Pg. 99: Drew A. Swanson's "A Man of Bad Reputation"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction by Drew A. Swanson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden’s impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In recounting Stephens's murder, the subsequent investigation and court proceedings, and the long-delayed confessions that revealed what actually happened at the courthouse in 1870, Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural North Carolina, Swanson argues, was an economic and ecological transformation. Arson, beating, and murder became tools to control people and landscapes, and the ramifications of this violence continued long afterward. The failure to prosecute anyone for decades after John Stephens's assassination left behind a vacuum, as each side shaped its own memory of Stephens and his murder.

The malleability of and contested storytelling around Stephens's legacy presents a window into the struggle to control the future of the South.

Learn more about A Man of Bad Reputation at the The University of North Carolina Press.

The Page 99 Test: A Man of Bad Reputation.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jerome Charyn reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jerome Charyn, author of Ravage & Son.

His entry begins:

I am currently reading a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk. I intend to write a story about Wittgenstein, who served as a porter at Guy’s Hospital during World War II. This was his war service. My narrator, a young American caught in London during the Blitz, befriends Wittgenstein and the story is about their curious friendship.

Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century. He was also a Jewish homosexual who converted to Catholicism. He came from the richest family in Vienna and...[read on]

About Ravage & Son, from the publisher:

A master storyteller’s novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century Manhattan

Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror.

Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish “Mr. Hyde,” a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.

A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.

Visit Jerome Charyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God.

My Book, The Movie: Big Red.

Q&A with Jerome Charyn.

The Page 69 Test: Ravage & Son.

Writers Read: Jerome Charyn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top comeback books

Mark Dent is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Vox, Wired, The Kansas City Star, and elsewhere. He is also a senior writer at The Hustle, a business and tech newsletter. His work has been cited as a notable mention in The Best American Sports Writing, and he has also been named Texas Sportswriter of the Year. Dent grew up in the Kansas City area and lives in Dallas.

Rustin Dodd is a senior writer at The Athletic. He previously worked as a sportswriter at The Kansas City Star from 2010 to 2017. His work has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Dodd grew up in the Kansas City area and lives in Brooklyn. He is a graduate of the University of Kansas.

Dent and Dodd are co-authors of Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin' Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback.

At Lit Hub they tagged seven of their favorite “comeback” books, including:

Kara Goucher and Mary Pilon, The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team

Athletes wow us all the time with comebacks on the court, field, and track. They face challenges outside of the games, too, which Goucher, writing with Pilon, openly shares in this memoir. Goucher turned a surprisingly successful college distance running career into an even more surprising and successful professional career, winning a silver medal in the 10,000 Meter Run at the 2007 World Outdoor Championships, the first time an American woman had medaled in that event.

Goucher, who trained with famed runner Alberto Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project, was on top of the world. But then she faced a tougher challenge shared by many women distance runners, who contend with a system riddled with abuse, body shaming, and cheating. Ultimately, Goucher achieves a greater comeback than anything she did in a race: triumphing over Salazar to hold him—and Nike—accountable.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joshua Ehrlich's "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge by Joshua Ehrlich.

About the book, from the publisher:

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.

Follow Joshua Ehrlich on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Robert Swartwood's "The Killing Room"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Killing Room by Robert Swartwood.

About the book, from the publisher:

From USA Today bestselling author Robert Swartwood comes another bone-chilling thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

While on vacation in Las Vegas, a businessman wakes up in a strange hotel room to find a dead woman in the bathtub.

Panicked, he runs. But before he can get far, a pair of detectives stop him.

Desperate, he tells them that he’s innocent. That there’s no way he killed the woman. That he’ll do anything not to go to prison.

That’s when they offer him a way out.

But there is no way out—as the detectives will soon learn.

Perfect for fans of Lee Child, Michael Sloan, and Robert Crais, The Killing Room races readers from one revelation to the next at breathtaking speed.

Visit Robert Swartwood's website.

Q&A with Robert Swartwood.

The Page 69 Test: The Killing Room.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five academic novels that won’t make you want to go back to school

Akemi C. Brodsky is the author of The Brill Pill. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a bachelor of science, then moved to the UK to do a master’s in engineering at Imperial College London. She currently lives in the Bay Area and spends most of her spare time traveling, cooking, seeing family and friends, and watching TV.

At Tor.com Brodsky tagged five academic novels that won’t make you want to return to school, including:

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

This is a controversial pick because I have heard some people say that they would love to attend the University. Personally, there are a few too many public floggings for me to voluntarily enroll. Kvothe, on the other hand, is desperate to be allowed in. Spurred by unspeakable tragedy and scrambling from a life of destitution, he is fueled by a need for knowledge, a thirst for vengeance, and his own extraordinary aptitude. School for Kvothe is fundamental but for others it is grueling. The unremitting pressure lands some few hundred students in an asylum known familiarly as the ‘Crockery.’ Though the ‘Crockery’ is fiction, the mental strain of college can be all too real, and for those of us not who are not ridiculously good at, well, everything, the idea of going back is less than appealing. That said, the story begins at some point in the future, where Kvothe is apparently no more than a humble innkeeper, laying low under a false name. A beautifully slow roll into a world of satisfyingly academic magic, The Name of the Wind is a fascinating character study that will leave you needing more (not least because the third part of the trilogy has yet to be released).

Read about another entry on the list.

The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles Series #1) is among Meghan Ball's eleven top fictional bands in sci-fi & fantasy and ten top fictional educational institutions from SFF books, and Arwen Elys Dayton's five top books about false identities.

My Book, The Movie: The Name of the Wind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ali Bryan's "The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships: A Novel by Ali Bryan.

About the book, from the publisher:

I'm a big fan of movies with ensemble casts, tight thematic cores and storylines that intersect, surprise and appease. Think Moonstruck, Little Miss Sunshine, The Royal Tenenbaums, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Barbie. Think The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships. The story takes place over the course of a single night, the hottest of the year, and the most important. The town is hosting a high stakes karaoke competition to commemorate the one year 'deathversary' of Crow Valley's local hero, Dale Jepson, who died after wildfires devastated the town. The prize? Big money and a chance to represent Crow Valley at the National Championships. But as the competition for vocal supremacy heats up, a prisoner (an arsonist and murderer no less) escapes from the local correctional facility and all of Crow Valley is thrown into chaos.

The story is told from five alternating POVs, each of whom share a connection to Dale. There's Roxanne, honorary karaoke judge, mid-life and Dale's widow. She works for the town and after a year, is still knee deep in grief. She carries his ashes around in a Thermos, talks to him through an empty Tic Tac container and wears a headlamp (the equivalent of leaving a porch light on) in case he comes back. She's unhinged, sarcastic and common. She's Melissa McCarthy.

There's Brett, Dale's best friend. They played ball together and...[read on]

Visit Ali Bryan's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Emily Hauser's "How Women Became Poets"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature by Emily Hauser.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the idea of the author was born in the battleground of gender

When Sappho sang her songs, the only word that existed to describe a poet was a male one—aoidos, or “singer-man.” The most famous woman poet of ancient Greece, whose craft was one of words, had no words with which to talk about who she was and what she did. In How Women Became Poets, Emily Hauser rewrites the story of Greek literature as one of gender, arguing that the ways the Greeks talked about their identity as poets constructed, played with, and broke down gender expectations that literature was for men alone. Bringing together recent studies in ancient authorship, gender, and performativity, Hauser offers a new history of classical literature that redefines the canon as a constant struggle to be heard through, and sometimes despite, gender.

Women, as Virginia Woolf recognized, need rooms of their own in order to write. So, too, have women writers through history needed a name to describe what it is they do. Hauser traces the invention of that name in ancient Greece, exploring the archaeology of the gendering of the poet. She follows ancient Greek poets, philosophers, and historians as they developed and debated the vocabulary for authorship on the battleground of gender—building up and reinforcing the word for male poet, then in response creating a language with which to describe women who write. Crucially, Hauser reinserts women into the traditionally all-male canon of Greek literature, arguing for the centrality of their role in shaping ideas around authorship and literary production.

Visit Emily Hauser's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Women Became Poets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Robert Swartwood

From my Q&A with Robert Swartwood, author of The Killing Room:

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

The book starts with a businessman waking up in a Las Vegas hotel room that isn't his to find a dead woman in the bathtub. That's literally the first few pages. So the title, The Killing Room, gives the reader a good sense of what they're getting into when they pick up the book.

At the same time, I've always loved books that lead you in one direction and then suddenly go in an entirely different direction. Many times with thrillers, you know where the story is going after the first few chapters. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing! I’ve certainly written books like...[read on]

Visit Robert Swartwood's website.

Q&A with Robert Swartwood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten female spies in fiction

Kim Sherwood is an author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she lives in the city. Her first novel, Testament (2018), won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing (2022), is the first in a trilogy commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond. Her latest novel, A Wild & True Relation (2023), was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”

At the Guardian Sherwood tagged her top ten female spies in fiction, including:

Moonraker, Ian Fleming (1955)

When Fleming sat down to write Casino Royale in 1952, he intended to “write the spy story to end all spy stories”. He did, reinventing the genre and creating an icon. Fleming is less known for his female characters, perhaps overshadowed by their cinematic incarnations and the trope of the “Bond girl.” It’s a shame, because Fleming invests them with rich back stories and motivations. Best of all is cool-headed and capable Gala Brand, a special branch agent embedded with suspicious rocket-engineer Drax. It’s Brand’s mission that Bond joins, and her first impression is damning: “He could probably shoot all right and talk foreign languages and do a lot of tricks that might be useful abroad. But what good could he do down here without any beautiful spies to make love to.” The tender relationship that emerges delivers the most poignant ending to any Bond novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mariana Alessandri's "Night Vision"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods by Mariana Alessandri.

About the book, from the publisher:

A philosopher’s personal meditation on how painful emotions can reveal truths about what it means to be truly human

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about feeling bad.

In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Søren Kierkegaard sat in their anger, sadness, and anxiety until their eyes adjusted to the dark. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate “night vision” and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity.

Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods―and ourselves―as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human.

Visit Mariana Alessandri's website, and learn more about Night Vision at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Night Vision.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight unforgettable books about missing persons

Una Mannion’s debut novel is A Crooked Tree.

Her new novel, Tell Me What I Am, is due out in the US in August 2023.

At CrimeReads Mannion tagged eight great books about missing persons. One title on the list:

Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan

In the summer of 2005, 18-year-old Kim Larsen vanishes on her way to work. Her Chevette is found several days later in a nearby town. O’Nan resists generic expectations, side-lining the true-crime thriller elements to offer a compassionate portrait of a family afraid to give up in the face of tragedy. Narrated alternately by Kim’s mother, father and fifteen-year-old sister, O’Nan shows us a different kind of procedural: endless waiting, spending nights with the ‘missing’ on websites as her sister does, or taking pills to fall into unconsciousness like her mother. Perhaps the most devastating character is the father, desperately driving up and down highways distributing flyers, trying to keep his daughter in the public consciousness.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Songs for the Missing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Genevieve Plunkett's "In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel: A Novel by Genevieve Plunkett.

About the book, from the publisher:

A young mother finds herself caught between a love affair and the wrath of her husband, who will do anything to put an end to it—even use his wife’s bipolar diagnosis against her

When faced with newfound feelings for Theo, the drummer of her band, married young mother Portia must decide whether to follow her heart or question her sanity. Going off her medication feels like waking up for the first time. But could this clarity be harmless daydreaming, or a symptom of something more serious?

Portia’s husband, a well-respected prosecutor in their small Vermont town, is convinced of the latter. He retaliates, initiating an intervention, claiming that Portia’s behavior is proof of her bipolar disorder. With lawyer-like cunning, he uses elements from her past to break her resolve until she agrees to being committed to a psychiatric hospital. In the hospital, Portia’s sense of reality is tested, and hard truths about her marriage, her love for Theo, and her most vulnerable hopes and desires are revealed.

In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is a potent and at times devastating story of stark tenderness. Written like a dream, this novel brings us toward new understandings of the flawed, yearning, multifaceted self.

Visit Genevieve Plunkett's website.

Q&A with Genevieve Plunkett.

The Page 69 Test: In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Liz Przybylski's "Sonic Sovereignty"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams by Liz Przybylski.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does sovereignty sound like?

Sonic Sovereignty explores how contemporary Indigenous musicians champion self-determination through musical expression in Canada and the United States. The framework of “sonic sovereignty” connects self-definition, collective determination, and Indigenous land rematriation to the immediate and long-lasting effects of expressive culture. Przybylski covers online and offline media spaces, following musicians and producers as they, and their music, circulate across broadcast and online networks.

Przybylski documents and reflects on shifts in both the music industry and political landscape in the last fifteen years: just as the ways in which people listen to, consume, and interact with popular music have radically changed, large public conversations have flourished around contemporary Indigenous culture, settler responsibility, Indigenous leadership, and decolonial futures.

Sonic Sovereignty encourages us to experiment with the temporal possibilities of listening by detailing moments when a sample, lyric, or musical reference moves a listener out of time. Przybylski maintains that hip hop and many North American Indigenous practices, all drawn from storytelling, welcome nonlinear listening. The musical readings presented in this book thus explore how musicians use tools to help listeners embrace rupture, and how out-of-time listening creates decolonial possibilities.

Visit Liz Przybylski's website. Listen to the playlist for Sonic Sovereignty. The cover art of Sonic Sovereignty is a piece by visual artist Marc Kuegle, and the featured musician on the cover is Sly Skeeta.

The Page 99 Test: Sonic Sovereignty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about life after the collapse of the Soviet Union

Irina Zhorov was born in Uzbekistan, in the Soviet Union, and moved to Philadelphia on the eve of its dissolution. After failing to make use of a geology degree she received an MFA from the University of Wyoming. She’s worked as a journalist for more than a decade, reporting primarily on environmental issues.

Her new novel is Lost Believers.

At Electric Lit Zhorov tagged eight books that reckon with the complicated legacy of the USSR, including:

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich

If ‘post-Soviet stuff’ is a genre you’re interested in exploring, I suggest starting with this nonfiction book. It’s a compilation of interviews that Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich weaves into a narrative about the dissolution of the USSR and what those who lived through it make of the rubble. Each voice—from doctors, soldiers, writers and everyone in between—tells a personal story but as a chorus they intone a hopelessness, some nostalgia and the singular ordeal of having lived under the Soviet flag.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Corinne Demas's "The Road Towards Home," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Road Towards Home: A Novel by Corinne Demas.

The entry begins:

The Road Towards Home is a love story (of sorts) between a most unlikely pair of retirees. Noah and Cassandra rediscover each other at Clarion Court, a senior living community (they knew each other fifty years before in college) and end up sharing a rough cottage on Cape Cod and trying to figure out if they have a future together. There are really three main characters here—the third is the setting, and I would hope any director who turns my novel into a movie is someone who’d love the Outer Cape and understand how important sea, sand, and sky (not to mention oysters and American Woodcocks) are to the story.

My novel was published June 1, and since then I’ve been hearing from many readers who say they’re eagerly awaiting the film version and send on their suggestions for actors. Several have pointed out that because the novel relies heavily on dialogue writing a screenplay would be a piece of cake.

When Brilliance Publishing was selecting two actors for the audiobook of The Road Towards Home they asked if I wanted to have input in the casting. Of course I did! The actors in the audition tapes they first sent me didn’t quite capture my characters, so I listened to samples of audio books in search of two voices who sounded like my Noah and my Cassandra, and whose voices worked well together. I realized how hard it is to have an entire character created by voice alone. Cassandra is seventy two, but she’s youthful and lively, as well as sharp and funny. Noah is a bit pedantic, but he’s witty and wry, and actually much kinder than he would like you to think he is. Voice actors David De Vries for Noah and Erin Bennett for Cassandra proved to be the perfect pairing!

Casting an actor when it’s not their voice alone is a different matter. Noah and Cassandra are...[read on]

Visit Corinne Demas's website.

Q&A with Corinne Demas.

The Page 69 Test: The Road Towards Home.

My Book, The Movie: The Road Towards Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Richard Halpern's "Leibnizing"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Leibnizing: A Philosopher in Motion by Richard Halpern.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.

Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and beauty whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz’s writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz’s work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions.

For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz’s thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz’s sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision.

Learn more about Leibnizing at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence.

The Page 99 Test: Leibnizing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top books about intelligent sea creatures

James Sturz grew up in New York City, snorkeling in his bathtub and pretending the living room shag carpet was finger coral. Now based in Hawaii, he has covered the underwater world for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and Men’s Journal, among many publications. His fiction and journalism have been published in 18 countries and translated into nine languages. He graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University and is a PADI Divemaster, free diver, and Explorers Club Fellow. His first novel, Sasso, was set in the caves of Basilicata, Italy, very far from the water.

Sturz's new novel is Underjungle.

At Lit Hub he tagged eight books that "feature intelligent sea creatures who become part of our world, or else we enter theirs." One title on the list:

Claire Fuller, The Memory of Animals

This heart-thumper is a tale of isolation, loss, connectedness, memory-reproducing technology, and a whole lotta apocalypse. So why shouldn’t there also be an octopus in it? Surely, they’re the kings of connection, with all those arms and suckers. The novel is set mostly in confined spaces in England and open ones in Greece, against a backdrop of something a hundred times worse than Covid, which has wrought devastation on the planet—think Emma Donoghue’s Room, flushed with childhood recollections of life at the sea. Fuller’s novel drips with ache and desperation, but you’ll never feel either more than when its 27-year-old marine biologist narrator, Neffy, embraces an octopus and weeps.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kelly Creagh's "Strange Unearthly Things"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Strange Unearthly Things by Kelly Creagh.

About the book, from the publisher:

A hauntingly romantic paranormal Jane Eyre reimagining, by the author of Phantom Heart!

Eighteen-year-old Jane Reye is a psychic artist. She draws what she sees, and what she sees are spirits and the supernatural. Growing up orphaned, she’s now of legal age and can no longer return to the girls’ school she’s called home for most of her life. Lost and alone after the death of her lifelong friend, she receives an invitation to partake in a study at the English manor Fairfax Hall: an investigation of the property that requires her specific area of expertise. Upon arrival, Jane understands this will be no ordinary study when she meets Elias Thornfield, the elusive proprietor of the estate, a boy her age, roguishly handsome, who dons a mysterious eye patch. During the study it becomes clear that something is amiss—something having to do with Elias and the spiritual activity taking place around the manor. Turning to her art to unravel the mystery, Jane is shocked to find that her talents—and her growing affection for Elias—could be the key to saving him from a horrible fate.

Visit Kelly Creagh's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelly Creagh and Annabel (September 2010).

Coffee with a Canine: Kelly Creagh & Annabel, Jack and Holly (September 2012).

The Page 69 Test: Phantom Heart.

Q&A with Kelly Creagh.

The Page 69 Test: Strange Unearthly Things.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Asia Friedman's "Mammography Wars"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes by Asia Friedman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mammography is a routine health screening performed forty million times each year in the United States, yet it remains one of the most deeply contested topics in medicine, with national health care organizations supporting conflicting guidelines. In Mammography Wars, sociologist Asia Friedman examines cultural and medical disagreements over mammography. At issue is whether to screen women under age fifty, which is rooted in deeper questions about early detection and the assumed linear and progressive development of breast cancer. Based on interviews with doctors and scientists, interviews with women ages 40 to 50, and newspaper coverage of mammography, Friedman uses the sociology of attention to map the cognitive structure of the “mammography wars,” offering insights into the entrenched nature of debates over mammography that often get missed when applying a medical lens. Friedman’s analysis also suggests the sociology of attention’s unique potential for analyzing cultural conflicts beyond mammography, and even beyond medicine.

Learn more about Mammography Wars at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Mammography Wars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels in which love conquers & sometimes destroys

T.M. Dunn is the author of three novels, Her Father's Daughter (2023), Last Stop On The 6 (2021,) and Rebels By Accident (2014). She has served as Senior Director of the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where she holds a MFA in creative writing, and currently coaches aspiring and established writers and teaches creative writing workshops.

At CrimeReads Dunn tagged five "novels where love drives characters to dangerous extremes," including:

Meg Gardiner’s UNSUB was published in 2017, and when the Boston Globe wrote that it had hints of “Silence of the Lambs,” I immediately clicked and purchased the hardcover. Anyone who had ever taken one of my creative writing classes knows that Hannibal Lecter is one of my favorite characters of all time. How the author, Thomas Harris, manages to get you, me, to root for a serial killer is extraordinary. I shamefully admit I let life get in my way and never read the novel. It was only recently, with a very long drive ahead of me to see my sister, I downloaded the audiobook and was captivated, no serial killer pun intended. There’s no question that the protagonist’s love for her father is the inspiration for her to become a detective who solves crimes and protects people.

When the serial killer, to whom her father devoted years of his life and most of Caitlin’s childhood trying and failing to stop, surfaces again, the love for her father, the need to save him, leads her down the similar destructive path that in many ways destroyed her father.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: UNSUB.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Genevieve Plunkett

From my Q&A with Genevieve Plunkett, author of In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel:

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

I wrote songs before I started writing fiction, so the cadence of the title was important to me. In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel has a catchiness that I hope draws people in, even if they don’t know what the book is about. As for how it connects to the story itself, the title comes directly from a conversation between Portia and Theo. They are bandmates, who are also in love, searching desperately for a way to be together, when it seems otherwise impossible. The lobby of a dream hotel is a central place and also a nowhere place, kind of like hope.

What's in a name?

Elizabeth Bowen was perhaps the first author that I truly loved as an adult reader. Her novel, The Death of the Heart, is centered around sixteen-year-old orphan Portia Quayne. My Portia--Portia Elby-- is not modeled after her, but...[read on]

Visit Genevieve Plunkett's website.

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--Marshal Zeringue