utility: 'All that sunshine was said to be the reason the film industry had moved west back in the 1920s. Only in Los Angeles could they...
In
Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, ...
In
Valiant Women, author Lena S. Andrews features the true stories of women serving in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II. Among the women profiled is Navy nurse Dorothy Still, who was working in the Philippines when World War II broke out. She was taken prisoner by the Japanese and sent to Santo Tomas internment camp, where she ...
...a beyond the book article for
Witness
One story in Jamel Brinkley's collection
Witness is about a woman who keeps receiving friendly notes from the same food delivery person and drafts long, personal letters in reply. In her letters, Gloria, a room service server at a hotel, reflects that food delivery apps are responsible for eliminating jobs like hers, but expresses ...
...a beyond the book article for
Dayswork
One of the topics explored in
Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel is Herman Melville's home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Arrowhead, which he went into significant debt to purchase but where he spent what seem to have been the happiest and most productive years of his life.
Dayswork additionally mentions the homes of Nathaniel ...
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 ...
In Richard Osman's thriller
We Solve Murders, a series of murders surrounds Maximum Impact Security, a close-protection agency, or a company that provides bodyguards to paying clients. The concept of employing a select group of individuals to guard an important person isn't a new one by any means. Many believe that this sort of quid pro ...
A central event in Ruby Todd's debut novel,
Bright Objects, is the sighting of a comet in the atmosphere. Comet St. John appears in January of 1997 over Sylvia's small town in Australia, causing its residents, along with the rest of the world, to stargaze and ponder the mysteries of the universe.
While Comet St. John is a ...
In the memoir
A Well-Trained Wife, the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) serves as author Tia Levings' gateway from mainstream conservative Christianity into patriarchal Christian fundamentalism. Readers may already be aware of the IBLP thanks to the popular Amazon Prime documentary
Shiny Happy People, which focuses on the abuses ...
Jessica Knoll's
Bright Young Women, a fictionalized take on the crimes of Ted Bundy, portrays its Bundy-inspired killer as an unimpressive man sensationalized as a charming genius. This echoes real-life critiques of the way Bundy has been cast by the media and law enforcement over the years.
Bundy was one of the twentieth century's ...
Lucy Ashe's
The Dance of the Dolls is populated by historical figures whose presence in the fictional narrative enmeshes the story within the real history of British ballet. Long associated with the royal courts of France and Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, the art form only became established in Britain in the early 20th century. ...
As Ben Goldfarb notes in
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, we're in the midst of an insect apocalypse. It's largely agreed now that our planet is experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, and insect species are among the most imperiled.
Habitat loss is a critical component, driven by road construction ...
...a beyond the book article for
Promise
Rachel Eliza Griffiths' debut novel
Promise is set in Maine at a time when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was spreading to that state. Racial tensions were rising as white folks who resented calls for equality began viewing the presence of Blacks, no matter how few, as a threat to their existence.
Although racism...
In
The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss talks about one of the few women in the book trade in the early 20th century: Madge Jenison, who opened The Sunwise Turn bookshop in Manhattan in 1916. A year later, she joined 20,000 other women in a protest for women's suffrage, marching with her fellow female booksellers....
...a beyond the book article for
Yr Dead is
author Sam Sax's debut novel, but not their first published work; they have previously published four chapbooks and three full collections of poetry, one of which won the James Laughlin Award and another of which won the National Poetry Series. Many other well-established poets have also turned to fiction with great success. A ...
Of all the unsettling photos taken at Kent State University on May 4th, 1970, one of them became the iconic image of unthinkable tragedy. In
this photo, twenty-year-old student Jeff Miller lies face down bleeding as fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screams in horror over his body. The photographer was KSU student John Filo, and the ...
In Ruben Reyes Jr.'s short story collection
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, speculative fiction is a way to rediscover the experiences of first- and second-generation Latinx immigrants. Alternative history might commemorate the devastating effects of genocide or alienation while at the same time offering imaginative escape from them. ...
King of the Armadillos by Wendy Chin-Tanner takes place partly in a federal institute in Louisiana where young protagonist Victor Chin is sent to be treated for Hansen's disease — commonly known as leprosy — in the 1950s.
This inpatient center, often referred to simply as Carville, was built on the site of an abandoned ...
The Golden Gate by Amy Chua begins with the murder of Walter Wilkinson, who is a fictionalized version of Wendell Willkie, a Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkinson and Willkie both died in 1944, but their cause of death was vastly different — Willkie died of a heart attack instead of ...
In Jesmyn Ward's
Let Us Descend, one of Annis's enslavers is a woman. Typically, when people think about enslavers and those perpetuating slavery as a system, they often think about white men. Some may find it surprising that women played a significant role in the slave trade, too. Furthermore, white people were not the only ones who ...
In
California Golden, Mindy has a transformative experience touring Vietnam during the war that makes her question her chosen career in show business. The Vietnam War was a transformative experience for America in the 1960s, impacting virtually everyone in some way. While the involvement of the United States in Vietnam was a profoundly ...
In the original Greek myth that
The Palace of Eros retells, Psyche is the youngest daughter of a king and the most beautiful woman in all the land. She is mistaken for Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and worshiped accordingly. An envious Aphrodite commands her son, Eros, to shoot Psyche with his arrows of love and make her become ...
What does one name a fictional small town that once served as a hub for slate mining before its inevitable decline? Well, Slater, of course. In her novel
The Dark We Know, Wen-yi Lee describes it as 'an old mining town sunk in a crater at the end of the road with nowhere to go beyond it but down.' Isadora Chang dreads returning there for ...
It's 2024. COVID-19, while still dangerous, is no longer the unknown factor it once was, and extended quarantines are no longer mandated as in the earlier days, pre-vaccination. Though the world has never stopped talking about what isolation has done to our collective psyche, I think it's only this year that we're starting to see some of ...
The final, titular story of Tony Tulathimutte's collection
Rejection is styled as a letter from a publisher explaining to the author why they will not be publishing the book. This form is used as a means of exploring the stories within from the perspective of a potential critic, and is used to humorous effect as the author considers his ...
