Q&A with Van Jensen

From my Q&A with Van Jensen, author of Godfall:

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

Godfall is about a god-like being falling out of the sky, so I'd say it hits the nail on the head.

Funny enough, this was a book that I took forever to generate the title. When the answer finally came, I about kicked myself that such an obvious one had been there all along.

What's in a name?

There's a thing that a lot of writers do where they use the meaning/etymology of a name to reinforce a character's personality traits. To me, that's a bit on the nose.

I think more about how a name sounds. How it feels. There's a military head in Godfall named Conover, and I chose that because it has the hard initial C, but also is unassuming. This is a guy who is tougher than he appears.

All this said, I did name my protagonist in this giant-alien story "David," so...[read on]

Visit Van Jensen's website.

Writers Read: Van Jensen.

Q&A with Van Jensen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lauren Derby's "Bêtes Noires"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands by Lauren Derby.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Bêtes Noires, Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions among the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shape-shifting spirit demons called baka/bacá. Drawing on interviews with and life stories of residents in a central Haitian-Dominican frontier town, Derby contends that bacás—hot spirits from the sorcery side of vodou/vodú that present as animals and generate wealth for their owners—are a manifestation of what Dominicans call fukú de Colón, the curse of Columbus. The dogs, pigs, cattle, and horses that Columbus brought with him are the only types of animals that bacás become. As instruments of Indigenous dispossession, these animals and their spirit demons convey a history of trauma and racialization in Dominican popular culture. In the context of slavery and beyond, bacás keep alive the promise of freedom, since shape-shifting has long enabled fugitivity. As Derby demonstrates, bacás represent a complex history of race, religion, repression, and resistance.

Learn more about Bêtes Noires at the Duke University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Bêtes Noires.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that delve into the great mysteries of Oxford

A. D. Bell lives in Oxford, haunting the city’s bookshops of a weekend, writing in their cafes and walking the winding paths of her characters.

Their debut, The Bookbinder’s Secret, features Lilian ("Lily") Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, who chafes at the confines of her life.

At CrimeReads Bell tagged seven novels that delve into the great mysteries of Oxford. One title on the list:

Charles Finch, The September Society

Published in 2008, this Victorian-set crime novel is a brilliant mystery set in and around the colleges. A student goes missing and his mother asks detective Charles Lenox to investigate the mystery. Things take a dark turn with the discovery of a body and a trail leads Lenox to a mysterious secret society.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelli Stanley's "The Reckoning," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Kelli Stanley's The Reckoning (A Renata Drake Thriller, 1).

The entry begins:

With the exception of Miranda Corbie, I generally don’t think about actors while I’m writing—I dream-cast after the book is through! Miranda was an exception because she looked like Rita Hayworth, so obviously only the woman who played Gilda could play Miranda—at least in my head.

So now that The Reckoning is out in the world, I’ve been ruminating on an imaginary movie. There are a lot of talented young actors out there, right now, and of course I’d love to see this book—a very suspenseful, slow-burning thriller about a young woman with severe PTSD who is on the run from the FBI and stumbles into a crime scene and a hunt for a serial killer—actually adapted (I envision something like Shetland except it’s Humboldt County, CA, not the northernmost islands of Great Britain). But for this dream cast, I’m going to dream all the way—and think about who would have played Renata Drake and the main characters in The Reckoning in 1985, the year the story is set!

The story is centered around Renata: a seriously traumatized, 25-year-old young defense attorney who lost her sister to a murderer who couldn’t be prosecuted. Renata wrestles with the anguish and the anger, and, under treatment for her PTSD, writes a fantasy-revenge journal on how, exactly, she would execute her sister’s murderer.

And then she wakes up on a concrete floor staring at his corpse.

She assumes, after an interview, that the FBI are going to figure out that she’s responsible, so she runs to the opposite end of the country and lands in Garberville, California … a tiny town in the heart of the redwoods that is facing its own harrowing crime: a serial killer of young girls. To make matters even more tense, a federal and state paramilitary taskforce surrounds the area, focusing on uprooting every cannabis plant in the Emerald Triangle.

Renata is both vulnerable and resilient, strong and sensitive, unsure, self-doubting and resolute. She’s a complex character in a highly complex situation … so, who in 1985 had the acting chops and was the right age to play her?

Linda Hamilton can certainly portray “tough.” But the heartbreak and survivor’s guilt of trauma and loss? I’m not so sure. On the flip side, Sean Young excelled at unbalanced, off-kilter characters, but could she emote the kind of grit and determination that Renata does? Debra Winger, certainly a brilliant actress, registers as a little too country, a little too Midwest. Renata is from Chicago and grew up in a very urban environment.

So, who’s my pick? One of the two greatest actresses of their generation: Michelle Pfeiffer or...[read on]

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley.

My Book, The Movie: Kelli Stanley's The Reckoning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Derek J. Thiess's "American Fantastic"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: American Fantastic: Myths of Violence and Redemption by Derek J. Thiess.

About the book, from the publisher:

American Fantastic challenges readers to recognize an organizing myth in America’s perception of its imperialist past, “the myth of redemptive violence.” Derek J. Thiess persuasively argues that this myth serves to obscure the deep thread of Christian supremacy that underwrites America’s colonial and imperial impulses, from the early colonial period to westward expansion to the contemporary global order. This American imaginary, which enmeshes religion with violence, is constructed in multiple contentious and productive contact zones: between genres, between cultures, and between past and present.

Thiess’s interdisciplinary study examines America’s past and present imperial projects, from the Hawaiian Islands to the Eastern Seaboard, as they proliferate in popular story forms. By interrogating American myths, legends, and fantastic narratives across an impressive array of genres, including folk narratives, science fiction, movies, and more, Thiess exposes how the “myth of redemptive violence” manifests in contemporary constructions of America’s fantastic imaginaries.

Visit Derek J. Thiess's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Fantastic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine true crime memoirs that explore our obsession with darkness

Rebecca Hannigan has an MA in Creative Writing Crime Fiction from UEA, graduating in 2023. She won the UEA/Little Brown Crime Prize for her dissertation. She has also been shortlisted for Virago/The Pool’s Best New Crime Writer.

Her first novel, Darkrooms, is a fictional work in which she explores the "feeling of betrayal and injustice" stemming from "a murder in [her] mother’s small Irish hometown" for which "no one was ever sentenced."

For People magazine Hannigan tagged nine "gripping true crime memoirs that explore why we're all so obsessed with darkness." One title on the list:

Hell In The Heartland by Jax Miller

When fiction author Miller set out to investigate an unsolved cold case set in the Oklahoma prairies, she had no idea what she was getting herself into. In 1999, an arson attack on a trailer home concealed the corpses of a couple, Danny and Kathy Freeman, but the bodies of their daughter Ashley and her best friend Lauria Bible were never found.

Miller spends a significant amount of time getting to know the local people and towns, but every discovery leads only to more pain; more disappearances, more tragic unsolved crimes, and more horrifyingly abusive characters terrorizing whole communities into silence. A desperately sad and bleak read about a class of society underserved by the justice system.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos

From my Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos, author of Asterwood:

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

Asterwood is a clean, simple title and I love that. It signals the novel's setting to readers, and I'm a setting-oriented writer--it's usually the detail that comes first in the pre-draft, dreamstorm stage of my work and the detail that speaks loudest in my finished books--so it feels right. I can't take credit though! There were many placeholder titles before my brilliant editor, Wendy Loggia, suggested Asterwood.

What's in a name?

So much. The novel's protagonist, Madelyn, is named...[read on]

Visit Jacquelyn Stolos's website.

Writers Read: Jacquelyn Stolos.

The Page 69 Test: Asterwood.

My Book, The Movie: Asterwood.

Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Fabricio Tocco's "Precarious Secrets"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Fabricio Tocco's Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of the political thriller genre and its context in Latin American politics and entertainment.

For the past five decades, a distinctive type of political thriller has been steadily developing in Latin America. Precarious Secrets is a panoramic overview of the genre in the hands of renowned writers and filmmakers from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, as well as lesser-known Peruvian, Uruguayan and Paraguayan artists for whom the style has been a vehicle for pungent narratives shot through with menace and conspiracy.

Fabricio Tocco explores the genre’s unique role in Latin American entertainment and activism. Precarious Secrets traces the evolutions of the Latin American political thriller from its emergence in the 1970s, through the silence imposed by dictatorships and the genre’s resurgence after the Cold War. The political thriller has dramatized the region’s turbulent past, through assassinations, coups, mass killings, revolutions and the search of desaparecidos by human rights organizations. In the process, Tocco isolates the Latin American political thriller’s particular grammar of secrecy. In the Hollywood thriller, revealing secrets involves high stakes and transformative consequences. In Latin American political thrillers, by contrast, secrets produce only more precarity—moral ambiguity as unsettling as it is unshakeable.

Learn more about Precarious Secrets at the University of Texas Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Precarious Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top sad books by funny women

Sydney Rende is a writer and editor. You can read her work in The New York Times Style Magazine, Carve Magazine, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University.

Rende's debut short story collection is I Could Be Famous.

At Lit Hub she tagged six sad books by funny women "who give grief and humor the equal respect they deserve." One title on the list:

Weike Wang, Chemistry

Weike Wang’s debut novel is quick, wry, and fraught with self-deprecating humor. Wang’s unnamed narrator, whose boyfriend Eric has just proposed, is pursuing her PhD in chemistry without much success. Through often fragmented narration, we see her unravel as she fails to meet the expectations she’s set for herself. But even in her darkest moments of identity crisis, her insights are self-aware, profound, and, yes, funny, including a bit where she impulsively chops off her hair because her mother told her that “too much hair will suck nutrients away from the head and leave it empty.”

Read about another entry on the list.

Chemistry is among K.D. Walker's eight top campus novels set in grad school and Anne Heltzel's seven novels about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Kelli Stanley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Kelli Stanley, author of The Reckoning (A Renata Drake Thriller, 1).

Her entry begins:

Well, because I’m on a deadline to finish the second Renata novel, I can’t read fiction. That’s a huge frustration for me, because I’d like to start plunging into Cara Black’s Huguette and James L’Etoile’s Illusion of Truth and Rhys Bowen’s Silent as the Grave, to name a few.

I make it a practice to avoid reading current fiction while I’m actively writing (as opposed to researching) a book, because I’m afraid that I’ll unconsciously start imitating it. So….

Non-fiction is my getaway, and I’m currently reading a delightful book...[read on]

About The Reckoning, from the publisher:

SHE KILLED A MAN.
HE DESERVED IT.
BUT JUSTICE ISN’T YET DONE.

First in an explosive new thriller series set in the eighties from the author of the critically acclaimed Miranda Corbie series introduces the fierce feminist Renata Drake—on the run from the FBI for the execution-style murder of her little sister’s killer.

California, Southern Humboldt County, 1985. Renata Drake steps off a Greyhound bus and into small-town Garberville, hoping to disappear. She checks the papers. She’s not headline news. Not yet.

But she’s made a mistake. The FBI have the cannabis-producing “Emerald Triangle” town— and its corrupt residents—in their sights. Even worse, a teenage girl is missing, and when she turns up dead, the third in three years, it’s clear a serial killer is living among them.

Renata knows about murdered girls and the burning desire for justice—and for revenge. Her younger sister Josie is gone, and now, so is the man who killed her. Renata didn’t stay in Washington, D.C. to be arrested for executing a murderer, and she shouldn’t stay here either. But Renata decides to investigate, and what she uncovers will trigger a final reckoning: For herself, for a killer, and for all of Southern Humboldt.

This powerful, page-turning thriller explores the human cost of corruption and the psychological toll that violence takes on women.

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that grapple with the gig economy

Anandi Mishra is a Sweden-based critic and communications professional. She has worked as a reporter for The Times of India and The Hindu. One of her essays has been translated to Italian and published in the Internazionale magazine. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Public Books, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, Popula, The Brooklyn Rail, Al Jazeera, among others.

At Electric Lit Mishra tagged seven books that "show us the varied relationships people have with money, who gets to make it, and at what cost to themselves." One title on the list:

Temporary by Hilary Leichter (2020)

“There is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This mantra guides the unnamed protagonist of Temporary, who is currently between 23 temp gigs while chasing the ultimate dream of a steady, permanent job. She trusts the temp agency to “knead my résumé into a series of paychecks that constitute a life.” She delivers mail, shines shoes at Grand Central, does high-level window cleaning, stands in place of mannequins in stores, and fills in for the Chairman of the Board of a corporation. In the hands of a lesser writer, these exaggerated, absurdist scenarios might fall flat. But Leichter’s deadpan delivery seethes and stings. Temporary questions the way we work now and how a certain sense of depravity in work has been normalized. Is it even possible to stop working?

Read about another entry on the list.

Temporary is among Dustin M. Hoffman's twelve books that center work and working-class lives and Josh Riedel's nine novels about losing / finding yourself in work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Esther Eidinow's "Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth by Esther Eidinow.

About the book, from the publisher:

This study explores the hidden histories offered by Greco-Roman myths of metamorphosis, and what they can reveal about the lived experience of ancient men and women. It investigates the role of the body, and the embodied experiences of emotions in these stories, arguing that these narratives of transformation allow us to glimpse aspects of our historical subjects, which in other sources remain largely unseen.

In these narratives of metamorphosis, we discover ancient worldviews: they disclose the perceived inter-relationships of human, non-human, and more-than-human entities. They show us that the human body was understood not only as a part of an extended network of beings, but also to consist of, and interact with, the same substances that were believed to comprise the surrounding landscapes: earth, air, fire, and water.

By grouping together stories according to these elements, this study highlights the patterns that underline different metamorphoses, comparing the experiences of male and female protagonists. These stories, it argues, express risks of transgressions, both for individuals and for the wider community. They tell us about the dangers that were perceived to be inherent in social roles, and in relations with the gods; they describe bodies both at risk and of risk.

And among those risks are extreme emotions--appearing as both cause and result of these startling bodily changes. These are narratives of the body that capture one of its most ephemeral aspects: the experience of intense, even traumatic emotions, in which a person and the world around them comes to seem transformed. Drawing on psychological research, this study suggests that these stories evoke experiences that persist across time and place, conveying an experience of the emotional body that speaks to us still.

Learn more about Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Andromeda Romano-Lax's "What Boys Learn"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn by Andromeda Romano-Lax.

About the book, from the publisher:

A twisty, jaw-dropping psychological thriller that unravels a mother's worst nightmare—that her child is capable of terrible violence—when her teenage son becomes a suspect in the murder of two classmates, from the author of The Deepest Lake.

Over one terrible weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in a wealthy Chicago suburb. As the community mourns, Abby Rosso, the girls’ high school counselor, begins to suspect that her son was secretly involved in their lives—and possibly, their deaths.

Abby doesn’t want to believe Benjamin hurt anyone. But she’s seen the warning signs before. Two decades ago, her brother was imprisoned for a disturbing crime—he was only a little older than Benjamin is now. And Abby has more troubling memories from her own adolescence that confirm what boys and men are capable of. As Abby searches for the truth about what happened to her students, she’s forced to face the question: Has she been making excuses for Benjamin for years?

Swirling with sharp questions about family and masculinity, What Boys Learn unravels a mother’s worst fears.

Learn more about the book and author at Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012).

The Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Jenna Blum

From my Q&A with Jenna Blum, author of Murder Your Darlings: A Novel:

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

Great question. I think a title needs to be both memorable and applicable, and I hope Murder Your Darlings is both. Most readers know this phrase means to cut things from a manuscript that are beloved but not essential, but what they might not know is that "murder your darlings" is the original advice to writers, given by a gentleman named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in 1914....and then it was appropriated, and changed, by Faulkner to "kill your darlings." When I learned this, I knew my title had to be the original Murder Your Darlings, since my thriller is after all not only about ruthless writers behaving badly but about the most extreme form of...[read on]

Visit Jenna Blum's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Lost Family.

Q&A with Jenna Blum.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles that take you deep inside the ivory tower

Screenwriter Nora Garrett’s debut film, After the Hunt -- directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny -- is set on the campus of Yale University.

At Bustle Garrett tagged "five college-set works that informed After the Hunt." One novel on the list:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

It's that rare, perfect novel where it's both incredibly well-written and so propulsive that you just can't stop reading it. When I read it, I felt so steeped in both the insularity and the exclusivity of the higher education environment. But since you're experiencing it from the [perspective of this] relative outsider, you're able to understand both the desire to be a part of it and the abhorrence of it. Which I think is kind of [After the Hunt character] Maggie's struggle, in some ways.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Secret History is among Chris Wheatley's six best dark academia novels, Ali Lowe's six best campus crime novels, Edwin Hill's six perfectly alluring academic mysteries, a top ten Twinkies in fiction, Kate Weinberg's five top campus novels, Emily Temple's twenty best campus novels, and Ruth Ware's top six books about boarding schools.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Andrew Burstein's "Being Thomas Jefferson"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History by Andrew Burstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently reviled American icon.

Perhaps no founding father is as mysterious as Thomas Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence was both a gifted wordsmith and a bundle of nerves. His superior knowledge of the human heart is captured in the impassioned appeal he brought to the Declaration. But as a champion of the common man who lived a life of privilege on a mountaintop plantation of his own design, he has eluded biographers who have sought to make sense of his inner life. In Being Thomas Jefferson, acclaimed Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein peels away layers of obfuscation, taking us past the veneer of the animated letter-writer to describe a confused lover and a misguided humanist, too timid to embrace antislavery.

Jefferson was a soft-spoken man who recoiled from direct conflict, yet a master puppeteer in politics. Whenever he left Monticello, where he could control his environment, he suffered debilitating headaches that plagued him for decades, until he finally retired from public life. So, what did it feel like to be Thomas Jefferson? Burstein explains the decision to take as his mistress Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his late wife, who bore him six children, none of whom he acknowledged. Presenting a society that encouraged separation between public and private, appearance and essence, Burstein paints a dramatic picture of early American culture and brings us closer to Jefferson's life and thought than ever before.

Learn more about Being Thomas Jefferson at the Bloomsbury website.

The Page 99 Test: Being Thomas Jefferson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Madeleine Dunnigan's "Jean," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Jean: A Novel by Madeleine Dunnigan.

The entry begins:

Jean is a novel set in a hippie, rural English boarding school for boys with ‘problems’. At its heart is Jean: antisocial, violent, with a refugee single-mother, and on a scholarship, Jean is an outcast even among these outcasts. But then he strikes up a friendship with Tom, a wealthier, fee-paying boy at the school. When things turn romantic, it seems as if Jean has finally found a way to transcend the trappings of his former life. Yet inevitably reality comes crashing in, and Jean must find a new way to escape.

From its inception, my novel Jean has had a strong connection with film. When I described it to people, I would often call it ‘an English Call Me By Your Name’. Andre Aciman’s novel was a huge influence; but it was Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation that informed the visual language of my book. The touches, the looks, the way Jean and Tom interact with and within nature. Similarly Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country showed me how to write queerness within a rural setting; and the heartbreaking tenderness that can come out of new love. One of my favourite films of all time is Lynne Ramsay’s Movern Callar: for its sparse dialogue and for its masterful use of music. Jean would be nothing without music. If Guadagnino, Lee or Ramsay wanted to direct the movie of Jean, I would...[read on]

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kelli Stanley's "The Reckoning"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Reckoning (A Renata Drake Thriller, 1) by Kelli Stanley.

About the book, from the publisher:

SHE KILLED A MAN.
HE DESERVED IT.
BUT JUSTICE ISN’T YET DONE.

First in an explosive new thriller series set in the eighties from the author of the critically acclaimed Miranda Corbie series introduces the fierce feminist Renata Drake—on the run from the FBI for the execution-style murder of her little sister’s killer.

California, Southern Humboldt County, 1985. Renata Drake steps off a Greyhound bus and into small-town Garberville, hoping to disappear. She checks the papers. She’s not headline news. Not yet.

But she’s made a mistake. The FBI have the cannabis-producing “Emerald Triangle” town— and its corrupt residents—in their sights. Even worse, a teenage girl is missing, and when she turns up dead, the third in three years, it’s clear a serial killer is living among them.

Renata knows about murdered girls and the burning desire for justice—and for revenge. Her younger sister Josie is gone, and now, so is the man who killed her. Renata didn’t stay in Washington, D.C. to be arrested for executing a murderer, and she shouldn’t stay here either. But Renata decides to investigate, and what she uncovers will trigger a final reckoning: For herself, for a killer, and for all of Southern Humboldt.

This powerful, page-turning thriller explores the human cost of corruption and the psychological toll that violence takes on women.

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Christina Schwenkel's "Sonic Socialism"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi by Christina Schwenkel.

About the book, from the publisher:

In an era dominated by visual information, what can the sounds of a pandemic reveal about crisis and care? How might attuning to sonic atmospheres uncover new dimensions to states of emergency and their implications for collective life? In Sonic Socialism, Christina Schwenkel examines the use of sound in COVID-19 response efforts in urban Vietnam. Based on "soundwork" conducted in Hanoi in 2020 during the pandemic's first year, she shows how acoustic technologies played a pivotal yet overlooked role in state efforts to achieve record-low infection rates worldwide. Across lived experiences of quarantine, lockdown, and spatial distancing, Schwenkel explores sound-based interventions to curb virus transmission, and the public's response to these auditory measures. From instant messaging alerts to public health videos and neighborhood loudspeakers, sonic governance sought to transform urban sounds and listening practices to mobilize action, drawing people into networks of care and control. As anthropology stands at a crossroads, Sonic Socialism makes the compelling case for the value of sensory autoethnography in reimagining a more careful and caring ethnographic practice in a post-pandemic world.

Visit Christina Schwenkel's website.

The Page 99 Test: The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.

The Page 99 Test: Sonic Socialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"CrimeReads" -- best traditional mysteries of 2025

One novel on the CrimeReads list of the best traditional mysteries released in 2025:

Fair Play, Louise Hegarty

In Hegarty’s ingenious and deeply felt mystery, a group of friends has gathered at an AirBnb to celebrate, but after a fractious evening, the birthday boy is found dead, casting a group of friends as the closed circle of suspects. The traditional mystery genre is paid its due as a detective arrives, along with a butler and a gardiner, appropriate enough since the friends were celebrating by playing a murder mystery game themselves. The result is a layered meta-fiction that plays out to a surprising and well-earned finish, one of the strongest mysteries start to finish to come around in years.

Read about another mystery on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Fair Play.

Q&A with Louise Hegarty.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Van Jensen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Van Jensen, author of Godfall.

His entry begins:

The book I've read that stuck with me lately is The Dog of the South by Charles Portis.

A jilted husband follows his wife and her new paramour to Mexico, seeking revenge, or at least to reclaim his Ford Torino. The book is about exactly that, but not really that at all. It's a shaggy travelogue, a picaresque character study, an anthology of broken and insane oddballs, an ode to adventure, or perhaps a warning of...[read on]

About Godfall, from the publisher:

In this riveting small town thriller, Sheriff David Blunt is faced with a string of murders following the arrival of an alien life form—perfect for fans of Blake Crouch and Jeff Vandermeer, and soon to be a television series from Ron Howard!

When a massive asteroid hurtles toward Earth, humanity braces for annihilation—but the end doesn’t come. In fact, it isn’t an asteroid but a three-mile-tall alien that drops down, seemingly dead, outside Little Springs, Nebraska.

Dubbed “the giant,” its arrival transforms the red-state farm town into a top-secret government research site and major metropolitan area, flooded with soldiers, scientists, bureaucrats, spies, criminals, conspiracy theorists—and a murderer.

As the sheriff of Little Springs, David Blunt thought he’d be keeping the peace among the same people he’d known all his life, not breaking up chanting crowds of cultists or battling an influx of drug dealers. As a series of brutal, bizarre murders strikes close to home, Blunt throws himself into the hunt for a killer who seems connected to the Giant.

With bodies piling up and tensions in Little Springs mounting, he realizes that to find the answers he needs, he must reconcile his old worldview with the town he now lives in—before it’s too late.

Visit Van Jensen's website.

Writers Read: Van Jensen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jeff Roche's "The Conservative Frontier"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right by Jeff Roche.

About the book, from the publisher:

How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.

Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region—larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart—develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?

Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right—the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.

Visit Jeff Roche's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Conservative Frontier.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the best locked room murder mysteries

Emily Burack is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site.

At Town & Country she tagged fifteen of the best locked room murder mysteries, including:

With a Vengeance by Riley Sager

A modern entry on this list (published this year), Riley Sager’s With a Vengeance is set during 1954 on a luxury overnight train. As the New York Times Book Review wrote, it is ‘a fast-paced thriller, a locked-room mystery and a violent tale of revenge...impeccable pacing and signature twists.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue