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Books About Native Residential School Experiences (11/24)
Recent years have seen increased awareness of the ongoing trauma created by historical residential schools for Native children in North America, which were operated by government bodies and churches beginning in approximately the mid-1800s, and lasting until the 1960s in the United States and the 1990s in Canada. Hundreds of thousands of ...
Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project (11/24)
Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.
Ringelblum was born in ...
Traian Popovici: The Man Who Saved Jews in Czernowitz (11/24)
The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold tells the story of Frederieke 'Rieke' Teitler, a young Jewish girl trying to survive the atrocities of Nazi-controlled Romania. Throughout the war, many of Rieke's friends are deported to Transnistria, a small country to the east where Jews were sent to live in camps and ghettos. Rieke and her family, ...
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) Navy (11/24)
The plot of Mark Helprin's novel The Oceans and the Stars imagines the United States at war with Iran. At one point the heroes of the book end up in the Indian Ocean searching for an Iranian vessel, ultimately battling a force the US captain refers to as the NEDSA, the naval arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (Sepah-e Pasdaran-e ...
Buffalo Bill and His Wild West Show (11/24)
In Maylis de Kerangal's new short story collection, Canoes, a woman moves from Paris to Golden, Colorado, a mining town in the foothills of the Rockies. At the top of Lookout Mountain, overlooking Golden, Buffalo Bill is buried—which surprises the woman, who thought Buffalo Bill was a fictional character.
Who was Buffalo Bill...
Playwright John Webster (11/24)
In her memoir My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss conjures up an imaginary wolf spirit to support her childhood self. She claims the idea came from a line in one of the first poems she memorized, "A Dirge" by English dramatist John Webster, widely regarded as the last of the great Elizabethan playwrights, second only to William ...
Development and Habitat Loss in Florida (11/24)
In August 2024, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) (under direction from the governor) proposed to clear land in nine state parks to make room for tourist-friendly developments—pickleball courts, golf courses, lodges, etc. Called the 2024-2025
Great Outdoors Initiative, it was anything but great. Here's just ...
Writers' Experiences with Aphasia (11/24)
In
Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, a combination of popular science and memoir, linguist Julie Sedivy shares that one of her worst fears is that an illness or injury will cause her to
develop aphasia, a type of disorder that impacts a person's ability to use both spoken and written language. After this confession, she goes on to ...
The Ghanaian Tradition of Day Names (11/24)
There are many different tribes and cultural influences in Ghana; therefore, Ghanaian culture shouldn't be assumed to be a monolith. However, the tradition of naming children after the day they are born is a common practice in the country. It originates from the Akan people — the largest ethnic group in Ghana, making up 47.3% of the...
The Picaresque (11/24)
In The Book of George, Kate Greathead covers the life of her eponymous hero in 14 chapters depicting key moments from his first 40 years. In doing so, she draws on elements of the picaresque, an episodic literary genre in which an outsider moves from adventure to adventure while satirizing the society of the day.
The picaresque is ...
Primary Sources: Stories of Palestinian Life (11/24)
Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message implores readers to consider listening to marginalized people speak on their own experiences. This seems uncontroversial until Coates sheds light on his findings that a startling amount of what the average American knows about Palestine does not come from Palestinians themselves. In the spirit of Coates' body...
Book Tours Behind the Scenes (11/24)
In The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, readers get a taste of what authors go through in the rite of publishing passage known as 'the book tour.' For new or established authors, a book tour usually includes an (often hectic) travel schedule to bookstores, schools, and writing conferences; book signings; and readings from their work. For ...
Protesting Operation Alert (11/24)
Alice McDermott's novel about the humanitarian efforts of American corporate wives living in Vietnam in the early '60s, Absolution, takes a detour to New York City in the previous decade, where Tricia, the protagonist, and her radicalized friend Stella participate in sit-ins against the compulsory Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
In ...
The 2023 Spiel des Jahres: Dorfromantik (11/24)
In his section on European games in Around the World in Eighty Games, Marcus du Sautoy discusses the Spiel des Jahres ('Game of the Year'), the most prestigious award in tabletop gaming, awarded annually since 1979 by a jury of journalists who write about games. The Spiel des Jahres carries no cash prize, but certainly the winners (which ...
The MANIAC Computer (10/24)
The title of Benjamin Labatut's novel The MANIAC refers to the computer—the fastest of its kind at the time—developed by the Hungarian American physicist John von Neumann. During the Second World War, von Neumann was a consultant on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he focused on the detailed mathematical ...
Bolivia's Cerro Rico and the Mining God El Tío (10/24)
During the height of the Spanish colonization of Latin America in the 16th and early 17th centuries, conquistadors forced enslaved workers to extract vast amounts of silver from mines in Cerro Rico ('rich hill' in Spanish) near the city of Potosí (in what is now Bolivia), which once held the largest silver deposits on Earth. As many ...
Graphic Memoirs Exploring Physical and Mental Health Struggles (10/24)
In her graphic memoir Something, Not Nothing, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt chronicles her partner's declining health, her eventual death, and the immense grief that followed. The medium of graphic memoir—in which the author documents their experiences using a combination of text and artwork—can be particularly powerful when used ...
Willie Reed: The Witness Who Returned Home (10/24)
The plan had to be executed perfectly by Willie Reed, an eighteen-year-old native of the Mississippi Delta. He had to walk into the darkness by himself making sure his bearings were correct. He had in his possession a coat and another pair of pants. He had to walk six miles on rural roads absent of all light. That would protect him, the ...
The Meiji Restoration Era (1868–1889) (10/24)
Fictionalized events during Emperor Meiji's ascent to power set the scene for Danielle Trussoni's The Puzzle Box, including the titular puzzle box at the heart of this thriller. The Meiji Restoration era (1868–1889) is widely recognized as laying the foundation for modernizing Japan, and The Puzzle Box references Japan's first ...
Music Therapy and Autism Spectrum Disorder (10/24)
In The Schubert Treatment, musician Claire Oppert shares her experiences with the healing power of music. A classically trained cellist, Oppert was inspired by the work of her physician family members to begin playing music in nursing homes and medical facilities. One of these facilities was the Adam Shelton Center in Saint-Denis, France,...
The Case for Rats as Pets (10/24)
Rats are polarizing animals. In some people, they evoke feelings of fear and disgust, thanks to their historical association with squalid settings and the spread of disease. But others find them adorable and friendly—the sort of creature that makes a great companion.
In the book Blood Test by Charles Baxter, the main ...
Women's Hotels in 20th Century New York City (10/24)
In Women's Hotel, Daniel Lavery introduces readers to the fictional Biedermeier, which is based on the real-life phenomenon of residential hotels for women only that existed in New York City throughout the 20th century. As women began working outside the home on a mass scale, they traveled in droves to the city to make lives for ...
Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (10/24)
Both the first hospital and the first medical school in the United States were founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, landing it the nickname 'City of Medicine.' Therefore, it seems only natural that it also became home to the first school in the world dedicated to providing women with a full formal education in the field, allowing them ...
Sun Yat-sen (10/24)
In the novel The House of Doors, Lesley Hamlyn volunteers as a translator for Sun Yat-sen's political movement in Penang, Malaysia. Sun Yat-sen is one of the foremost figures in Chinese political history. By leading China from an empire to a republic, he also became an important inspiration to other independence movements of twentieth-...
Sharks in the Water: German U-boats in World War I (10/24)
Douglas Brunt’s The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel tells the story of Rudolf Diesel, the German inventor of the internal combustion engine. After the Industrial Revolution, industry had become king, and Diesel’s groundbreaking invention produced more power, used cheaper fuel and didn’t require a team of laborers to ...
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (10/24)
The emotional crisis faced by the protagonists of Jen Ferguson's Those Pink Mountain Nights stems from the disappearance of a mother and daughter from a First Nations community in Alberta, Canada. Although the book keeps its focus tight, on the intimate stories of a handful of teens, the characters occasionally reference the larger issue ...
Revenge Westerns (10/24)
Revenge is an arduous task, and tales of retribution are especially suited for the western setting. In the popular imagination, the American West is lawless and brutal, besotted with everyday bloodshed, and so revenge seems like an appropriate goal. Nearly every writer of westerns has a vigilante or two somewhere in their lineup. It's a ...
The French East India Companies (10/24)
In David Diop's novel
Beyond the Door of No Return, French botanist Michel Adanson journeys across 18
th-century Senegal to discover the fate of a woman who was kidnapped. At the time of the story, much of the area was either directly or indirectly under the control of the French East India Company, a less-known competitor to
the ...
The Fram: Polar Ship (10/24)
Helen Czerski's book The Blue Machine explains how Earth's oceanic system functions, including some discussion of the work that went into discovering that information. A few expeditions that contributed greatly were those of the Norwegian ship the Fram, which explored the Arctic and Antarctic oceans in the late 19th and early 20th ...
Bringing Them Home: The Use of DNA to Identify Remains at the Dozier School for Boys (10/24)
The Reformatory, the newest novel by celebrated author Tananarive Due, tells the horrific story of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. Once the country's largest reform school, Dozier supposedly intended to rehabilitate its students into productive citizens, but instead the boys were terrorized and tortured, and some were even ...
George Orwell and 1984 (10/24)
Sandra Newman's novel Julia is based on George Orwell's classic work of fiction 1984, retold from the point of view of the protagonist's lover. Who, though, was George Orwell, and how did 1984 come to be?
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Bengal, India. His father, Richard, was employed in the India ...
Benito Juárez (10/24)
In his novel Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera illuminates the year and a half Benito Juárez spent as a political exile in New Orleans, an often-overlooked period in the life of Mexico's first Indigenous president.
Juárez was born in 1806 to a Zapotec family living in the town of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca, Mexico. He was ...
Amaterasu Ōmikami (10/24)
In Yoko Tawada's novels Scattered All Over the Earth and Suggested in the Stars, characters retell stories from the Kojiki, translated as 'Records of Ancient Matters' or 'Records of Ancient Things.' The Kojiki is the oldest text from Japan, written mostly for the purpose of establishing a clear line of descent from the Shinto gods and the...
Grove Press (10/24)
Grove Press, the publisher of Betsy Lerner's Shred Sisters, formed in New York City in 1947. Four years later, it was purchased by Barnet Lee 'Barney' Rosset, Jr., who took chances by publishing books that were considered edgy: the Beats, modern plays, and sexually explicit literature and works with gay themes that had been banned ...
The History of Go (10/24)
In Richard Powers' novel
Playground, best friends Todd and Rafi become obsessed with the board game Go (often capitalized in English to differentiate it from the common verb), and the pastime plays a large role in the narrative. According to
the National Go Center, 'Beyond being merely a game, Go can take on other meanings to its devotees...
Sally Rooney Reads from Intermezzo in Dublin (10/24)
On Saturday, September 21, 2024, more than 500 people gathered at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, located a few meters from St. Stephen's Green, a setting in Sally Rooney's new novel Intermezzo. The Irish author, one of the most influential figures on the contemporary literary scene, greeted the audience with a warm smile and a hand ...
Movies and Romantic Idealization (10/24)
Movies are great escapism, and why shouldn't they be? An art form in its own right, rich in imagery and metaphor, the cinema offers many lessons that can be learned about ourselves and others just by watching someone else's drama play out on screen.
But while movies can be healing in the right circumstances, and have been proven to aid...
European Spa Resorts (10/24)
Olga Tokarczuk's novel The Empusium is set in the mountain health resort of Görbersdorf (modern day Sokołowsko in Poland) in 1913. Renowned for its tuberculosis sanitorium, the town fit into a context of around 600 similar resorts in Europe that focused on recovery from then-incurable diseases, as well as overall wellness. The ...
Jian Bing (10/24)
In C Pam Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey, which takes place in a fictional near-future of worsening climate change and severely reduced biodiversity, the main character chooses to work as an elite chef for a wealthy employer on an isolated mountain in Italy rather than give up access to the ingredients she loves that are rapidly vanishing ...
The Institute in Basic Life Principles (09/24)
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 ...
Poets Turned Novelists (09/24)
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 ...
The Greek Myth of Eros and Psyche (09/24)
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 ...
The Magnetic Pull of Historically Black Colleges (09/24)
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 ...
A Brief History of Close Protection Agencies (09/24)
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 ...
Rejected Authors (09/24)
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 ...
French Philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord (09/24)
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 ...
The Kent State Pietà (09/24)
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 ...
Isolation, Alienation, and Escapism: Observing Two Thriller Narratives (09/24)
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 ...
Free People of Color and Their Roles in the American Slave Trade (09/24)
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 ...
Author Homes in Massachusetts (09/24)
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 ...
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