Pg. 69: Garrett Curbow's "Whispers of Ink and Starlight"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Whispers of Ink and Starlight: A Novel by Garrett Curbow.

About Whispers of Ink and Starlight, from the publisher:

A spellbinding tale of forbidden love and the power of words, where a girl must choose between the life written for her and the future she dares to imagine.

In a small Georgia town, Nelle’s life has been carefully scripted by her creator and captor, the reclusive author Wallace Quill. Born from ink and imagination, every breath she takes is dictated by his pen. But on a star-studded Fourth of July night, she meets James—a young man with dreams as vivid as the fireworks above them—and suddenly, the unwritten becomes possible.

As Nelle and James fall deeply in love, they embark on a breathtaking journey across Europe, each new experience a defiant stroke against the words that bind her. But freedom has a price. With every mile they travel, the ink in Nelle’s veins threatens to rewrite their story. In a world where every moment could be her last, Nelle and James must fight to write their own happily ever after—before the final page turns.

Visit Garrett Curbow's website.

Q&A with Garrett Curbow.

Writers Read: Garrett Curbow.

The Page 69 Test: Whispers of Ink and Starlight.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Megan Kate Nelson's "The Westerners"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier by Megan Kate Nelson.

About the book, from the publisher:

From award-winning historian Megan Kate Nelson, an epic account of the creation of the American West in the 19th century, shattering the traditional frontier myth that has dominated popular American culture.

The Westerners tells two richly detailed and interwoven stories. The first reveals the captivating lives of women and men moving through the American West—Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Canadian and Asian immigrants—in the 19th century. The second tracks the attempts of many Americans to erase these westerners from history, through a frontier myth that lionized individualism and conquest and celebrated white settlers traveling west in search of prosperity.

Nelson’s vivid, eye-opening account centers on seven extraordinary individuals whose lives capture the true history of the frontier: Sacajawea, not just Lewis and Clark’s guide but an explorer who forged her own path; Jim Beckwourth, a biracial fur trader whose sharp cultural insight made him indispensable; María Gertrudis Barceló, a Hispana gambling saloon owner who broke every stereotype to become the wealthiest woman in Santa Fe; Ovando Hollister, a gold miner, soldier, and newspaper man who championed Western expansion; Little Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne chief whose courageous leadership secured his people’s future; Canadian immigrant Ella Watson, who strove to become a ranch woman in a male-dominated world; and the defiant Polly Bemis, a Chinese immigrant who carved out a life in Idaho despite federal expulsion efforts.

Nelson roots this bold new history of the American West in the deep research and gripping storytelling that have garnered her critical acclaim. Highlighting the perseverance and ingenuity of the communities that have otherwise been forgotten or erased from history, The Westerners challenges us to reimagine who we are and where we came from.

Visit Megan Kate Nelson's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Three-Cornered War.

The Page 99 Test: The Westerners.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Paulette Kennedy reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Paulette Kennedy, author of The Two Deaths of Lillian Carmichael: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

The Other Moctezuma Girls by Sofia Robleda

An epic coming-of-age story set in 16th-century Mexico, after the Spanish Conquest, centering Isabel, the daughter of the last Aztec empress. After her mother's death, Isabel embarks on a journey to discover her mother's story, and unveil the intriguing secrets hidden in her past. Robleda transports readers to a time when women used their wiles and intelligence to survive during an era when men colonized and claimed dominion over the countries they invaded, and viewed the women in their lives as political pawns. Isabel, and Tecuichpoch, the proud daughter of the famed Moctezuma--who relays her story through compelling diary entries Isabel finds on her quest--are both formidable, proud women, who inspire with their matriarchal strength and resilience. I especially enjoyed the elements of magical realism, which were so beautifully woven into the body of the story and...[read on]

About The Two Deaths of Lillian Carmichael, from the publisher:

A young woman, perceived dead, plots to reinvent herself in a gripping historical gothic about secrets, superstition, and murder by the bestselling author of The Devil and Mrs. Davenport.

South Carolina, 1853. Lillian Carmichael, privileged daughter of a disgraced Charleston family, is due to be hanged for the murder of her sister when fate gives her a second chance at life.

After a catatonic episode on the long walk to the gallows, Lillian is declared dead and entombed in the family mausoleum. She awakens days later, buried alive, and flees to the Lowcountry marshes to survive on her wits and reinvent herself. All the while, a series of exsanguination murders holds the terrorized city in thrall―as do the superstitions that the vanished Lillian is some craven creature, resurrected and out for blood.

Lillian finds sanctuary in a crumbling former plantation and a friend in Kate O’Malley, a charismatic actress adept at fashioning new identities. The two form an intimate and powerful alliance, but as the body count rises, the manhunt for Lillian reaches a fever pitch. It will take both women’s cunning for her to escape the gallows again, and to find her freedom, Lillian must first cross paths with the real killer and confront her own family’s deepest, darkest secret.

Visit Paulette Kennedy's website.

The Page 69 Test: Parting the Veil.

The Page 69 Test: The Devil and Mrs. Davenport.

My Book, The Movie: The Artist of Blackberry Grange.

The Page 69 Test: The Two Deaths of Lillian Carmichael.

Writers Read: Paulette Kennedy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top fairy tale retellings

Bar Fridman-Tell has a BA in art history and an MA in English literature. (She gleefully wrote her thesis about Victorian vampires.) She has worked as a bartender, a bookseller, a translator, and a library assistant. She is currently studying for a master's in library and information sciences, hoping to stay in a library for good. She lives in Toronto with her professor husband and two very fluffy cats. Honeysuckle is her debut novel.

At Lit Hub Fridman-Tell tagged six books that "take a fairy tale and pull one thread loose, to see what happens next, or tip the story on its side and see what new shape emerges." One title on the list:

T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call

T. Kingfisher is the master of fairy tale retellings, and though I seem to say it about each and every one of her books, A Sorceress Comes to Call really might be my favorite. Starting with the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Goose Girl,” T. Kingfisher unravels the idea of parental expectations in fairy tales—and the ever-present injunction to follow your parents’ commands—sketching an unsettling examination of abuse and power dynamics, with a side of (the best) heroic geese and a demonic, headless horse that really raises the bar for horse-related trauma.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Karen Rose Smith's "If Books Could Kill"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: If Books Could Kill (Tomes & Tea Mystery #3) by Karen Rose Smith.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Daisy Swanson’s daughter Jazzi has moved away to the lakeside town of Belltower Landing, but the apple doesn’t fall from the tree. Much like Daisy, she’s running a tea bar and bookshop––and has a knack for getting into hot water…

Town librarian Mathilda has a troublesome new emplROSEoyee, and after Jazzi spots the two of them arguing at the ice-sculpture festival, Mathilda asks Jazzi if she’d mind discussing her workplace woes over a cup of tea. During the visit, Jazzi also finds out about Mathilda’s top-secret stash of valuable first editions.

Soon afterward, those rare books have vanished—and Mathilda is dead. As the police check out suspects and a lawyer searches for the next of kin, Jazzi learns that the librarian’s life was as mysterious as any crime thriller. She’d left home and changed her name as a teenager, and always seemed a little lonely. Oddly, it’s her new employee who seems the most distraught.

It’s the off-season, so the upstate New York town is free of the usual swarm of tourists—but the quiet doesn’t last long. The press is descending as the murder makes national news, and rumors start circulating. With Belltower Landing steeped in suspicion, Jazzi must figure out whether the first editions were the real motive for sending Mathilda to her final resting place…

Visit Karen Rose Smith's website, Facebook page, and Instagram page.

Coffee with a Canine: Karen Rose Smith & Hope and Riley.

The Page 69 Test: Staged to Death.

The Page 69 Test: Murder with Lemon Tea Cakes.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Marks the Page.

The Page 69 Test: Booked for Revenge.

The Page 69 Test: If Books Could Kill.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top crime novels featuring female duos

Elle Cosimano is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, an International Thriller Writers Award winner, and an Edgar Award nominee. Cosimano’s debut novel for adults, Finlay Donovan Is Killing It, kicked off a witty, fast-paced contemporary mystery series, which was a People magazine pick and was named one of New York Public Library's Best Books of 2021. The third book in the series, Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun, was an instant New York Times bestseller. A TV show based on the series is now in development by Tina Fey and Lang Fisher for Peacock. In addition to writing novels for teens and adults, her essays have appeared in HuffPost and Time. Cosimano lives with her husband and two sons in Virginia.

[Q&A with Elle Cosimano; My Book, The Movie: Seasons of the Storm]

Her new novel is Finlay Donovan Crosses the Line.

At CrimeReads Cosimano tagged ten favorite crime novels featuring captivating partners in crime. One title on the list:

Lori Rader-Day, Wreck Your Heart

A down-on-her-luck country singer sets off with the half-sister she didn’t know she had to uncover their family history and solve a murder while searching for their missing mom.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Charlotte Brooks's "The Moys of New York and Shanghai"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution by Charlotte Brooks.

About the book, from the publisher:

The most extraordinary family you’ve never heard of.

Born to Chinese immigrant parents, the Moy siblings grew up in an America that questioned their citizenship and denied their equality. Sophisticated and self-consciously modern, they challenged limitations and stereotypes in the United States and sought new opportunities in China’s tumultuous republic. Sometimes the risks they took paid off, but their occasional recklessness also led to infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, and worse. Those in China faced pressure to collaborate with Japanese occupiers, making choices that had serious consequences for their siblings in the United States.

Charlotte Brooks’s gripping tale follows the family back and forth across the Pacific and through two world wars, China’s Nationalist and Communist revolutions, and the Cold War—events that the siblings and their spouses helped shape. The Moys’ incredible story offers a kaleidoscopic view of an entire generation’s struggle for acceptance and belonging.

Follow Charlotte Brooks on Instagram.

The Page 99 Test: Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends.

The Page 99 Test: The Moys of New York and Shanghai.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Pamela Steele

From my Q&A with Pamela Steele, author of In The Fields of Fatherless Children: A Novel:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I didn’t commit to a title until my gut told me I was in the last few days of writing a complete draft for submission. In thinking about a title, I remembered that an early reader had remarked on how biblical the story is, which brought my mind to biblical references I’d used in the story: Bethel and Thomas, for example. When I got to the point where I knew I needed a title, I ruminated on Solomon, the novel’s primary antagonist and a character I’d actually named for a long-dead ancestor. I picked up a Bible and scanned Song of Solomon for an idea and then found myself backtracking to Proverbs. When I happened upon Chapter 23, verse 10 and read it aloud: Do not move an ancient boundary stone or encroach on the fields of the fatherless . . . I knew I’d found a title that fit one of the novel’s larger themes of family relationships and abandonment: In the Fields of Fatherless Children.

Initially, the editors at Counterpoint thought the title fitting but...[read on]

Follow Pamela Steele on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

My Book, The Movie: In The Fields of Fatherless Children.

Q&A with Pamela Steele.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Albertine Clarke reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Albertine Clarke, author of The Body Builders: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

Right now, I’m reading Septology by Jon Fosse. It’s great, very long and very meditative, and tells the story of an ageing Norwegian painter living in a tiny fishing village. I like books that I can tarry with when I’m supposed to be doing other things, and Septology provides that. I also lost it for a couple of days and found it in my bed, so I feel that I’ve absorbed part of it through my skin.

Before that, I read The Hitch by Sara Levine. It was very funny, and I read the whole thing in a couple of days. There’s a...[read on]

About The Body Builders, from the publisher:

For readers of Megan Nolan and Sheila Heti, a mesmerizing Borgesian literary debut about the frayed borders between our bodies and minds.

Ada lives a solitary life. She spends her days in her London apartment building's swimming pool, occasionally visiting with her cousin Francesca and meeting her friends, each of them chatting, drinking, posing invitations Ada ignores. Ada's parents are recently divorced after her father became a bodybuilder: he spends his days at the gym, which is crowded and bright, warm with human proximity, infrequently calling to express minor concerns around his daughter's well-being.

When she meets a man named Atticus by the pool, Ada immediately feels an intimate connection between them: they share a life, in a way she can't explain. Little by little, Ada's estrangement from her familiar surroundings and from reality widens, as though seeing her reflection through a mirror, pieces of it falling away. After her mother entreats Ada to join her on a remote Greek holiday, Ada is jolted out of the physical world and into a new, artificial environment, one that a mysterious and potentially otherworldly force has created and designed for her. As this brilliant first novel pivots with masterful effect into the surreal and speculative, we move through Ada's experiences of life like spokes on a wheel, profoundly surprised by the enduring mystery of our existence, and of our relationships with ourselves and others. When a person's life, in the odd space between mind and body, is inherently one of isolation, are our connections with those around us merely projections of ourselves? And if not, where do they come from?

Albertine Clarke transforms the speculative into an entirely singular experience of deep interiority. The precision, subtlety, and confidence of her writing is nothing short of astonishing. THE BODY BUILDERS is new classic of the speculative fiction genre, landing like a blow, widening a crack that allows us to perceive the world wholly differently than we ever imagined.

Follow Albertine Clarke on Instagram.

Q&A with Albertine Clarke.

My Book, The Movie: The Body Builders.

Writers Read: Albertine Clarke.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top novels about women in the wild

Laura Hulthen Thomas’s deeply human, emotional storytelling explores blue and white collars, lovers and spouses, mothers and children, and the unique Michigan places that shape these relationships. Her novels, stories, and essays reveal the complexities of home, work, and the Midwestern landscape. Thomas is a Teaching Professor in the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College. Her first book, States of Motion, was a finalist for a Foreword Reviews Indie Award.

Thomas's new novel is The Meaning of Fear.

At Electric Lit she tagged "nine novels [that] tell the stories of women who find themselves battling their own wilds." One title on the list:

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The God of the Woods opens with the epigraph, “How quickly . . . peril could be followed by beauty in the wilderness . . . ” It’s 1975 and teen Barbara Van Laar has disappeared from a summer camp her family owns in the Adirondack woods, exactly 14 years after the mysterious disappearance of her brother, Bear. From there, the narrative dips back in time to show Barbara’s mother, Alice, trapped in an oppressive marriage, drugged during childbirth, forbidden to nurse, and isolated from everything natural about raising her kids. In the present, the search for Barbara in wild places slowly reveals Van Laar family’s secrets that never quite disappeared. Upon arriving to Camp Emerson, girls are taught to “sit down and yell” should they find themselves lost in the forest. The mystery of what happened to Barbara may prove that staying in one place and crying for help is exactly what women determined to survive should never do.

Read about another novel on the list.

The God of the Woods is among Benjamin Bradley's four mystery novels that explore legacy, Sandra Chwialkowska's five titles where bad things happen in beautiful places, Midge Raymond's eight books about women keeping secrets and Molly Odintz's eight thrillers & horror novels set at terrible summer camps.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Eli Hirsch's "Selves in Doubt"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Selves in Doubt by Eli Hirsch.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Selves in Doubt, Eli Hirsch focuses on the importance of the first-person perspective to a normal human level of rational thought and behavior. Hirsch argues that an "I-blind" being—one who lacks the capacity to employ the first-person pronoun—could not be fully rational; nor could they acquire normal knowledge of physical reality.

The meaning of the first-person pronoun is shown to have a particular bearing on the anomalous context of split-brain patients and generalizations of that context. Hirsch critiques Parfit's suggestion that a better language might eliminate or revise the concept of personal identity and the use of the first-person pronoun, on the grounds that the first-person perspective must remain as it is because the capacity to employ the first-person pronoun is a necessary condition for a language to be suitable for rational beings. Hirsch also contends that, contrary to Lewis and Sider, it may be difficult to find any other necessary condition for a language to be suitable for rational beings.

A bold claim defended later in the book is that it is metaphysically impossible to be sane while doubting the reality of other selves. This claim leads to a discussion of skepticism, and the final chapter consists in reflections on how facing skepticism relates to facing death.

Learn more about Selves in Doubt at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Selves in Doubt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Andrew Reid's "The Survivor"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Survivor by Andrew Reid.

About The Survivor, from the publisher:

A hijacked New York subway train, an anonymous killer, and a young man trapped by his hidden past converge in a breathless, breathtaking thriller

Do not turn off your phone
Do not get off the train
I know who you really are

Fired and walked out by security on his first day at his new job in New York City, Ben Cross thought his day couldn't get worse. But he couldn't be more wrong. Getting on the 1 train headed uptown, Ben starts receiving text messages from an anonymous killer, showing that they've already killed someone, then pointedly killing another as they got off the train to prove they aren't bluffing and to ensure Ben follows orders. But Ben wasn't picked at random—he has a history that no one is supposed to know.

At the same time, A NYPD detective, Kelly Hendricks, is on punishment duty with the transit police. The first one on the scene after the first murder, she gets on the train to find out what is really going on.

Switching rapidly between Cross and Hendricks, as the hijacked 1 train heads from South Ferry to 181st, the secret to the killer lies in Ben's own history—why he's been targeted and punished.

Follow Andrew Reid on Instagram and Threads.

Writers Read: Andrew Reid.

The Page 69 Test: The Survivor.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top sci-fi novels with ragtag crews

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged four "fun sci-fi escapades featuring motley crews." One entry on the list:

You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo

Retirement takes an unexpected turn in this exciting space opera. All former admiral Niko Larson wanted after retirement was to open a restaurant in a quiet part of the universe—which she has accomplished, starting The Last Chance with the help of her former unit. But when the government interferes and Niko and her crew end up on a combative sentient ship, they’ll have to rely on their old training and each other to get back to the restaurant.

Read about another title on the list.

Q&A with Cat Rambo.

My Book, The Movie: You Sexy Thing.

The Page 69 Test: You Sexy Thing.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Garrett Curbow reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Garrett Curbow, author of Whispers of Ink and Starlight: A Novel.

His entry begins:

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

This is a brutal WWI historical fiction following the love story of two men in combat. Winn puts you right there in the trenches, describing all the horrors of war, not gratuitously, but with enough realism to give you nightmares. I don’t read a copious amount of historical fiction, but I fell in love with the main characters of this novel, Gaunt and Ellwood, and found myself fascinated by the real-world events they had to endure. Their story, spanning the years of war, is stained with loss, fear, and longing. Two men stuck in Hell-on-Earth and politically restricted from being in love. It is both a heartbreaking and hopeful novel, and I definitely recommend it, especially if...[read on]

About Whispers of Ink and Starlight, from the publisher:

A spellbinding tale of forbidden love and the power of words, where a girl must choose between the life written for her and the future she dares to imagine.

In a small Georgia town, Nelle’s life has been carefully scripted by her creator and captor, the reclusive author Wallace Quill. Born from ink and imagination, every breath she takes is dictated by his pen. But on a star-studded Fourth of July night, she meets James—a young man with dreams as vivid as the fireworks above them—and suddenly, the unwritten becomes possible.

As Nelle and James fall deeply in love, they embark on a breathtaking journey across Europe, each new experience a defiant stroke against the words that bind her. But freedom has a price. With every mile they travel, the ink in Nelle’s veins threatens to rewrite their story. In a world where every moment could be her last, Nelle and James must fight to write their own happily ever after—before the final page turns.

Visit Garrett Curbow's website.

Q&A with Garrett Curbow.

Writers Read: Garrett Curbow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pamela Steele's "In The Fields of Fatherless Children," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: In The Fields of Fatherless Children: A Novel by Pamela Steele.

The entry begins:

June, sixteen and pregnant, lives with her mother and stepfather in the Appalachian mountains in the Vietnam Era. When her baby girl is born, Isom, her stepfather steals it and June sets off on a journey to find her.

The abundance of the novel's strong female characters calls for a female director. Greta Gerwig is my choice, hands down. She's amazing, especially with her direction of Lady Bird.

In the Fields of Fatherless Children is a polyphonic novel told in third person and the first person voices of Bethel and Granny, the main character’s mother and grandmother.

June, the main character, is seventeen, resourceful and resilient, but suffering a quiet rage.

June’s physical appearance harkens to her Scots-Irish-Cherokee ancestors. Sadie Sink, of Stranger Things, is 23 but looks seventeen and I have no trouble seeing her standing up to Isom, her step-father, or searching a flooded holler or scavenging for food and tools.

Tom, June’s older brother, is protective and tender and doesn’t want to spend his life...[read on]

Follow Pamela Steele on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

My Book, The Movie: In The Fields of Fatherless Children.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Atilla Hallsby's "Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric by Atilla Hallsby.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie, Atilla Hallsby argues that secrets play a pivotal role in organizing political discourse in the United States. Hallsby takes up contemporary case studies—ranging from the Valerie Plame scandal during the George W. Bush presidency, to the use of Saul Alinsky’s name as a partisan codeword for politicizing Obama’s Blackness, to Chelsea Manning’s public naming and outing—to show how dramatic revelations increasingly fail to produce meaningful change and instead reproduce entrenched racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies.

The core feature of these interlinked moments of crisis is the secret: a rhetorical patterning of political life organized by specific forms, each one lending a familiar shape to the shadows of American empire. These forms, theorized here as tropes, connect decades of secrets, linking the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror to the Trump-era reemergence of “deep state” conspiracy theories. As an extension of secrecy and surveillance studies, and with the aim of attaining a more accountable and just form of US governmentality, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie explains how still-unfolding political realities in the United States emerged, transformed, and regenerate.

Visit Atilla Hallsby's website.

The Page 99 Test: Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels with astronaut protagonists

Cecile Pin is a writer living in London. Her debut novel Wandering Souls was published in twelve languages. It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Prix Femina Etranger, and shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. She has won the Fragonard Prize for Foreign Literature, a Somerset Maugham Award, and a London Writers' Award. In 2025, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe. Her new novel is Celestial Lights.

At Lit Hub Pin tagged seven novels with astronaut protagonists, including:

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

As for To the Moon and Back [by Eliana Ramage], I read Jenkins Reid’s latest novel once I had finished writing Celestial Lights, and what a joy it was. Set against the backdrop of the 1980s US space shuttle program, Atmosphere is a story of love and human limitation, both epic and intimate in its scope.

Read about another title on the list.

Also see Samantha Cristoforetti's top ten books about space travel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Herodotus's "Histories"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series covers Herodotus's Histories. It begins:

Homer, the epic poet who wrote the story of the Trojan War, lived some four hundred years before Herodotus, who wrote the history of the Persian War. Thucydides, who lived just a generation after Herodotus, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, a war, he insisted, that was the greatest war that had ever happened, a war that lasted twenty-seven years and ended with Athens defeated and its empire destroyed. The defeat of Athens, and the long decline that, some believe, still continues, gives some reason to think Thucydides was right, that the war between Athens and Sparta was the most important war that had taken place, but there never would not have been a war had Athens not become an empire which seemed to threaten the freedom, if not the very existence, of Sparta and its allies. And Athens would not have become an empire if the Athenians had not had the courage, and the foresight, to stand against the attempt of Xerxes and the Persians to make, as Xerxes promised, “a Persian empire that has the same limit as Zeus’s sky. For the sun will look upon no country that has a border with ours, but I shall make them all one country, once I have passed in my progress through all Europe.” Why this did not happen, how Xerxes and the Persians were defeated, is what Herodotus wants to understand.

Herodotus will tell the story of the war, and will tell it better than the story Homer told of Troy. He will investigate, and uncover, the real causes, and not, like Homer...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Lauren Reding

From my Q&A with Lauren Reding, author of The Killer in the House:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title for The Killer in the House tells you a couple of important things. First, obviously, there’s a killer! But, to me, the bigger clue in the title has to do with the domestic setting: the house itself and the secrets inside.

In the book, down-on-her-luck Renee takes new a job as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family that’s also trying to get a fresh start. The father, Ed, has just been exonerated of the high-profile murder of his first wife, thanks to a sensational true crime podcast. Now, he’s excited to reunite his family and face the world again, a triumphant and vindicated man.

But from inside the house, Renee sees the secrets Ed’s family hides from public view. As she folds laundry and washes dishes, she begins to suspect that danger still threatens the family, and she can’t help but take risks (and then bigger risks) to assemble the whole story from the clues that never made it into the podcast, clues hidden inside...[read on]

Visit Lauren Reding's website.

Q&A with Lauren Reding.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that explore whiteness in intimate relationships

Lisa Low is the author of Crown for the Girl Inside, winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest from YesYes Books. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.

Low's full-length poetry collection is Replica.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "cross-genre books explore interracial relationships by inverting the white gaze." One title on the list:

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic memoir opens with her six-year-old son’s obsession with Michael Jackson, a fixation that generates endless questions about race and identity—both the pop star’s and his own. Conversations with Z, who is half-Jewish and half-Indian, ramp up as the 2016 election approaches, prompting Jacob to self-reflect. Colorism in Indian culture, her childhood, her parents’ arranged marriage, even her own love life gets reconsidered. We encounter weird white guys, women across races, her first real boyfriend, who is Black, and Jed, a white classmate from childhood who becomes her husband and Z’s dad. Jacob’s relationship with Jed is only one of the threads followed, but their conversations on mixed-race parenting and Trump-supporting family members are some of the most salient and complicated in the book.

Read about another entry on the list.

Good Talk is among Catherine Pierce's five titles to read in the early days of parenting and Amy Butcher's eight defiant books by women.

--Marshal Zeringue