Pg. 99: Joshua R. Shiver's "War Fought and Felt"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers by Joshua R. Shiver.

About the book, from the publisher:

Joshua R. Shiver’s War Fought and Felt advances our grasp of the links between masculinity, emotion, and relationships during the American Civil War. It is the first broadly researched, multidisciplinary, and statistically supported approach to understanding the pivotal role of emotions in the everyday lives of Confederate soldiers. Using a source base of more than 1,790 letters and diaries from two hundred Confederate soldiers from North Carolina and Alabama, it builds upon traditional sociocultural and ideological arguments for why Confederate soldiers fought. Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it underscores the necessity of examining primal emotions when looking to understand soldiers’ motivations. It argues that the heightened emotions felt by these soldiers drove them to suffer, fight, desert, and willingly die.

Shiver examines the vital role of emotions within the context of soldiers’ relationships with their parents, children, wives, sweethearts, and comrades. These relationships and the emotions they engendered defined Confederate soldiers’ firsthand experiences of war and ultimately redefined the Confederate cause itself. A war that began steeped in ideology ended, for the soldiers, as one fought for the protection and future of one’s loved ones. Shiver demonstrates that the emotionally overwhelming nature of the war forced a tectonic shift in American masculinity in which the prewar emphasis on stoic individualism gave way to an outpouring of emotional expression and mutual interdependence. As a result, Confederate soldiers pragmatically embraced emotional and relational norms that were previously considered taboo.

By placing emotion alongside traditional ideological and sociocultural explanations for motivation, Shiver sheds light on a new area of research that promises to promote a deeper understanding of why the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest, most emotionally influential, and world-changing events of the last two centuries.

Learn more about War Fought and Felt at the LSU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: War Fought and Felt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten thrillers with characters you’ll love to hate

Tanya Grant writes twisty thrillers full of secrets, murder, and gossipy group dynamics. When not conducting highly suspicious web searches (for research!), she also writes romances. Her essays have appeared on HelloGiggles.com and Bust.com, and she's spoken about creativity on various podcasts. When she's not writing, you can find the author listening to the coyotes howl outside her Seattle-area home, drinking cinnamon tea, and chasing her two children.

Grant's new novel is Made You Look.

At CrimeReads she tagged "ten thrillers with characters you’ll love to hate," including:

May Cobb, The Hollywood Assistant

When a personal assistant to a famous Hollywood couple gets caught in their secrets and lies, she lands in the middle of a murder investigation. May Cobb is the queen of writing unlikeable women, and in this thriller she delivers plenty to enjoy, from the assistant who continues to make questionable choices to the angsty drama-magnet wife she works for.

Read about another thriller on Grant's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Crystal King's "The Happiness Collector," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Happiness Collector: A Novel by Crystal King.

The entry begins:

I don't cast actors while I'm writing. For me, that comes after, when the manuscript is finished, and I can look back at who my characters became on the page. In The Happiness Collector, my protagonist, Aida Reale, emerges as a historian who loses everything: her book deal, her academic position, and her sense of purpose. When she accepts a too-good-to-be-true job at a mysterious Italian company called MODA, she thinks she's salvaging her career. Instead, she discovers she's been hired by gods using mortals as pawns in their nefarious machinations.

Looking back at Aida now, I'd cast Emma Stone without hesitation.

Stone has that rare ability to play intelligence without making it feel performative. In The Favourite, she navigated court intrigue with a combination of calculation and vulnerability that would serve Aida perfectly. My protagonist isn't a warrior or a chosen one. She's a researcher who solves problems by digging through archives and asking uncomfortable questions. She needs to be smart enough to piece together what's happening, stubborn enough to keep pushing when things turn dangerous, and human enough that we feel her fear when she realizes the people she works for aren't people at all.

Stone also excels at playing women whose relationships are messy and complicated. The romance in this book is woven into Aida's transformation from someone who thinks she knows what she wants to someone forced to reckon with who she actually is. Stone can play that kind of internal conflict without spelling it out in dialogue.

What I appreciate most is Stone's gift for balancing drama with moments of levity. The Happiness Collector has humor woven through the tension. There's absurdity in discovering your boss is a god, in signing an NDA that binds you to divine employers, in trying to have normal conversations about happiness disappearing as part of your job. Stone can...[read on]

Visit Crystal King's website.

The Page 69 Test: Feast of Sorrow.

Writers Read: Crystal King (March 2019).

The Page 69 Test: The Chef's Secret.

My Book, The Movie: The Happiness Collector.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Steve Tibble's "Assassins and Templars"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood by Steve Tibble.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of the medieval world’s most extraordinary organisations, the Assassins and the Templars

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels.

In this engaging account, Steve Tibble traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.

Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

The Page 99 Test: Templars.

The Page 99 Test: Crusader Criminals.

The Page 99 Test: Assassins and Templars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top messy divorce novels & memoirs

At Vogue Daisy Jones and Emma Specter tagged seven "messy divorce novels and memoirs to read (or revisit) now," including:

Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo (2021)

This novel gives its female protagonist, Anna, a rich storyline beyond the bounds of her recent separation from her husband: Anna, a young biracial woman living in England, returns to her Nigerian hometown to seek out the truth about her father’s death, richly complicating the divorce narrative.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Hien Nguyen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Hien Nguyen, author of Twin Tides.

Her entry begins:

I am currently reading The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee. In it, we follow Alice Chow, a single mother struggling to juggle the delicate balance (or imbalance) of her life. A haunting intergenerational tale that is as heart wrenching as it is unnerving, it interrogates the legacies and violence the women in her family have inherited. I find myself drawn to horror by Asian women and other writers of color, in particular when...[read on]

About Twin Tides, from the publisher:

Long-lost twin sisters unravel the mystery behind their mother's disappearance and face the family betrayal that ultimately separated them in this breathtaking speculative young adult thriller.

Heiress and influencer Caliste Ha lives a glamorous life in an LA high rise, her perfectly curated social media feed hiding the cracks in her family. Across the country, Aria Nguyen is barely surviving as a freshman and academic scammer at Georgetown University. They have never met.

That changes with one unexpected and grim phone call. Their long-missing mother has been found dead in Les Eaux, Minnesota. Upon arrival in the sleepy town, Caliste and Aria discover another shocker—they are identical twins.

Ready to unearth the secrets that led to their mother’s death and their separation, they start looking for answers. But a vengeful ghost is haunting the waters, and an unknown enemy is watching their every move.

Can Aria and Caliste unravel all the sinister mysteries of Les Eaux, or will the town’s deadly secrets ultimately drag them under?

Visit Hien Nguyen's website.

Writers Read: Hien Nguyen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Russell Fielding's "Breadfruit"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree by Russell Fielding.

About the book, from the publisher:

Breadfruit trees are staples of the tropics, bearing cantaloupe-sized green-skinned fruits whose taste and texture resemble potatoes. More than three thousand years ago, breadfruit fueled the Pacific voyages of discovery that settled islands throughout Oceania. In the late eighteenth century, the British expedition that ended with the mutiny on the Bounty aimed, but failed, to introduce breadfruit to the West Indies as food for enslaved African laborers on sugar plantations. A later voyage resulted in the fruit’s widespread distribution and complicated role within modern Caribbean food cultures. In recent years, breadfruit has been touted as a tool for sustainable development and as a “superfood” with both health benefits and culinary versatility.

Russell Fielding tells these stories and many others, exploring breadfruit’s fascinating global history and varied present-day uses. Bringing together extensive research and vivid travelogues, including learning directly from local agriculturists, chefs, scientists, and holders of traditional knowledge, he provides an immersive narrative of breadfruit’s contributions. Fielding argues that breadfruit’s history comprises two journeys: first, from its origins in Southeast Asia across the Pacific; and second, its transplantation to the Caribbean. Today, a third journey is taking place, one that is spreading breadfruit throughout the world.

Engagingly written and compellingly argued, this book draws timely lessons from breadfruit’s past to forecast its future potential.

Visit Russell Fielding's website.

The Page 99 Test: Breadfruit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten overlooked dystopian novels

One title from TopTenz's "list of 10 dystopian novels which are often overshadowed by other champions of the genre but which are nevertheless worthy of some – and in some cases, even equal – praise:"

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis (1980)

Walter Tevis is better known for his novels like “The Hustler” and “The Colour of Money” which were adopted for the screen resulting in creation of some all-time great movies. But he also wrote a dystopian novel called “Mockingbird” in 1980, which ironically, is often overlooked by most readers in predisposition to Tevis’s own aforementioned more famous works.

Man is an endangered species in “Mockingbird”. But unlike the book from which the first sentence is borrowed, “Mockingbird” is a highly interesting novel which manages to avoid all the standard clichés of dystopian fiction. Robots do all the toiling for humans – be it cooking, cleaning, or driving. Perpetually stoned, suicidal, illiterate, and inevitably moving towards extinction, humanity’s only salvation rests with an android named Spofforth who himself has no desire to live (but was designed in such a way that he couldn’t commit suicide), and with a man named Paul Bentley and a woman named Mary Lou, who must rekindle the human desire to live through love.

Set in a dilapidating 25th century New York, the book follows a university professor Paul Bentley, who himself doesn’t know how to read. Comically enough, while watching old silent movies, he notices the subtitles at the bottom of the screen and it dawns on him that it represents what is actually being said in the movie. Eventually, he starts learning basic words of English language by watching numerous movies. A clash of motives happens between the human and the android when Bentley expresses his desire to teach other human beings to read to Spufford, because the android considers reading a crime as it deviates from the norm of the society.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Christina Kovac's "Watch Us Fall"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Watch Us Fall: A Novel by Christina Kovac.

About the book, from the publisher:

“A stunning work of suspense that’s impossible to put down. Christina Kovac masterfully combines a twisty missing person mystery, a heartbreaking love story, and an insightful exploration of the nature of obsession and trauma. I loved this novel.” —Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek

Lucy and her three best friends share a glamorous but decaying house in the heart of Georgetown. They call themselves “the Sweeties” and live an idyllic post-grad lifestyle complete with exciting jobs, dramatic love lives, and, most importantly, each other.

But when Addie, the group’s queen bee, discovers that her ex-boyfriend Josh has gone missing, the Sweeties’ worlds are turned upside down. In the days leading up to his disappearance, Josh, a star investigative journalist from a prominent political family, was behaving erratically—and Lucy is determined to find out why. All four friends upend their lives to search for him, but detectives begin to suspect that the Sweeties might know more than they’re letting on.

As the investigation unfolds, Lucy’s obsession with the case reaches a boiling point, and with it, her own troubling secrets begin bubbling to the surface of her carefully curated life. A thrilling account of the lies and delusions that lurk beneath cloistered groups of female friends and the sinister realities of celebrity, Watch Us Fall is a gripping mystery and an examination of the things we tell ourselves when we can’t face the truth.

Visit Christina Kovac's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cutaway.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutaway.

Writers Read: Christina Kovac (March 2017).

My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall.

The Page 69 Test: Watch Us Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: James Riordon's "Crush"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity by James Riordon.

About the book, from the publisher:

The fascinating story of gravity, from its intimate role in our daily lives to its cosmic significance.

Gravity is at once familiar and mysterious. It’s the reason for the numbers on your bathroom scale, the intricate dance of the stars and planets, and the evolution and eventual fate of the universe. In Crush, James Riordon takes readers on a tour of gravity from its vanishing insignificance on the microscopic scale to its crushing extreme inside black holes.

From the moment we lift our heads as infants until the moment we lie down and ultimately surrender to its pull at the end of our lives, we labor under the burden of gravity. It has guided the shape and structure of our bodies over eons of evolution and sculpted the Earth as it cooled from a blob of molten rock. As Riordon explains, the stars couldn’t shine without gravity holding them together. Even the atoms that form you and everything around you were forged in stellar furnaces that gravity built. It took Einstein to realize that gravity is not, in fact, a force at all, but instead the curvature of space and time.

A fascinating and memorable read, Crush examines our personal relationships with gravity, explores gravity’s role in making the universe uniquely hospitable for life, and even reveals how the mundane flow of water in your kitchen sink offers a glimpse into the secrets of black holes.

Visit James Riordon's website.

The Page 99 Test: Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight moving & meaningful nonfiction books about pets

Carolina Ciucci is a teacher, writer and reviewer based in the south of Argentina. She hoards books like they’re going out of style. In case of emergency, you can summon her by talking about Ireland, fictional witches, and the Brontë family. At Book Riot she tagged "eight lovely nonfiction books about pets." One title on the list:

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan looks at her life in eras, and each era is marked by a particular dog. This chronicle of her life, including her transition, is full of beautiful memories of her furry friends and their love. Always, primarily, the book is about love. And who can love better than a dog?

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Lexi Alexander

From my Q&A with Lexi Alexander, author of Dead Set on You: A Novel:

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

A title can make or break a book – so choosing the title for Dead Set on You was many iterations in the making. In fact, my original working title was Hating You, Interrupted, because I knew from the beginning I wanted something that telegraphed rivals-to-lovers energy (“hating you”) with a twist in the relationship (“interrupted”), plus a nod to the supernatural hiccup at the heart of the story: my heroine waking up as a ghost tethered to her former friend, now rival.

Along the publishing journey, the title changed to Dead Set on You. This was also many ideas in the making – there’s a notepad with all the scribbled options shoved into a desk drawer somewhere. As for Dead Set on You – it does so much work as a title. It signals the paranormal element, keeps the romantic tension front and center, and still winks at the rivalry at the core of the book. I’m biased but I also think it’s sharp, memorable, and...[read on]

Visit Lexi Alexander's website.

Q&A with Lexi Alexander.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Marion Orr's "House of Diggs"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr. by Marion Orr.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan's first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till's killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs's rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson—two of Diggs's better-known Black contemporaries.

Vividly written and deeply researched, House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in US history. Congressman Diggs was a legislative lion whose unfortunate downfall punctuated his distinguished career and pushed him and his historic accomplishments out of sight. Now, for the first time, House of Diggs restores him to his much-deserved place in the history of American politics.

Learn more about House of Diggs at the University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: House of Diggs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six suspense novels & twisty thrillers set in small towns

Laura Griffin is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than thirty books and novellas. She is a two-time RITA Award winner, as well as the recipient of the Daphne du Maurier Award.

Her new novel is Innocence Road.

At CrimeReads Griffin tagged six favorite suspense novels and twisty thrillers set in small towns, including:

Rachel Howzell Hall, Fog and Fury

Irony is alive and well in Rachel Howzell Hall’s thriller about a private investigator who moves to Haven, California, hoping to escape the violence of L.A. but ends up getting embroiled in a murder investigation. Hall sets her story in a town nicknamed “Mayberry by the Sea,” but savvy readers will clue into the surprise she is creating for her protagonist, Sonny Rush, who soon after arrival gets called upon to help solve the mysterious death of a teenage boy.

It doesn’t take long for Sonny to figure out that nothing is as it seems in Haven, and that charming little communities can hide dangerous secrets.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Kovac's "Watch Us Fall," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall: A Novel by Christina Kovac.

The entry begins:

Addie James, who is the pivotal love interest/best friend, should be played by Zendaya. I always imagined Zendaya. In fact, when Josh first sees her, he notices Addie’s “big eyes and sharp cheeks, her warm brown skin... the way she moved. Like a dancer, or an athlete. Someone joyful in their body.” And Zendaya moves like that.

Anya Taylor-Joy from Queen’s Gambit would be an interesting choice for Lucy. She’s got a...[read on]

Visit Christina Kovac's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cutaway.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutaway.

Writers Read: Christina Kovac (March 2017).

My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Min Joo Lee's "Finding Mr. Perfect"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race by Min Joo Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Finding Mr. Perfect explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. Author Min Joo Lee argues that disparate racialized erotic desires of Korean pop culture fans, foreign tourists to Korea, Korean men, and the Korean nation converge to configure the interracial and transnational relationships between these tourists and Korean men. Lee observes how racial prejudices are developed and manifested through interracial and transnational intimate desires and encounters. This book is the first to examine the interracial relationships between Hallyu tourists and Korean men. Furthermore, it is the first to analyze Korea as a popular romance tourist destination for heterosexual women. Finding Mr. Perfect illuminates South Korean popular culture’s transnational fandom and tourism as a global phenomenon where fantasies and realities converge to have a tangible impact on individual lives.

Learn more about Finding Mr. Perfect at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Finding Mr. Perfect.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen books on why & how to preserve democracy

One title on Tertulia's list of "books that explain how we have arrived at a precarious state of democracy and what is to be done about it:"

The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back
Madiba K. Dennie

Blending scholarship with accessible analysis of Constitutional law, this book underscores the ambition of the Reconstruction Amendments, which were adopted in the wake of the Civil War and sought to build a democracy with equal membership for marginalized people. The author argues the law must serve to make that promise of democracy real in spirit, not in following the original interpretation of a bygone era.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 99 Test: The Originalism Trap.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Cara Black reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Cara Black, author of Huguette.

Her entry begins:

Right now I'm reading Generation (Volume 1) published in 1987 by Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman.

This is a non-fiction book in French (and I confess DeepL for translation is very helpful in reading this 600 page book!)

I found this book secondhand in Paris at the wonderful Gibert Joseph bookstore near Saint Michel.

My friend recommended to read this since I'm doing research on May 1968 and the Sorbonne student uprising for my next book. He was right - it's got everything - firsthand accounts of protestors, journalists, police actions. Descriptions of...[read on]

About Huguette, from the publisher:

In the lawlessness of post–World War II France, a resilient young woman fights to survive and make a living, no matter the cost—from the New York Times bestselling author of Three Hours in Paris and the Aimée Leduc series

After Libération, spring 1945: Seventeen-year-old Huguette Faure is a survivor. The war has taken everything from her—both her parents and her sense of safety. Now, pregnant and on the lam, she cannot return to her childhood home in Paris. Forced to reinvent herself, she must outrun her father’s enemies, who want her dead. After narrowly avoiding jail time—thanks to the help of a kindhearted police officer named Claude Leduc—Huguette lands a job assisting a legendary film director. As her role develops from helping him with chores to cooking his books, she sees an opportunity to break free from the ghosts of her past once and for all.

In this big-hearted story of resilience, New York Times bestselling author Cara Black offers a wholly original depiction of postwar France as well as introduces Claude Leduc—the man who decades later inspired his granddaughter, Aimée, to become a private investigator.

Visit Cara Black's website and follow her on Instagram and Threads.

The Page 69 Test: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

My Book, the Movie: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

The Page 69 Test: Murder below Montparnasse.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Champ de Mars.

The Page 69 Test: Three Hours in Paris.

The Page 69 Test: Night Flight to Paris.

Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2023).

Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Murder at la Villette.

My Book, The Movie: Huguette.

The Page 69 Test: Huguette.

Writers Read: Cara Black.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Orlando Murrin's "May Contain Murder"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: May Contain Murder by Orlando Murrin.

About the book, from the publisher:

For fans of Nita Prose, Benjamin Stevenson, and Jessa Maxwell, this delightfully witty and tightly-written new locked room culinary mystery from the MasterChef semi-finalist, cookbook writer, and bestselling author of Knife Skills for Beginners features a charming chef, delicious original recipes, and a killer cruise aboard a luxurious superyacht.

“If it weren’t for all the terrible things that have been happening, I’d consider myself the luckiest man alive...”

While his flooded house undergoes repairs, chef-turned-writer Paul Delamare has been offered an accommodation upgrade—an all-expenses-paid trip aboard a private superyacht in the company of Xéra, one of his dearest friends. Paul will help Xéra work on her memoirs as Maldemer glides its sumptuous way to the Caribbean. The scenery is stunning, the luxury is unparalleled, and the food…well, at least the dishes that Paul is roped into preparing are delicious. The hired chef, meanwhile, seems completely out of her depth.

She’s not the only one. Much as Paul adores Xéra, a Parisian socialite who he was introduced to by his late lover, Marcus, he has little in common with the other guests, a motley crew consisting of Xéra’s new husband and his grasping family.

When Xéra’s priceless new necklace goes missing, Paul falls under suspicion. But there’s far worse in store, as one of the passengers is found dead in mysterious and grisly circumstances. The stormy weather matches the threatening mood onboard, and as Maldemer veers off course, every semblance of order goes with it.

Above and below deck there are secrets and dangerous alliances. And as he untangles the truth, it becomes clear that Paul’s sharing close quarters with a killer eager to make this his final voyage...

Visit Orlando Murrin's website.

The Page 69 Test: Knife Skills for Beginners.

Q&A with Orlando Murrin.

The Page 69 Test: May Contain Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Raphael Magarik's "Fictions of God"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator by Raphael Magarik.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new history of literary narration rooted in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation.

We often identify secularization's characteristic literary form as the modern novel: out with divine scripture, in with human fictions. In Fictions of God, Raphael Magarik argues that this story overlooks the cultural upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. Early reformers imagined a Bible that was neither infallible nor inerrant but fictional, composed by a divine counterfactual: God crafted the text, they said, as if it had been written by the prophets. Early modern Protestants now found in their Bibles not a source of foundational truths but a model for unreliable narration, even fiction.

Fictions of God traces how this approach to literature passed from biblical commentators to poets like Abraham Cowley, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson amid the violent emergence of a new religious and political order—long before the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel. The result is a transformative account of the Reformation’s effect on imaginative literature and the secularization of the Bible itself.

Learn more about Fictions of God at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Fictions of God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 20 crime fiction, mysteries, and thrillers: "CrimeReads"

One title on the top twenty list of the best crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers of 2025, according to CrimeReads:

Murder Takes a Vacation, Laura Lippman

Stalwart mystery author Lippman takes up the Agatha Christie mantle in her newest novel, Murder Takes a Vacation, in which Tess Monaghan’s longtime sidekick, Mrs. Blossom, gets her turn in the spotlight. The action sees Blossom head to France for a once-in-a-lifetime cruise; her interest is sparked by a man on board, but, naturally, the man soon turns up dead in Paris, and the ship begins looking more like a vipers’ nest, as Blossom unspools a mystery among the passengers. The new novel adds a welcome layer of depth to the character and constructs a worthy mystery for her to solve, all set against the splendors of a voyager’s France. –

Read about another novel on the list.

Murder Takes a Vacation is among Sue Hincenbergs's eight mysteries and thrillers featuring older sleuths and criminals.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Takes a Vacation.

--Marshal Zeringue