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Grief and Intergenerational Trauma (05/20)
As the narrative of How It Feels to Float unfolds, it becomes apparent that Biz's father suffered from some mental health problems and that there is a connection between how he and Biz process the world. The hereditary effects of trauma are only just becoming understood but, in essence, intergenerational trauma describes the transfer of ...
Funding Research in STEM (05/20)
In The Age of Living Machines, Susan Hockfield tells readers about the work of Angela Belcher, a chemist and bioengineer who found a way to make affordable, clean and natural renewable energy. Belcher and her colleagues did this by harnessing the power of viruses to make electric circuits that were then turned into high-powered batteries....
Young Adult Epistolary Novels (05/20)
Epistolary novels have a long tradition in literature, and even young adult novels like Sarah Henstra's We Contain Multitudes have gotten in on the act. Given their younger audiences, however, authors writing for teens often incorporate new technologies or other clever twists on the epistolary form. Check out a few of these examples of YA...
The Islands of Maine (05/20)
Sarah Blake's The Guest Book is set predominantly on a private island off the coast of Maine owned by the Milton family. There are roughly 3,000 islands in Maine's territory, some that are popular vacation spots, others that are entirely uninhabited.
Islands like Chebeague, Vinalhaven and Mount Desert are some of the most popular ...
The Five Most Destructive Wildfires in Recorded California History (05/20)
In Fire in Paradise, authors Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano capture the devastation wrought by the Camp Fire that destroyed the community of Paradise in California on November 8, 2018. California's hot, dry and windy climate makes it particularly susceptible to wildfires. Climate change has exacerbated these conditions, raising ...
Mayotte: A Community in Crisis (05/20)
An official department of France, Mayotte is a group of islands located in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of southeast Africa. This unique political and geographic setup has led to the development of a complex, fraught national identity for many of its people, with problems related to crime, population density, poverty and poor social ...
Korčula: Past and Present (05/20)
Korčula is a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea off the Dalmation coast, and the setting of Karen Russell's story 'Black Corfu' from her story collection Orange World. It's the second most populated island in the Adriatic (after Krk), and it has a long, storied history of being occupied by various superpowers reaching back to the ...
Foster Care (05/20)
In Kathryn Glasgow's How to Make Friends with the Dark, 16-year-old Tiger learns that her mother is dead, and almost equally upsetting, she can't even go somewhere familiar to stay while she figures out how to adjust to being an orphan; with no known father or other relatives, she is relegated to the legal responsibility of the state of ...
Greek Influence on the English Language (05/20)
As Mary Norris notes in her travelogue/memoir/historical narrative Greek to Me, many words and terms in the English language are derived from Greek. These range from somewhat arcane medical and scientific terminology, to more commonly used words and phrases. The etymological evolutions are generally divided into three categories: learned ...
The 1857 Dead Rabbits Riot (05/20)
In the historical novel The Parting Glass, narrator Mary Ballard's twin brother becomes involved with a notorious secret society/street gang in New York City called the Order. Mary's friend Liddie recalls meeting her brother during a night of rioting that seems to have been based on the Dead Rabbits riot, which took place July 4-5, 1857, ...
Freya, the Norse Goddess of Love, Fertility, War & Death (05/20)
The Boneless Mercies is based on the classic Anglo-Saxon poem
Beowulf, a sweeping tale of heroes, monsters and epic battles influenced by the culture and mythology of sixth-century Scandinavia. While there are no gods or goddesses in
Beowulf, there are references to mythological heroes like Sigmund of the
Völsunga saga (a Norse epic ...
The Ancient Druids (05/20)
It is likely that when you hear mention of the ancient Druids or Druidism, certain images arise–perhaps there are flowing white robes or oak leaves involved, there are also probably long, bushy beards and maybe a sprig of mistletoe. Over the centuries that separate us from this enigmatic group, we have done a great deal of ...
Literary Explorations of Women in STEM (05/20)
Through a compelling fictional storyline, The Tenth Muse draws attention to the sexism that pervades high-paying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers, and charts an expansive global tradition of underappreciated female trailblazers. In this, novelist Catherine Chung joins a chorus of other American women writers...
A Brief History of Podcasts (05/20)
The action in Denise Mina's novel Conviction is set in motion when the protagonist listens to a true-crime podcast.
Serial audio broadcasts have existed for more than a century; many of us remember gathering around our radios each week to listen to favorite shows, or remember parents or grandparents doing so. In many ways listening to ...
Nymphs in Greek Mythology (05/20)
The nature of nymphs, the 'least of the lesser goddesses,' as they are referred to in Circe, is central to the novel. Circe, herself a sorceress or witch nymph, is most famous for turning Odysseus' crew into wild pigs and later becoming the hero's lover and adviser. In Greek mythology, nymphs are female spirits associated with the natural...
Symbolism of the Pig (04/20)
In addition to having a very real fugitive pig running through the streets of Brussels, Robert Menasse deploys a pig leitmotif throughout The Capital that takes on a wealth of significance across the novel. Characters discuss the value of pig's ears, and pork is served in a succulent cherry beer sauce. Even fictional pigs such as Babe, ...
Time-Saving Appliances (04/20)
Jennifer Weiner's novel
Mrs. Everything confronts the notion that a woman can do and be everything to everyone. From the 1950s through the early 2000s, women in America became liberated from many household chores due to time-saving inventions. Refrigerators, dishwashers, laundry appliances, even automatic coffee makers, all helped ...
Brisbane, Australia (04/20)
Brisbane (pronounced 'brizz-binh'), the capital city of Queensland, Australia, is the setting for Trent Dalton's debut novel Boy Swallows Universe. In an essay in the Weekend Australian Magazine, Dalton describes his hometown with his trademark literary flair: 'Brisbane is a bat-sucked mango wedged in your mower blades...Brisbane is all ...
A Coney Island Tour (04/20)
Here we are, at the famed Coney Island in Brooklyn, through the eyes of Billy O'Callaghan in his novel My Coney Island Baby. The air is 'mean with cold.' Snow's coming, so along Surf Avenue, past Nathan's Hot Dogs, 'most of the stores along here are shuttered…some closed for the season, others having already written off the day as a...
The Indigenous People of Kamchatka, Russia (04/20)
The remote Russian peninsula of Kamchatka, where Julia Phillips' debut novel Disappearing Earth takes place, is very isolated. It is located on the far east side of Russia, surrounded by the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean, riddled by volcanic activity from the Pacific tectonic plate, part of Earth's 'Ring of Fire.' ...
HBOT: Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (04/20)
HBOT (hyperbaric oxygen therapy), the medical treatment at the center of Miracle Creek, is a real treatment used for a variety of conditions. While undergoing HBOT, you breathe pure oxygen in an environment where the air pressure is much higher than normal. The higher pressure allows you to take in more oxygen, which can help your body ...
The Corruption of Home in Gothic Literature (04/20)
Marina Kemp's Marguerite operates on several thematic levels; not least as an homage to classics of gothic literature. Like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw before it, the novel opens with a young woman arriving at a large, secluded country house, before documenting ...
Are Chickens Smart? (04/20)
Barn 8 recounts the formulation and execution of a plan to rescue (or, depending on your viewpoint, steal) nearly one million hens from an egg farm. Interspersed with the plot are ruminations on the lives, personalities, evolution and intelligence of these animals that the author obviously regards highly. So, how smart are chickens?
A...
History of the New York City Theatre Scene (04/20)
The New York City borough of Manhattan sometimes seems like it's much older than it actually is, given its massive scale, impressive infrastructure, and cultural impact. However, it was only in the 1850s that work began on Central Park, and Manhattan started to rapidly expand north of 14th Street. Times Square was only so named in 1904, ...
Women Spies Who Changed WWII (04/20)
For a wide array of reasons, the Allied countries recruited many women as spies in WWII. Their first advantage was they could blend in more easily than their male counterparts in the civilian population of a typical town or village. But there was also a growing sense that women were more skilled at being secretive, coy, and courageous. ...
The Internment of Japanese, German and Italian-Americans During WWII (04/20)
In The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner, the novel's main character is a child of German descent confined to the Crystal City internment camp during World War II, and later repatriated with her family to Germany. Many of us are aware of the exclusion, removal and detention of 120,000 people of Japanese heritage that occurred as the ...
The Controversy of Capital Punishment (04/20)
In David R. Dow's thriller, Confessions of an Innocent Man, the protagonist is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. Since the murder is committed in Texas, one of the 30 U.S. states that still allows capital punishment, he is sent directly to death row. There he awaits his execution among the 200+ other residents. From 1976 to ...
1970s Hangouts in New York City (04/20)
Among other things, Hustvedt's novel Memories of the Future is a vivid portrait of what it was like to live in New York City as a young woman in the late 1970s. She writes evocatively about many of her character's favorite haunts, which include several establishments that are still operating today. Interested in a glimpse into 'Minnesota'...
Climate Change and Migration in the U.S. (04/20)
In John Lanchester's The Wall, protagonist Joseph Kavanagh is conscripted into military service to defend the titular wall against a breach by the 'Others.' The Others are not an invading army, however, but individuals displaced from their homes by some unnamed climate disaster. In the real world, as the effects of climate change become ...
The Mighty Zambezi River (04/20)
One of the longest rivers in the world, the Zambezi is fed by many tributaries and flows more than 1,500 miles from the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Angola, Namibia and Botswana, then carves its way through Zambia and Zimbabwe and southeast through Mozambique, ultimately spilling into the Indian Ocean. In some places it's ...
The Life and Career of Yūko Tsushima (04/20)
Born in 1947 in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka, Yūko Tsushima was one of the most accomplished Japanese novelists of her generation at the time of her death from lung cancer in 2016. The author remains lesser known outside of Japan, but with the recent translations of Territory of Light and Of Dogs and Walls, there has been a small wave ...
The Fallibility of Memory (04/20)
Throughout his collection of short stories, Instructions for a Funeral, David Means shows the ways in which people's recollections of the past change over time. Learning new information, reconsidering ethical stances and changing self-perceptions contribute to characters tweaking their memories to better fit new narratives about their ...
Baobab: The Tree of Life (03/20)
A prominent symbol in Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree, the mighty baobab tree sparks the imagination because of its unusual shape and longevity. Traditional Shona myth explains that the tree showed too much pride and was always whining and calling other creatures bad names, so the creator turned it upside-down as punishment, hence it ...
WWII French Winemakers' Resistance (03/20)
In The Winemaker's Wife, Inés Chauveau's life is turned upside down by the declaration of World War II and the Germans' arrival at her husband's vineyard. Instead of making a profit from their wines, the Chauveaus are expected to give their product to the Germans, and while Inés is prepared to do whatever it takes to get through...
20 Years of Speak (03/20)
Released in 1999, Speak was Laurie Halse Anderson's first novel and also her most controversial. Melinda Sordino, the protagonist, is raped the summer before her freshman year of high school at a house party. She calls the police but is unable to verbalize what happened, leaving the scene before they arrive. The police bust the house ...
Forest Fire Survival (03/20)
The River sets college students Jack and Wynn in a race against a forest fire as they canoe down the Maskwa River to the Hudson Bay with little chance of rescue. In recent years there has been an uptick in the number, severity and duration of forest fires, likely due to climate change (See
Escalating Wildfires in the Western U.S.), so it ...
The Underwater World of Haenyeos (03/20)
Lisa See's novel, The Island of Sea Women, highlights the lives of haenyeos – women from the South Korean island of Jeju who support their families by free-diving for plants and animals that thrive in the ocean. They're known to be able to hold their breath for two to three minutes at a stretch and can descend to depths of 30 to 45 ...
Chimpanzee Sanctuaries (03/20)
In
Mama's Last Hug, Frans de Waal details the observation of chimpanzees in places like
Burgers' Zoo in the Netherlands. Chimps there enjoy a relatively peaceful existence with large enclosures mimicking their natural habitat. In the United States, a number of organizations are working to establish a similar quality of life for chimps ...
Posthumous Cancer Memoirs (03/20)
Once or twice each year, I find a superb memoir in which the author comes to terms with mortality after a diagnosis of incurable cancer. Sometimes when I look up more information about the author I'm relieved to learn they're still alive (e.g. Kate Bowler, Clive James and Christian Wiman). But sometimes I see an end date to the life span,...
New Hampshire's Mount Monadnock (03/20)
Looking at a photograph of Mount Monadnock, it might not appear all that imposing. But if you've seen it in person, you were probably impressed by its size. To capture a place on the page, one has to know it intimately, and it's obvious from Andrew Krivak's deep, poetic descriptions of this mountain and its surrounding environment in The ...
The Legendary Esalen Institute (03/20)
In Rajeev Balasubramanyam's novel,
Professor Chandra Follows his Bliss, about a man's golden years' journey to finding himself, Oxford Professor P. R. Chandrasekhar takes a course in self-awareness at California's legendary
Esalen Institute. Tucked between the mountains and the Pacific Ocean, Esalen is gifted with the relaxing sounds of ...
Predictions and Paradoxes: Famous Technology Theories (03/20)
Marc-Uwe Kling's novel Qualityland, which is set in a European country in the near future, incorporates plot points based around human interactions with machines. Throughout the book, references are made to economic, technological and robotics theories that were developed in the 19th and 20th centuries as scientists began to speculate ...
Kotzebue, Alaska (03/20)
Caroline Van Hemert's memoir, The Sun is a Compass, chronicles a 4000-mile journey that concludes in northwest Alaska in the city of Kotzebue.
Kotzebue is located on a three-mile-long sand spit at the end of the Baldwin Peninsula, where the Noatak, Kobuk and Selawik rivers converge. Although it was named after Otto von Kotzebue (1787-...
Borodinsky Bread (03/20)
Early on in Savage Feast, Boris Fishman, beginning to recount his family's exodus from the Soviet Union, states that there were 800 kinds of bread in the U.S.S.R. It's true. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor in 1985, there is domashanya, a basic household roll; stolichniye, the bread of Moscow, and orlovsky, which ...
Lee Lozano's Dropout Piece (03/20)
In Fake Like Me, author Barbara Bourland alludes to artist Lee Lozano (1930-1999) and her elusive, controversial final project called Dropout Piece. This piece of performance art was Lozano's act of withdrawing from the art world in order to be an outsider. She slipped into isolation through the end of her life, pushing the boundaries of ...
Patriarchy in the Mennonite Community (03/20)
Miriam Toews' novel Women Talking is inspired by events that took place in Manitoba Colony, a Mennonite community in eastern Bolivia with a population of about 2,000. From 2005-2009, hundreds of girls and women were drugged and raped during the night, which religious leadership claimed was the work of God or the devil, punishing them for ...
Why Young Adults Are Choosing the Suicide Option (03/20)
Two decades before I was born, a cousin of mine entered seminary and killed himself within the week. No one in the family discussed it. He was dead. No need to talk about why. But death by suicide has undergone a radical cultural shift. It is no longer absurdly kept secret.
In Sally Rooney's Normal People, Connell fantasizes about ...
Controversial 20th Century Female Photographers (03/20)
Lillian Preston, the photographer at the heart of Feast Your Eyes, is fictional, but there are a number of controversial 20th century female photographers on whom she could be based, including Diane Arbus (1923-1971), Irina Ionesco (b.1930) and Sally Mann (b.1951).
Born Diane Nemerov, 18-year-old Diane Arbus received her first camera ...
Arab Americans at a Glance (02/20)
The term 'Arab' designates those who share a specific cultural, linguistic and in some cases political heritage. According to the
Arab American Institute (AAI), the Arab world is comprised of the 22 countries that make up the Arab League, an organization formed in 1945 to represent the interests of Arabs worldwide. The nations (Algeria, ...
Iranian Cuisine (02/20)
In Marjan Kamali's novel
The Stationery Shop, Iranian food plays a central role, whether a simple melon smoothie drink, hot tea sweetened with rock sugar candy (
nabat), or a more complicated feast for Persian New Year. Traditional cuisine from Iran, also known as
Persia, is a mélange of many cultures partly due to a vibrant trading ...
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