Mary Anna Evans's "The Dark Library," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Dark Library: A Novel by Mary Anna Evans.

The entry begins:

The Dark Library is set in 1942, and it is heavily influenced by books and movies of the area, especially the brooding and atmospheric movies of Alfred Hitchcock and the dark suspense novels of Daphne du Maurier. If, like me, you love Hitchcock’s adaptation of du Maurier’s Rebecca, then you know exactly the vibe I had in mind.

My protagonist, Estella Ecker, who would much prefer that you called her E, is a scholar of Gothic literature, which she says are stories of “unhappy people in big houses,” so The Dark Library also nods to even earlier novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. (I almost called the book Unhappy People in Big Houses.) These are novels that are incredibly cinematic, so I hope you read The Dark Library with mental images of old stone mansions surrounded by overgrown gardens, brooding over the wind-tossed Hudson River.

Because this is a book that has one foot in the present and one foot in the past, I’m going to cast the movie twice, once with actors who are currently working and once with actors working in or around 1942. That’s twice the fun!

The Cast of The Dark Library, Now/Then

Dr. Estella “E” Ecker: Brie Larson/Veronica Lake at 32

Mother: Nicole Kidman/Veronica Lake at 52

Father: Kenneth Branagh...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans's website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (June 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her.

My Book, The Movie: The Traitor Beside Her.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Library.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Dark Library.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf's "Remnants of Refusal"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma by Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf.

About the book, from the publisher:

Analyzes how French and Chinese literary and filmic texts enact a series of feminist affective responses to the erasure of historical trauma.

Remnants of Refusal traces an affective discourse of feminist refusal across a series of French and Chinese works of film and literature. Developing an inventive comparative approach, Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf argues that this discourse takes shape in response to two national traumas and their aftermath: the German Occupation and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, respectively. In both contexts, events associated with the trauma were effectively erased from the official historical record and replaced by an unwritten code of public secrecy. And, in both contexts, three affects-melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion-provide means of expressing mourning without breaking the taboo of direct representation. In films and literary texts by Wang Anyi, Chen Ran, Jia Zhangke, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, and others, mourning is most frequently borne by and through the bodies of women, generating a broader feminist counternarrative to historical forgetting and burgeoning neoliberalism.

Learn more about Remnants of Refusal at the SUNY Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Remnants of Refusal.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels that capture the drama & intrigue of filmmaking

Joanna Howard is the author of the novel Porthole (2025) and the memoir Rerun Era (2019). Other works include Foreign Correspondent (2013), On the Winding Stair(2009), and In the Colorless Round, a prose collaboration with artist Rikki Ducornet (2006). She co-wrote Field Glass, a speculative novel, with Joanna Ruocco (2017). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Verse, Bomb, and parts elsewhere. She lives in Denver and Providence and teaches at University of Denver.

At Electric Lit Howard tagged eight novels that "offer some compelling explorations of the drama and intrigue of filmmaking." One title on the list:

The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg

This magnificent story of a woman in search of her dead or presumed dead or walking-dead husband is set to the backdrop of a horror film festival in Cuba and is reminiscent of Brian De Palma at his high point. As the protagonist of The Third Hotel follows a ghost through the streets of Havana in her own kind of horror story, Van Den Berg investigates the horrors behind horror film history, the cultural inheritance of gendered violence in the genre, and the mixed bag of seduction and dread inherent in the form.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Third Hotel is among Jae-Yeon Yoo's eleven top fictional hotels for your fictional vacation and Katie Yee's twenty books that are laced with sinister magic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Weina Dai Randel

From my Q&A with Weina Dai Randel, author of The Master Jeweler:

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

The Master Jeweler follows the journey of a jeweler who searches for fame, friendship, and family from her youth to middle age. It traces her growth, her ambition, her triumphs and mistakes, and ultimately, her realization of what truly matters in life. So I was pretty sure the title should be called The Jeweler, similar to Noah Gordon’s The Physician, which I adore. Simplistic and enduring, right? But as it often happens, I miscalculated. My publisher proposed to change it during the production stage, and my first reaction was, “Impossible! It has to be The Jeweler!” But then I realized they had a point, so we brainstormed and my editor came up with The Master Jeweler. I let it sit...[read on]

Visit Weina Dai Randel's website.

Q&A with Weina Dai Randel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alexander Menrisky's "Everyday Ecofascism"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely look into how fascist ideas permeate contemporary culture well beyond the far right

As challenges posed by climate change have intensified in the twenty-first century, right-wing figures in the United States and abroad have increasingly framed anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, and white-supremacist sentiments in terms of environmental survival. Everyday Ecofascism explores the insidious nature of this tendency, revealing how permutations of these perspectives in fact resonate across the political spectrum. Drawing on comparative studies of fascism writ large, Alexander Menrisky demonstrates that ecofascism is best understood not as a uniquely right-wing ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy and other forms of domination.

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Menrisky shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. Through a literary and cultural studies lens, he illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Opposite his analysis of ecofascism in action, Menrisky sheds important light on narrative resistances to dominant conceptions of race, nation, and territory by Native, queer, and women-of-color writers who have countered ethnonationalism for generations.

Bridging past and present, Menrisky powerfully nails down the emergent concept of ecofascism and forms a basis for understanding phenomena like Covid-19, ecological utopianism, and psychedelic environmentalism that detangles ecofascist tendencies from justice-oriented visions of place-based belonging.

Learn more about Everyday Ecofascism at the University of Minnesota Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Everyday Ecofascism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about our passion & need for reading

Donna Seaman is the adult books editor at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the Louis Shore Award for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Seaman created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness, her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.

Seaman's latest book is River of Books: A Life in Reading.

At Lit Hub she tagged seven books in which "writers ardently and incisively attest to how books save and sustain them, elucidating our profound need for books and affirming the need for us to defend our right to read and write freely." One title on the list:

Peter Orner, Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margins

Orner is a virtuoso of subtlety, nuance, and essence. He approaches moments, memories, and the emotions they arouse at a slant, almost surreptitiously, his tone wistful, pensive. He is also edgy and witty and sometimes furious. In both his fiction, including the ravishing short-story collection Maggie Brown & Others, and his essays, Orner mulls over his experiences growing up Jewish in Chicago and its North Shore suburbs, a milieu rife with struggle, longing, anger, secrets, lies, and love. Books are his refuge, as he asserts in Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (2016) and, somewhat more covertly, Still No Word from You.

Like Garner’s reading memoir, Orner’s is loosely structured as a day in the life of a writer, but instead of pegging it to meals, he marks time, from “Morning” to “Mid-Morning,” “Noon,”“3 P.M.,” “Dusk,” and “Night.” That said, this is actually an account of a day in the mind of a writer. Musings and recollected scenes from his past morph into thoughts, for example, about a poem by Amy Clampitt, finding his mother’s penciled “Yes!” in the margin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, and piquant reflections on Jean Rhys, her fiction, and her “merciless concision.” Orner practices merciful distillation, infusing every word with regret, sorrow, or wonder. Absurd and poignant family stories alternate with tales about such writers as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, the underappreciated Wright Morris and Maeve Brennan, Lorraine Hansberry, Bette Howland, Paul Celan, and Andre Dubus. The result is an intimate, melancholy, frank, and surprising paean to reading and books.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Mary Anna Evans's "The Dark Library"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Dark Library: A Novel by Mary Anna Evans.

About the book, from the publisher:

Can a family's dark history repeat itself?

Estella Ecker has returned to Rockfall House, the last place on earth she wants to be. Years after she ran away from her overbearing father, she has been forced back home to walk in his footsteps, teaching at the college he dominated and living in the fabulous home where he entertained artists and scholars for decades―and perhaps she owns it now, because her mercurial mother has disappeared. At the center of everything―the whispers, the rumors, the secrets―is her father's library of rare books, which she had been forbidden to touch while he was alive to stop her.

Everyone in town is watching Estella, with her dead father's name on their lips, and no one seems to care about her missing mother. Who were her parents, really, and is the answer hidden somewhere in the depths of Rockfall House? And who will Estella be, if she gathers enough courage to find that answer? What she will discover is that no one can escape the secrets hidden in this dark library.

Suspenseful and unsettling but ultimately triumphant, The Dark Library by acclaimed author Mary Anna Evans is a compelling tale of mystery, family secrets, and the quest for truth.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans's website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (June 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her.

My Book, The Movie: The Traitor Beside Her.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Library.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kathryn C. Lavelle's "Reluctant Conquest"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Reluctant Conquest: American Wealth, Power, and Science in the Arctic by Kathryn C. Lavelle.

About the book, from the publisher:

A comprehensive history of U.S. involvement in the Arctic, from the American Revolution through the acquisition of Alaska to the present day

What drives American foreign relations in the Arctic? It is difficult to give a unified answer to this question because most histories of the region are divided between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, Asian and European strategic interests, or federal government and Indigenous peoples’ concerns, making it difficult to understand the connections among the environmental challenges, scientific understandings, strategic calculations, and governance relationships. Most Americans do not think of their country as an Arctic power, yet it is a region where the United States has had important ties throughout its history.

In this sweeping study, from the founding of the country through the acquisition of Alaska to the present, Kathryn C. Lavelle considers American relations across the circumpolar North, incorporating discussions of economics, national security, and science that are conventionally separated. Lavelle argues that it is impossible to understand U.S. policy without a knowledge of American political development and of how scientific understandings have grown alongside studies of climate and other environmental issues. This history has important implications for future American policy regarding traditional national security and political economy, in addition to climate change and environmental cooperation.

Learn more about Reluctant Conquest at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Reluctant Conquest.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine great mystery & thriller novels set at sea

Sian Gilbert was born in Bristol, UK. She studied history at the University of Warwick, before teaching at a comprehensive school in Birmingham for almost five years. She now lives in Cambridge with her partner.

Gilbert's new novel is I Did Warn Her.

At CrimeReads she tagged nine novels that

explore the different ways setting a book at sea can impact characters and plot, from the inherent dangers of sailing, to being stranded, to what happens when the boat sinks and relationships are tested. The protagonists often have an offer they can’t refuse, a desire to taste a life so different from their own, and this leads to fatal consequences.

One title on the list:

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

No list of thrillers set at sea would be complete without The Woman in Cabin 10. Lo Blacklock, already traumatised from a burglary days before setting sail on the Aurora, has been given the job of writing about a luxury cruise. She’s been given a suite, unlimited drinks, delicious good, and the promise of complete five-star treatment for the whole trip. And at first, the promise of the A-list life at sea delivers. When picturing being on board a superyacht or expensive cruise liner, this is the image. But of course the glamour hides a darker edge, and Lo hears someone being thrown overboard from next door. And to make matters worse, the guest in the cabin, a woman who kindly lent Lo her mascara and has now vanished, apparently never existed at all. The crew deny all knowledge of her, and it’s up to Lo to uncover the truth.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Woman in Cabin 10 is among Seraphina Nova Glass's seven obsession thrillers, Lisa Alther's top seven books about lives lived at sea, and Jeff Somers's six best locked-room mysteries.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Mary Anna Evans reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans, author of The Dark Library: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

As always, my nightstand and my electronic reading implements are full of stuff I'm reading. I'm just not a one-book-at-a-time reader.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, because I have one of those minds that never stops, and that's not always a good thing. The Tao Te Ching doesn't help me achieve mental stillness, because nothing has done that yet, but it nudges me in the right direction. So does Le Guin's incandescent prose.

Stuart Turton's The Last Murder at the End of the World, because...[read on]

About The Dark Library, from the publisher:

Can a family's dark history repeat itself?

Estella Ecker has returned to Rockfall House, the last place on earth she wants to be. Years after she ran away from her overbearing father, she has been forced back home to walk in his footsteps, teaching at the college he dominated and living in the fabulous home where he entertained artists and scholars for decades―and perhaps she owns it now, because her mercurial mother has disappeared. At the center of everything―the whispers, the rumors, the secrets―is her father's library of rare books, which she had been forbidden to touch while he was alive to stop her.

Everyone in town is watching Estella, with her dead father's name on their lips, and no one seems to care about her missing mother. Who were her parents, really, and is the answer hidden somewhere in the depths of Rockfall House? And who will Estella be, if she gathers enough courage to find that answer? What she will discover is that no one can escape the secrets hidden in this dark library.

Suspenseful and unsettling but ultimately triumphant, The Dark Library by acclaimed author Mary Anna Evans is a compelling tale of mystery, family secrets, and the quest for truth.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans's website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (June 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her.

My Book, The Movie: The Traitor Beside Her.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Library.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six exciting thrillers set on planes & trains

At Book Riot Liberty Hardy tagged six exciting thrillers set on planes and trains, including:

Confessions on the 7:45 by Lisa Unger

While commuting from work, Selena Murphy starts to chat with a stranger on the train. As they pass the time talking, the stranger reveals that her husband is having an affair with the nanny. It’s a shocking secret to share with a stranger (say that three times fast), but they’ll probably never meet again, right? But then Selena learns that a nanny has gone missing, and maybe that stranger on the train wasn’t there by accident. As she looks into the disappearance, Selena finds connections, drawing her deeper into the mystery and unraveling her quiet life.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Ryan Cull's "Unlimited Eligibility"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Unlimited Eligibility?: Inclusive Democracy and the American Lyric by Ryan Cull.

About the book, from the publisher:

Rewrites the dominant narrative of the political work of lyric poetry in the United States since the nineteenth century.

What if increased visibility of marginalized identities-a goal of much socially committed lyric poetry in the United States-does not necessarily lead to increased social recognition? For many contemporary scholars, this is the central question of lyric politics. Unlimited Eligibility? revisits and deeply historicizes this question. Ryan Cull explores the relationship of a diverse set of poets, including Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, James Merrill, Thylias Moss, and Claudia Rankine, to a series of movements intended to build inclusion: the St. Louis Hegelians, cultural pluralism, identity politics, and multiculturalism. In tracing the tensions in lyric poetry's merger with the pursuit of recognition, Cull offers a new history of the political work of lyric poetry while exposing the discursive roots of the nation's faltering progress toward becoming a more inclusive democracy.

Learn more about Unlimited Eligibility? at the State University of New York Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Unlimited Eligibility?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books about history’s unsung legacies

Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection Agrippina the Younger and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Arterian's writing has appeared in BOMB, The Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Noemi Press, Arterian writes "The Annotated Nightstand" column at Lit Hub. She lives in Los Angeles.

At Electric Lit the author tagged ten books that "attend to the lacunae in the archive, reorienting the way we perceive the historical, and ultimately reconstructing the way we understand ourselves today." One title on the list:

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje

This “novel in verse” is about the titular Billy the Kid—a man who, despite seeming like someone out of a dime novel, was real. As a 19th century gunslinging outlaw, Billy is forever braided with ideas and American history. Ondaatje, inspired to push back against the glorification of the Wild West he encountered as a child reading comic books in Sri Lanka, wrote The Collected Works. He includes photographs, newspaper clippings, and interviews, as well as pages from those dime novels of his youth. Ondaatje’s poems are compressed, even restrained, against the expansiveness of his archival material. It is a stunning attempt to suss out who, exactly, was this living legend and how, as Ondaatje writes in his afterword, he was “turned into a cartoon.” Obdaatje explains, “I had to invent Billy from the ground up.” So Ondaatje gives us a man who catches a fly and holds the terrified buzz to his ear. “These are the killed,” Ondaatje’s Billy says before he lists those he murdered. “Blood a necklace on me all my life.”

Read about another book on Arterian's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Edmund Burke

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 is on The Remarkable Edmund Burke. It begins:

It is a mark of how much has changed, how words have changed their meaning, that Edmund Burke who, more than anyone else in the 18th century, defined what conservatism meant, has next to nothing in common with those who call themselves conservatives today. Today’s conservatives think government the enemy of liberty, and public spending at best a necessary evil; Burke thought liberty impossible without government, and public spending better than the expenditures of private wealth. When government spends on public projects, “The poorest man feels his own importance and dignity in it.” When the rich spend on themselves, it “makes the man of humbler rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority and degrades and vilifies his condition.”

This may seem to suggest that Burke wanted to narrow, if not eliminate, the difference between rich and poor. That was the last thing he wanted. Give everyone an equal share in the wealth of the country, you might end up with a reasonably prosperous middle-class, but you would not have the landed aristocracy of 18th century England, the kind of “gentlemen” able to run a country. If this sounds decidedly undemocratic, it is; and Burke makes no apologies. Liberty requires more than individual rights and majority rule. Libery without wisdom and without virtue “is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” Liberty requires order, and order depends upon the existence of what both Burke and Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy.” Without this aristocracy, “there is no nation.” But what, exactly, beyond the wealth of the the landed aristocracy of England, makes one a member of this “natural aristocracy?” Burke tells us, tells us in a single sentence, a single sentence that would shock to the limits, which I confess are not very great, of every law school teacher teaching legal writing who fails to understand....[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 Edmind Burke.

--Marshal Zeringue

KD Adlyn's "Sister, Butcher, Sister," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Sister, Butcher, Sister: A Novel by KD Aldyn.

The entry begins:

I can easily imagine the opening scene of my psychological crime thriller movie.

There will be blood. There will be carnage.

Follow along with me:

The opening scene starts monochrome. The viewer is at the shoulder of someone running through a forest path. It is dusk. There are cliffs on one side of the path, a roiling ocean beyond. We hear: the waves crashing, the wind in the trees, labored breathing.

The screen goes blank. Blood red droplets begin to fall.

The title comes in bursts:

SISTER…boom…BUTCHER...boom…SISTER

Now, in full color, as the opening credits roll:

Kate (played by English actor Carey Mulligan) runs along the beach. She shucks down to her bathing suit and dives through the surface.

A flash shot of hands sharpening a knife.

Aurora (Dakota Johnson) walks swiftly through the pine forest paths and...[read on]

Visit KD Adlyn's website.

Q&A with KD Aldyn.

The Page 69 Test: Sister, Butcher, Sister.

My Book, The Movie: Sister, Butcher, Sister.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alexandre F. Caillot's "Late to the Fight"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg by Alexandre F. Caillot.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Late to the Fight, Alexandre F. Caillot explores the combat performance of the Union soldiers who filled newly raised regiments that fought through the Civil War’s final year. Historians have typically regarded these late enlistees as substandard to those who signed on at the war’s start. Using the experiences of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments to assess the record of late-arriving soldiers under fire, Caillot shows that these forgotten boys in blue left behind a record of valor and sacrifice essential to achieving the destruction of the Confederacy.

Learn more about Late to the Fight at the LSU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Late to the Fight.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five essential books about Florida

Grace Flahive was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She studied English literature at McGill University in Montreal before moving to London, UK, in 2014, where she’s lived ever since.

Palm Meridian is her debut novel.

At Lit Hub she tagged five essential books about Florida (if you’re a Canadian writing a novel about Orlando). One title on the list:

Lauren Groff, Florida

Some books are books. Other books are places. More than any story collection I’ve read in my life, Lauren Groff’s Florida feels like tearing through the page and stepping into a fully realized portrait of the state, living and breathing and dangled with Spanish moss, as panthers pass through the shadows. In “The Midnight Zone,” a mother staying in a remote cabin with her two young boys falls from a stool and hits her head and finds herself traveling outside of her body, amongst the thick of the trees. In “Eyewall,” a woman hunkers down as a hurricane slams her home, and when the storm passes, a miracle is revealed: a single, intact chicken egg sits, gleaming, where the front steps had been.

These stories are rich, at times hallucinogenic, and unforgettable.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Shana Youngdahl's "A Catalog of Burnt Objects"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Catalog of Burnt Objects by Shana Youngdahl.

About the book, from the publisher:

The powerful story of a girl struggling to figure out her estranged brother, a new love, and her own life just as wildfires beset her small California town—perfect for fans of Nina LaCour and Kathleen Glasgow

Seventeen-year-old Caprice wants to piece her family back together now that her older brother has returned home, even as she resents that he ever broke them apart. Just as she starts to get a new footing—falling in love for the first time, uncertainly mending her traumatized relationship with her brother, completing the app that will win her a college scholarship and a job in tech—wildfires strike Sierra, her small California town, forcing her to reckon with a future that is impossible to predict.

A love story of many kinds, and a reflection of the terrifying, heartbreaking Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, where the author grew up, this is a tale that looks at what is lost and discovers what remains, and how a family can be nearly destroyed again and again, and still survive.

Visit Shana Youngdahl's website.

Q&A with Shana Youngdahl.

The Page 69 Test: A Catalog of Burnt Objects.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Erin Beeghly's "What's Wrong with Stereotyping?"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: What's Wrong with Stereotyping? by Erin Beeghly.

About the book, from the publisher:

What's Wrong with Stereotyping? offers a refreshing and accessibly written philosophical take on the ethics of stereotyping. Stereotyping is woven into every aspect of human experience: conversation, psychology, algorithmic systems, and culture. It relates to generalization and induction, core aspects of rationality. But when and why it is morally wrong to stereotype? This book tackles this deep and enduring puzzle. To solve it, Erin Beeghly delves into the relationship between stereotyping and another phenomenon, discrimination. Not only does stereotyping cause discriminatory treatment, she argues, stereotyping can itself be discriminatory. This insight-that to stereotype is to discriminate-enables a novel philosophical methodology, which builds towards a theory of wrongful stereotyping by analyzing the lived experiences of marginalized groups and existing theories of wrongful discrimination.

Core chapters evaluate important ethical wrongs: the failure to treat persons as individuals, disrespect, harm, prejudice, threats to freedoms, and the failure to treat persons as equals. One finds that there is no "essence" of wrongful stereotyping, a single property or set of properties that all problematic cases share in common. Nor are the wrongs of stereotyping reducible to an elegant number, two or three. Instead, wrongful stereotyping is a messy normative kind characterized by clusters of wrong-making properties, including all the ones noted here (and perhaps more). Readers will come away with a radically pluralistic, open-ended theory of wrongful stereotyping that they can use to identify wrongful stereotyping in their own lives and our contemporary world. Filled with thought-provoking examples and models for social change, this book emphasizes the messiness of moral reality and the importance of looking to the past in order to understand the ethical perils of stereotyping.

Visit Erin Beeghly's website.

The Page 99 Test: What's Wrong with Stereotyping?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that dive into the drug-fueled darkness of the club scene

Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, These Women, and Sing Her Down which won the LA Times Book Prize. Her new novel is Ecstasy.

[The Page 69 Test: The Art of Disappearing; The Page 69 Test: Wonder Valley; The Page 69 Test: These Women]

Pochoda won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and has been a finalist for the the Edgar Award, among other awards. For many years, she has led a creative writing workshop in Skid Row, Los Angeles where she helped found Skid Row Zine. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. She lives in Los Angeles.

At CrimeReads Pochoda tagged "five books that mix nightlife with noir, where the dance floor becomes a crime scene and the come-up always ends in a comedown." One title on the list:

The Beach by Alex Garland (1996)
Backpacker utopia meets jungle paranoia—with MDMA-fueled mania

Before Garland was scripting dystopias, he wrote The Beach—an existential thriller of Gen X disillusionment set on a secret Thai island. Though not a “club” novel in setting, the spirit of the rave scene is all over this book: the search for pure experience, the retreat from consumer society, and the chemical highs used to fuel both. MDMA plays a key role in the group’s descent, from communal harmony to tribalism and violence. Garland’s prose pulses with the heat and sweat of the tropics—and the slow rot of paradise lost.

Read about another book on the list.

The Beach also appears on Andrea Bartz's list of seven psychological thrillers for White Lotus fans, Lucy Clarke's top ten list of books about castaways, Hephzibah Anderson's list of eleven previously hip books that have not aged well, S J watson's list of six novels that could only take place at the seashore, Cat Barton's top five list of books on Southeast Asian travel literature, Kate Kellaway's ten best list of fictional holidays, Eleanor Muffitt top 12 list of books that make you want to pack your bags and trot the globe, Anna Wilson's top ten list of books set on the seaside, the Guardian editors' list of the 50 best summer reads ever, John Mullan's list of ten of the best swimming scenes in literature, and Sloane Crosley's list of five depressing beach reads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Katia Lief's "Women Like Us"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Women Like Us by Katia Lief.

About the book, from the publisher:

Katia Lief’s Women Like Us is a sharply-rendered literary thriller that examines the complexities and responsibilities of female friendship—what brings women together, and what drives them apart.

Joni Ackerman was tired of being invisible.

It’s been five years since Joni Ackerman tipped the antifreeze into her husband’s cocktail. Five years since he was found dead on the stairs. Five years since she got away with murder. At first, Joni feared the consequences of her transgression, but she’s learned to embrace the power of recklessness in a way she would have hated to see in anyone else. It was that recklessness, after all, that took her to this rewarding new life.

Joni now runs Sunny Day Productions alongside her daughter, Chris, and her best friend, Val. All is well in life and work until, one day, their balance is rocked when an unexpected, and unwelcome, visitor appears.

When Joni’s brother, Marc, resurfaces after a twenty-year estrangement, Joni braces for the sibling she knew—a cruel, vindictive conman who deftly switched between personas. But this Marc on her doorstep is different. He’s older, softer. And he seems to have overcome the self-inflicted traumas of his past.

But Val isn’t fooled. She knows exactly what sort of man Marc is, and she warns Joni to keep her guard up. When Mark inevitably betrays Joni’s trust, Joni is forced to look inward. As dark thoughts, and darker compulsions, take form, Joni can’t help but wonder: ‘Is psychopathy a family trait?’

Visit Katia Lief's website.

The Page 69 Test: Next Time You See Me.

My Book, The Movie: Next Time You See Me.

The Page 69 Test: Vanishing Girls.

My Book, The Movie: The Money Kill.

The Page 69 Test: Last Night.

Q&A with Katia Lief.

The Page 69 Test: Invisible Woman.

The Page 69 Test: Women Like Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joseph Kellner's "The Spirit of Socialism"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse by Joseph Kellner.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Spirit of Socialism is a cultural history of the Soviet collapse. It examines the millions of Soviet people who, during the cascading crises of the collapse and the post-Soviet transition, embarked on a spirited and highly visible search for new meaning. Amid profound disorientation, these seekers found direction in their horoscopes, or behind gurus in saffron robes or apocalyptic preachers, or by turning from the most basic premises of official science and history to orient themselves anew. The beliefs they seized on and, even more, the questions that guided their search reveal the essence of late-Soviet culture and its legacy in post-Soviet Russia.

To skeptical outsiders, the seekers appeared eccentric, deviant, and above all un-Soviet. Yet they came to their ideas by Soviet sources and Soviet premises. As Joseph Kellner demonstrates, their motley beliefs reflect modern values that formed the spiritual core of Soviet ideology, among them a high regard for science, an informed and generous internationalism, and a confidence in humanity to chart its own course. Soviet ideology failed, however, to unite these values in an overarching vision that could withstand historical change.

And so, as The Spirit of Socialism shows, the seekers asked questions raised but not resolved by the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet order―questions of epistemic authority, of cultural identity, and of history's ultimate meaning. Although the Soviet collapse was not the end of history, it was a rupture of epochal significance, whose fissures extend into our own uncertain era.

Learn more about The Spirit of Socialism at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Spirit of Socialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about the quiet power of libraries & museums

Marian Womack is a bilingual Hispano-British writer of Weird fiction, speculative and hybrid fiction, and fiction of the Anthropocene. Her novels include The Swimmers (one of the best ten SF books of 2021, The Sunday Times) and in the Walton & Waltraud uncanny mystery series The Golden Key (2020) and On the Nature of Magic (2023). Her short fiction has been collected in Lost Objects and Out of the Window, Into the Dark, nominated to two British Fantasy Awards and one British Science Fiction Association Award, and selected for Year’s Bests. She lives in Cambridge (UK).

At Electric Lit Womack tagged eight titles about the quiet power of libraries and museums, including:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves

Twenty years after its publication in English in Lucia Graves’s delectable translation, The Shadow of the Wind hasn’t lost any of its charm, and remains a classic of the “secret library” sub-genre of books (such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith) which imagine the library as the physical shape of occult or mystical desires. Its young protagonist, a bookseller’s son, becomes obsessed with Julian Carax, an obscure, cursed author, and starts investigating what could have happened to him along with his vanished bibliography. When the young bookseller’s life becomes intertwined with the truths he starts to discover about Carax, reality and fiction are shown to be different sides of the same coin. At its heart, this engrossing novel is an ode to the transformative power of books and storytelling, masterfully articulating that wondrous moment of discovery we’ve all experienced when finding the book that turned us into readers. But The Shadow of the Wind is not simply about books—the library at its centre, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, serves as a heart-wrenching metaphor for all that was lost under the long shadow of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, and in particular for the shameful “pact of forgetting” that the democratic transition imposed on Spanish citizens, removing the possibility of restorative justice around the horrors of Franco’s regime. This is a novel that became a modern classic for all the right reasons.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Shadow of the Wind is among Stuart Kells's top ten libraries in fiction and Bartholomew Bennett's top ten fictional booksellers.

--Marshal Zeringue