Pg. 69: Diane Barnes's "The Mulligan Curse"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Mulligan Curse: A Novel by Diane Barnes.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of All We Could Still Have comes a charming tale about one woman who embraces a family curse, laying bare the dreams we give up―and the chances we take to get them back.

Mary Mulligan has two problems: her wisdom teeth…and everything else. Her only daughter is moving overseas. Her husband would rather go golfing than spend time with her. And Mary’s left to wonder why she abandoned her career ambitions when loneliness is all she has to show for it.

Plus her teeth really, really hurt.

But that’s one problem she can fix―never mind the stories that say if she gets her wisdom teeth removed, the last thirty years of her life will be erased. In fact, Mary wouldn’t mind if the Mulligan curse were actually true.

Turns out, it is.

The world around her hasn’t changed, but Mary is suddenly twenty-four again, with the life she once dreamed of still ahead of her. As she embarks on this new beginning, Mary comes to realize that those dreams aren’t nearly as important as everything she once had. If only she knew how to get it all back.

Visit Diane Barnes's website.

Q&A with Diane Barnes.

The Page 69 Test: All We Could Still Have.

My Book, The Movie: All We Could Still Have.

The Page 69 Test: The Mulligan Curse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew C. Halteman's "Hungry Beautiful Animals"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan by Matthew C. Halteman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new approach to going vegan "as a joyful celebration of life on this planet" (Bryant Terry) that is a gateway into a better life for us all

Perhaps you’ve looked at factory farming or climate change and thought, I should become a vegan. And like most people who think that, very probably you haven’t. Why? Well, in our world, roast turkey emanates gratitude, steak confers virility, and chicken soup represents a mother’s love. Against that, simply swapping meat for plants won’t work.

In Hungry Beautiful Animals, philosopher Matthew C. Halteman shows us how—despite all the forces arrayed against going vegan—we can create an abundant life for everyone without using animals for food. It might seem that moral rectitude or environmental judgement should do the trick, but they can’t. Going vegan must be about flourishing, for all life. Shame and blame don’t lead to flourishing. We must do it with joy instead.

Hungry Beautiful Animals is more than philosophy: it’s a book of action, of forgiveness, of love. Funny and wise, this book frees us joyfully to want what we already know we need.

Visit Matthew C. Halteman's website.

The Page 99 Test: Hungry Beautiful Animals.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six essential love stories (where love is a heavy lift)

Jessica Soffer is the author of This Is a Love Story and Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots. She grew up in New York City, attended Connecticut College, and earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Real Simple, Saveur, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing to small groups and in the corporate space and lives in Sag Harbor, New York with her family.

[Writers Read: Jessica Soffer (April 2013); My Book, The Movie: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots]

Soffer's new novel is This Is a Love Story.

At Lit Hub she tagged six essential literary love stories that "do not sugarcoat the inescapable fact that love is a heavy lift." One title on the list:

Julian Barnes, The Only Story

The agonized—truly, this one is bleak but beloved!—memory of a romance fifty years prior is the heart of this novel, an aching exploration of memory, missteps, and the way that a love can change not only our life’s path but the essence of who we are.

An Englishman remembers a romance with a woman, thirty years his senior, who he met playing tennis doubles as the only story that matters in his life. It makes us wonder, of course, which was the only one that matters in ours.

But perhaps my favorite bit is the super Barnes craft move of switching from first person to second person to third person progressively to suggest the incredible torment of recollection and needing to move further and further away from it just to keep on.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Constance Squires

From my Q&A with Constance E. Squires, author of Low April Sun:

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

I usually change my titles a lot, often calling a book something different for each draft, and it’s often been the case that stories and even books have had their titles changed close to publication by suggestions from editors. But Low April Sun came to me early and didn’t change. The story takes place in April in two timelines, 1995 and 2015, so the title covers both temporal settings and unifies them. The word “Low” is like hitting a somber note, with low evoking depth—a bottom level—and moral depravity or unfairness—lowlife, low blow. Well, what else was the Oklahoma City Bombing if not a low blow? All of those meanings of Low fit the story, April is the setting, and sun is, well, heat and hope, and that’s there, too, in how the characters pursue their lives. So Low April Sun is a three-word progression from darkness to light.

What’s in a name?

One of the book’s main characters is named August P. I hid a lot of meaning in his name, partly to remind myself what I wanted...[read on]

Visit Constance E. Squires's website.

My Book, The Movie: Low April Sun.

The Page 69 Test: Low April Sun.

Q&A with Constance Squires.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Surekha Davies's "Humans: A Monstrous History"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Humans: A Monstrous History by Surekha Davies.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—from our deepest fears—and what these monsters tell us about humanity's present and future.

Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.

In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.

Visit Surekha Davies's website.

The Page 99 Test: Humans: A Monstrous History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven stories about women coming of age in their 30s & 40s

Emily J. Smith is a writer based in Brooklyn.

Her debut novel is Nothing Serious.

Smith discovered writing in her thirties, after a career in tech and nonprofits. She holds a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell, and an M.B.A. from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She also founded Chorus, the matchmaking app where friends swipe for friends.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven stories that celebrate "women in their thirties and forties who, rather than conforming to the traditional paths of marriage and motherhood, embark on transformative journeys of self-discovery while choosing a life without children." One title on the list:

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

The Woman Upstairs is the quintessential novel of a single woman who feels, as she enters middle age, that her life has not gone as planned. Nora Eldridge is a 42-year old-artist by night, school teacher by day. The book opens with an unforgettable internal monologue of rage and regret about becoming what she calls the “woman upstairs”—the quiet, reliable helper for the people around her, fading into a background of mediocrity. But her life is disrupted by the arrival of a new student in her third-grade class, Reza Shahid, who she becomes enamored by, along with his glamorous parents. Reza’s mother is a successful artist who frequently invites Nora to work with her in her studio, where they form a tight artistic bond, and his father is an intellectual and charming Harvard professor. Her obsession with the Shahid family is all-consuming until cracks begin to form. When Nora discovers a devastating betrayal, her idolization of the family starts to crumble, leaving her not only with a clearer picture of the Shahids, but a clearer picture of herself, one that sets her on a path of change and resolve.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Woman Upstairs is among Isabelle McConville's six top novels featuring women and art, Jenny Shank's five terrific novels about art and artists, Joyce Maynard's six favorite books, and Alex Hourston’s top ten unlikely friendships in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is William Boyle reading?

Featured at Writers Read: William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street.

His entry begins:

I've been rereading Leah Carroll's memoir Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder. Carroll tells the story of her mother's murder and her father's descent into alcoholism and depression and, in doing so, she gives her parents back their humanity, making them more than just the tragedies that befell them, and she also tells her own story, how her parents are her, how she's them. I use this book every semester in the true crime class I teach, and I reread it every single time. I guess I've been...[read on]

About Saint of the Narrows Street, from the publisher:

As an Italian American family's decades-old secret begins to unravel, they will have to bear the consequences—and face each other—in this thrilling southern Brooklyn-set tragic opera of the highest caliber from crime fiction luminary William Boyle.

Gravesend, Brooklyn, 1986: Risa Franzone lives in a ground-floor apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street with her bad-seed husband, Saverio, and their eight-month-old baby, Fabrizio. On the night Risa's younger sister, Giulia, moves in to recover from a bad breakup, a fateful accident occurs: Risa, boiled over with anger and fear, strikes a drunk, erratic Sav with a cast-iron pan, killing him on the spot.

The sisters are left with a choice: notify the authorities and make a case for self-defense, or bury the man's body and go on with their lives as best they can. In a moment of panic, in the late hours of the night, they call upon Sav's childhood friend—the sweet, loyal Christopher "Chooch" Gardini—to help them, hoping they can trust him to carry a secret like this.

Over the vast expanse of the next eighteen years, life goes on in the working-class Italian neighborhood of Gravesend as Risa, Giulia, Chooch, and eventually Fabrizio grapple with what happened that night. A standout work of character-driven crime fiction from a celebrated author of the form, Saint of the Narrows Street is a searing and richly drawn novel about the choices we make and how they shape our lives.

Visit William Boyle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: City of Margins.

My Book, The Movie: City of Margins.

Q&A with William Boyle.

The Page 69 Test: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

My Book, The Movie: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

Writers Read: William Boyle (December 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Saint of the Narrows Street.

My Book, The Movie: Saint of the Narrows Street.

Writers Read: William Boyle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Constance E. Squires's "Low April Sun"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Low April Sun: A Novel by Constance E. Squires.

About the book, from the publisher:

On the morning of April 19, 1995, Delaney Travis steps into the Social Security office in Oklahoma City to obtain an ID for her new job. Moments later, an explosion shatters the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building into rubble. Her boyfriend Keith and half-sister Edie are left to assume the worst—that Delaney perished in the bombing, despite lack of definitive proof. Twenty years later, now married and bonded by the tragedy, Edie and Keith’s lives are upended when they begin to receive mysterious Facebook messages from someone claiming to be Delaney.

Desperate for closure, the couple embarks on separate journeys, each aiming for an artists’ community in New Mexico that may hold answers. Alongside their quest is August, a recovering alcoholic with a haunting connection to the bombing. Raised in the separatist compound of Elohim City, August harbors secrets about Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the attack, and his own possible involvement in the tragedy. When his path crosses with Edie, he must choose whether to tell anyone about his past.

As the 20-year anniversary of the bombing approaches, fracking-induced earthquakes shake the ground of Oklahoma City, mirroring the unsettled lives of its residents. In their quest for answers, Edie, Keith, and August seek to understand how the shadows of the past continue to darken the present, as the ground beneath them threatens to give way once again.

In Low April Sun, acclaimed author Constance E. Squires has written the first novel to explore the enduring impact of the Oklahoma City bombing. While masterfully weaving a spellbinding mystery, Squires ultimately offers us a moving meditation on grief and forgiveness.

Visit Constance E. Squires's website.

My Book, The Movie: Low April Sun.

The Page 69 Test: Low April Sun.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joshua K. Leon's "World Cities in History"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: World Cities in History: Urban Networks from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire by Joshua K. Leon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Joshua K. Leon explores 6,000 years of urban networks and the politics that drove them, from Uruk in the fourth millennium BCE to Amsterdam's seventeenth-century 'golden age.' He provides a fresh, interdisciplinary reading of significant periods in history, showing how global networks have shaped everyday life. Alongside grand architecture, art and literature, these extraordinary places also innovated ways to exert control over far-flung hinterlands, the labor of their citizens, and rigid class, race and gender divides. Asking what it meant for ordinary people to live in Athens, Rome, Chang'an, or Baghdad - those who built and fed these cities, not just their rulers - he offers one of the few fully rendered applications of world cities theory to historical cases. The result is not only vividly detailed and accessible, but an intriguing and theoretically original contribution to urban history.

Visit Joshua K. Leon's website.

The Page 99 Test: World Cities in History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels that feature the uncanny suspense of a third character's arrival

Nick Newman is the adult pen-name of Nicholas Bowling, author of several children’s novels including Witchborn and In the Shadow of Heroes, which was shortlisted for the Costa Children's Book Award. He works as a bookseller at Daunt Books in London.

His new novel is The Garden.

At CrimeReads Newman tagged five books by "authors who have made masterpieces of tension through a triangulating a single relationship." One title on the list:

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

I don’t need to extol the virtues of a book that won its author the Pulitzer Prize. It is terrifying, it is heartbreaking – not for the bleakness of its world, but for the tenderness of its central relationship between the unnamed man and his son. Here is all of humanity, in its defiance, its frailty, its compassion. Here is vast, devastated open world, and yet it is a story of extraordinary intimacy – the boy and his father are a candleflame in the darkness, and we are not privy to anything that is not illuminated by them. The unbearable tension of the novel comes not from any intrusion into the pair, but from the threat of one. We read it in a state of total vigilance – knowing, really, that at some point two will become three, or perhaps one, and either will be catastrophic.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Road appears on Linda Rodriguez McRobbie's list of yhirty of literature's best parents, Robert Lee Brewer's list of the ten best dystopian novels ever written, Pedro Hoffmeister's list of five titles with lessons to turn a post-apocalyptic novel into a thriller, Malcolm Devlin’s list of eight zombie stories without any zombies, Michael Christie's list of ten novels to reconfigure our conception of nature for the better, Emily Temple's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Ceridwen Christensen's list of ten novels that end their apocalypses on a beach, Steph Post's top ten list of classic (and perhaps not so classic) road trip books, a list of five of the best climate change novels, Claire Fuller's top five list of extreme survival stories, Justin Cronin's top ten list of world-ending novels, Rose Tremain's six best books list, Ian McGuire's ten top list of adventure novels, Alastair Bruce's top ten list of books about forgetting, Jeff Somers's lists of five science fiction novels that really should be considered literary classics and eight good, bad, and weird dad/child pairs in science fiction and fantasy, Amelia Gray's ten best dark books list, Weston Williams's top fifteen list of books with memorable dads, ShortList's roundup of the twenty greatest dystopian novels, Mary Miller's top ten list of the best road books, Joel Cunningham's list of eleven "literary" novels that include elements of science fiction, fantasy or horror, Claire Cameron's list of five favorite stories about unlikely survivors, Isabel Allende's six favorite books list, the Telegraph's list of the 15 most depressing books, Joseph D’Lacey's top ten list of horror books, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five unforgettable fathers from fiction, Ken Jennings's list of eight top books about parents and kids, Anthony Horowitz's top ten list of apocalypse books, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five notable "What If?" books, John Mullan's list of ten of the top long walks in literature, Tony Bradman's top ten list of father and son stories, Ramin Karimloo's six favorite books list, Jon Krakauer's five best list of books about mortality and existential angst, William Skidelsky's list of the top ten most vivid accounts of being marooned in literature, Liz Jensen's top 10 list of environmental disaster stories, the Guardian's list of books to change the climate, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and the Times (of London) list of the 100 best books of the decade. In 2009 Sam Anderson of New York magazine claimed "that we'll still be talking about [The Road] in ten years."

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Sherry Rankin

From my Q&A with Sherry Rankin, author of The Killing Plains:

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

My working title for this novel was The Hare’s Mask, because the skinned rabbit faces that are left on the murder victims in this book create such a vivid, creepy image, to me. But I was never sold on it as a permanent title. It just helps me to have something to call a book while I’m writing it. The editorial team at Thomas and Mercer wanted the book to have a title that was indicative of the West Texas landscape and the nature of the crimes occurring in the novel. We briefly considered Dead Man’s Bluff; but my agent actually came up with The Killing Plains, and I liked it immediately.

What's in a name?

For me, a character’s name either springs up spontaneously, or I never do seem to get it quite right. As I was doing some pre-writing about the personality of my main character in The Killing Plains, the name “Colly Newland” just popped into my head, almost as if she were rising up out of nowhere and introducing herself to me.

“Colly” is actually a nickname. Her...[read on]

Visit Sherry Rankin's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Killing Plains.

The Page 69 Test: The Killing Plains.

Q&A with Sherry Rankin.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Boyle's "Saint of the Narrows Street," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle.

The entry begins:

Saint of the Narrows Street opens on a hot summer night in August 1986, when main character Risa Franzone is pushed to the limit by her bad seed husband, Sav. She has an infant, Fabrizio, to take care of, and Sav has crossed one too many lines. Risa’s sister, Giulia, has also shown up looking for solace after a bad breakup, and Giulia tries to convince Risa to leave Sav. Things come to a boiling point in their sweltering apartment and eventually go sideways after Sav drunkenly storms in and assaults Giulia. Risa brains Sav with her cutlet pan, and he hits his head on the edge of a table on his way down. Not sure what to do, the sisters enlist the help of Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, who lives across the street and is Sav’s childhood friend, though he adores Risa and recognizes what Sav has become. What happens that night ripples out across the next three decades, and we drop in on these characters in moments of crisis in 1991, 1998, and 2004.

It’s a difficult book to imagine a cast for because of the elements of time and aging. Fab goes from nine months old to eighteen years old over the course of the book, so I’m leaving him off. I can’t say I was thinking of specific actors as I was writing, but here are some folks I’d love to see in the three main roles:

Risa: Cristin Milioti

Chooch: John Magaro

Giulia: Victoria Pedretti

I can also see Ray Romano as Joey Sends, Susan...[read on]

Visit William Boyle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: City of Margins.

My Book, The Movie: City of Margins.

Q&A with William Boyle.

The Page 69 Test: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

My Book, The Movie: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

Writers Read: William Boyle (December 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Saint of the Narrows Street.

My Book, The Movie: Saint of the Narrows Street.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Hiroshi Motomura's "Borders and Belonging"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy by Hiroshi Motomura.

About the book, from the publisher:

A uniquely broad and fair-minded guide to making immigration policy ethical.

Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration.

In Borders and Belonging, Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy. Motomura begins by affirming a basic concept―national borders―and asks when they might be ethical borders, fostering fairness but also responding realistically to migration patterns and to the political forces that migration generates. In a nation with ethical borders, who should be let in or kept out? How should people forced to migrate be treated? Should newcomers be admitted temporarily or permanently? How should those with lawful immigration status be treated? What is the best role for enforcement in immigration policy? To what extent does the arrival of newcomers hurt long-time residents? What are the "root causes" of immigration and how can we address them?

Realistic about the desire of most citizens for national borders, this book is an indispensable guide for moving toward ethical borders and better immigration policy.

Learn more about Borders and Belonging at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Borders and Belonging.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that owe a debt to Jane Austen’s work

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the History Channel’s show Pawn Stars, and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks. Romney is the author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (with JP Romney) and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769–1999. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).

Romeny's new books is Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend .

At Lit Hub she tagged six books that "owe a debt to Austen’s work" by authors who "teased out threads from Austen in order to make something peculiarly their own." One title on the list:

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Part of Austen’s modern appeal—the reason she is one of the most commonly read “classic” authors—is because her work pleases readers across today’s fractured genre landscape. Austen has a devoted following among romance readers. She also attracts admirers who don’t read romance at all.

Often cited as one of the greatest English novels of the past one hundred years, Atonement pulls inspiration primarily from Northanger Abbey. In both novels, a young girl’s literary turn of mind exacerbates her naive errors, complicating our conceptions of imagination and reality, dreaming and consequences. In an interview about Atonement, Ian McEwan made clear his debt to her: “The ghost that stalks this novel is that of Jane Austen.”

Read about another title on the list.

Atonement also appears on Kaley Rohlinger's list of fifteen top books with unreliable narrators, Ore Agbaje-Williams's list of seven scandalous betrayals in literature, Brittany Bunzey's list of 23 books about backstabbing and betrayal, Emma Rous's list of the ten top dinner parties in modern fiction, David Leavitt's top ten list of house parties in fiction, Abbie Greaves's top ten list of books about silence, Eliza Casey's list of ten favorite stories--from film, fiction, and television--from the early 20th century, Nicci French's top ten list of dinner parties in fiction, Mark Skinner's list of ten of the best country house novels, Julia Dahl's top ten list of books about miscarriages of justice, Tim Lott's top ten list of summers in fiction, Ellen McCarthy's list of six favorite books about weddings and marriage, David Treuer's six favorite books list, Kirkus Reviews's list of eleven books whose final pages will shock you, Nicole Hill's list of eleven books in which the main character dies, Isla Blair's six best books list, Jessica Soffer's top ten list of book endings, Jane Ciabattari's list of five masterpieces of fiction that also worked as films, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best birthday parties in literature, ten of the best misdirected messages in literature, ten of the best scenes on London Underground, ten of the best breakages in literature, ten of the best weddings in literature, and ten of the best identical twins in fiction. It is one of Stephanie Beacham's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is James L. Cambias reading?

Featured at Writers Read: James L. Cambias, author of The Miranda Conspiracy (The Billion Worlds Book 3).

His entry begins:

Lately I've been working my way through a big, dense, but fascinating book: The History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book includes the text of the original handwritten manuscript version of The Hobbit, with copious notes and commentary by Rateliff.

John Rateliff covers everything. There are notes on the physical manuscript itself — Tolkien apparently wrote a lot of his first draft on blank pages torn from student examination books (which suggests that an Oxford professor's salary in the 1920s didn't stretch very far). The color of the ink indicates when Tolkien took a break from the project and came back to it.

The book goes into the literary antecedents of the The Hobbit — everything from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle, and P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, to...[read on]

About The Miranda Conspiracy, from the publisher:

An ancient treasure in deep space holds the key to a deadly conspiracy which will shake the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium.

At the end of the Tenth Millennium, Zee and his AI buddy Daslakh arrive on the icy moon Miranda, hoping to make a good impression on his girlfriend Adya's upper-class parents. Instead they discover that Adya's father is the target of a political conspiracy. While Adya tries to discover who is trying to to ruin the family fortunes and expel them from Miranda's exclusive ruling class, Daslakh and Zee go on the trail of a lost treasure in deep space. As they both dig deeper they run afoul of rival political factions, romantic complications, space mercenaries, octopus gangsters, and ruthless secret agents—and all the while dealing with interference from Adya's parents and party-going sister. Love, power, wealth, and honor collide in the floating cities and palaces inside Miranda.

Visit James L. Cambias's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Darkling Sea.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias (January 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Arkad's World.

The Page 69 Test: Arkad's World.

My Book, The Movie: The Godel Operation.

Q&A with James L. Cambias.

The Page 69 Test: The Godel Operation.

The Page 69 Test: The Miranda Conspiracy.

My Book, The Movie: The Miranda Conspiracy.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Tamara L. Miller's "Into the Fall"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Into the Fall: A Thriller by Tamara L. Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

From debut author Tamara L. Miller comes a suspenseful psychological thriller tracking the mysteries of a seemingly mundane life as they come to light in the vast, unforgiving Canadian wilderness.

For better or for worse, Sarah Anderson has it all: a thriving career, a nice home in Ottawa, two young kids…and a marriage coming apart at the seams.

Then her husband, Matthew, vanishes without a trace during a family vacation up north. Sarah and her children are nearly lost among the slumbering lakes, treacherous cliffs, and brooding forests of the Canadian Shield. A glacier-scraped realm of ancient beauty and terror, it’s a world away from the safety of the suburbs. And a big storm is brewing.

A kind rural lawman comes to their aid and takes an interest in the case. The trail goes cold, however, launching Sarah into a yearlong odyssey to find her husband. On the way, she must reconnect with her estranged sister and duck the suspicions of a slick city police officer. But that’s nothing compared to unearthing the dark secrets buried deep in the granite of her marriage―and in herself.

Visit Tamara L. Miller's website.

My Book, The Movie: Into the Fall.

Q&A with Tamara L. Miller.

The Page 69 Test: Into the Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Bruce Robbins's "Atrocity: A Literary History"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Atrocity: A Literary History by Bruce Robbins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Bruce Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity.

Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, what we think of now as atrocities have not always invited indignation or been seen to violate moral norms. Venturing from the Bible to Zadie Smith, Robbins explores the literature of suffering, to show how, over time, abhorrence of mass violence takes shape. With it comes the emergence of a necessary element of cosmopolitanism: the ability to look at one's own nation with the critical eyes of a stranger.

Drawing on a vast written archive and with penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of violence as Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homero Aridjis's short novel Smyrna in Flames, and Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. These essential texts do more than simply testify to atrocious acts. In their literariness, they take the risk of contextualizing and relativizing, thereby extending beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. They recognize atrocity as a moral scandal about which something should be done and can be done, while they also place that scandal within a larger and more uncertain history.

Learn more about Atrocity: A Literary History at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Atrocity: A Literary History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top contemporary novels with omniscient narrators

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel, Glassworks, was was longlisted for the Center for Fiction and VCU Cabell First Novel Prizes and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Apple, and Good Housekeeping. Her new novel is Mutual Interest. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn with her partner.

At Electric Lit Wolfgang-Smith tagged eight "contemporary novels that use omniscient narrators in a fascinating way." One title on the list:

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

This first book of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota quartet is as much philosophical thought experiment as it is science-fiction epic, including in its narrative voice. Palmer writes in a self-consciously neo-Enlightenment style, matching her far-future setting in which a utopian (or is it?) Earth has reorganized its society around the aesthetics and ideas of the eighteenth century.

The narrator of Too Like the Lightning is in fact not omniscient, merely overambitious and highly unreliable—but Palmer invites the reader to interrogate the difference, if there is one.

Mycroft Canner, a convicted criminal living out his life in service to whoever may need him, prostrates himself before an imagined in-universe reader he addresses directly in frequent, often argumentative asides. It is Mycroft who affects the high-omniscient style in which Palmer writes, and though the book is theoretically his memoir, he often narrates scenes for which he was not present—some he claims to have heard summarized by characters who were present; some he imagines, wholesale; for others, muddying the stylistic waters still further, he passes the pen to secondary (often reluctant) narrators.

This is a novel of big swings, one that will give any book club enough to argue over for hours. I can’t promise the intrusive, patchily omniscient style will be at the top of your list of controversies to litigate, but hey—it depends on your crew!

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Too Like the Lightning.

--Marshal Zeringue

James L. Cambias's "The Miranda Conspiracy," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Miranda Conspiracy (The Billion Worlds Book 3) by James L. Cambias.

The entry begins:

My new novel The Miranda Conspiracy is the first direct sequel I've ever written — the first time characters from a previous book go into a new narrative with almost no break. It's a followup to my 2021 novel The Godel Operation, chronicling the further adventures of Daslakh, Zee, Adya, and Pelagia in the final years of the Tenth Millennium. For imaginary film casting, this means I'm strongly tempted to repeat the casting ideas I suggested for The Godel Operation: Anya Taylor-Joy as Adya Elso, Adam Beach as Zee Sadaran, Alan Tudyk as the voice of Daslakh, and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the orca-brained spaceship Pelagia.

But that's no fun at all. Anyway, actors age but fictional characters don't. Some of the people I cited may be getting too old to play a pair of youngsters in their early twenties. It's time for a reboot!

So: who will be in the new and improved cast for The Miranda Conspiracy?

For Adya, I'll go with Jenna Ortega. She is good at conveying intelligence, which is important since Adya is "the smart one" in her family. But she's got range, and that's important because she's also going to be playing Adya's identical clone-sister Kavita, who is wild and outgoing, "the popular one." With a little makeup she'll also be playing their nearly-identical mother Mutalali. This means she'll...[read on]

Visit James L. Cambias's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Darkling Sea.

Writers Read: James L. Cambias (January 2019).

My Book, The Movie: Arkad's World.

The Page 69 Test: Arkad's World.

My Book, The Movie: The Godel Operation.

Q&A with James L. Cambias.

The Page 69 Test: The Godel Operation.

The Page 69 Test: The Miranda Conspiracy.

My Book, The Movie: The Miranda Conspiracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the best book couples

Staffers at People magazine tagged "some of their favorite literary romances, from books within the genre and beyond." One title on the list:

Evelyn Hugo and Celia St. James from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Golden era movie star Evelyn Hugo may have had to marry multiple men in order to find her one true love, fellow Hollywood actress Celia St. James, but it was well worth the wait. Their relationship is one of our favorites from the Daisy Jones & the Six author.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is among Elizabeth Staple's eight titles about youthful mistakes that come back to haunt you, Katherine St. John's five top fiction titles about Hollywood, and Kerri Jarema's eleven top novels set in Old Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Abigail Ocobock's "Marriage Material"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships by Abigail Ocobock.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cutting-edge study of marriage’s transformative effects on same-sex relationships.

It is no secret that marriage rates in the United States are at an all-time low. Despite this significant decline, the institution of marriage endures in our society amid historic changes to its meaning and practice. How does the continuing strength of marriage impact the relationships of same-sex couples after the legalization of same-sex marriage?

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with LGBTQ+ people, Marriage Material reveals the transformative impact marriage equality has had on same-sex relationships. Sociologist Abigail Ocobock looks to same-sex couples across a wide age range to illuminate the complex ways institutional mechanisms work in tandem to govern the choices and behaviors of individuals with different marriage experiences. Ocobock examines both the influence of marriage on the dynamics of same-sex relationships and how LGBTQ+ people challenge heteronormative assumptions about marriage, highlighting the complex interplay between institutional constraint and individual agency.

Marriage Material presents a bold challenge to dominant scholarly and popular ideas about the decline of marriage, making clear that gaining access to legal marriage has transformed same-sex relationships, both for better and for worse.

Learn more about Marriage Material at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Marriage Material.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Tamara L. Miller

From my Q&A with Tamara L. Miller, author of Into the Fall: A Thriller:

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

Settling on a title is like casting into a very large body of water looking for just the right nugget. The best titles are layered, giving a sense of the story but also playing with the themes and readers’ expectations. Into the Fall came about thanks to some brainstorming with my agent. We wanted something that captured the Canadian wilderness at its most wild and unfamiliar, while also hinted at the fate of the characters.

The novel opens on a late season canoe trip when Sarah Anderson wakes up to a frost filled morning and a missing husband. We played with a few titles, all rooted in water or wilderness themes. Deep Waters was a holding title for a long time, but it didn’t quite capture the emotional journey that each of the characters goes through as they learn the people they loved were not who they seemed. Into the Fall, with its double entendre, was...[read on]

Visit Tamara L. Miller's website.

My Book, The Movie: Into the Fall.

Q&A with Tamara L. Miller.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sherry Rankin's "The Killing Plains"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Killing Plains by Sherry Rankin.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the winner of the CWA’s Debut Dagger Award.

Two victims. Twenty years apart. One elusive killer.

Crescent Bluff, West Texas. Everybody knows everybody. And everybody has a secret.

When a boy is found dead with the skin of a hare’s head in his hand, everyone knows who killed him―Willis Newland, just released from prison after serving twenty years for an identical murder.

But what if everyone’s wrong?

Detective Colly Newland reluctantly agrees to investigate a case that seems to involve the whole town, including her dead husband’s extended family. But the deeper she digs, the more secrets she unearths. And as threats against her escalate, Colly realizes someone is willing to kill to keep theirs…

Visit Sherry Rankin's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Killing Plains.

The Page 69 Test: The Killing Plains.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels featuring flawed child prodigies

Jeff Macfee is a writer. The Contest, his latest crime novel, is about a former puzzle prodigy who returns to the contest of her youth.

He is also the author of the superhero noir Nine Tenths.

At CrimeReads Macfee tagged five favorite novels featuring flawed child prodigies "struggling with a talent that doesn’t always, or even often, make their lives easier." One title on the list:

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Haddon’s child protagonist Christopher John Francis Boone is saddled with many names, a superior mathematical mind, and behavioral conditions that make fitting in difficult. When his neighbor’s dog is murdered, his structured brain won’t let him leave the mystery alone. He starts to investigate and uncovers not only a surprising killer but some very uncomfortable truths about his own life. Christopher is an entertainingly unique main character, and a perfect example of a prodigy undone by their very nature.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is among Benjamin Buchholz's five best novels with devilishly unreliable narrators, John Mullan's ten best child narrators, Kim Hood's top ten books with interesting characters who just happen to have a disability, Julia Donaldson's six best books, and Melvyn Burgess's top ten books written for teenagers.

--Marshal Zeringue