Five top fictional works featuring sisters

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the new novel We Were the Universe and the short story collection Black Light, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.

At Lit Hub she tagged five favorite fictional works featuring sisters, including:

Cecily Wong, Kaleidoscope

Riley and Morgan Brighton—the dynamic, beautifully rendered sisters in Cecily Wong’s Kaleidoscope—are opposites in many ways, but they love each other tremendously. They are close-knit, well adjusted, and supportive (without giving too much away, the opening scene exemplifies the way siblings bond during hard times, showing how resilient they can be when tackling problems together). When a sudden tragedy strikes, Riley is forced to reexamine her relationship with Morgan, with herself, and with the world at large—she sets out on a radiant path of discovery.

Kaleidoscope is impeccably structured and thoroughly researched—it’s about sisterhood, but it’s also part adventure story, part travelogue, and there’s even a little bit of mystery mixed in. Wong’s dry humor and careful observations underpin this moving, ultimately hopeful novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elise Juska's "Reunion," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Reunion: A Novel by Elise Juska.

The entry begins:

The main characters in Reunion are three college friends—Polly, Adam, and Hope—who are emerging from the pandemic and returning to their twenty-fifth reunion. They’re bringing with them not only mixed feelings about their college years but concern about their children, particularly Polly’s teenage son Jonah, who’s traveling with her to Maine.

When working on my previous novels I never had actors in mind, but strangely enough, for this one, from the beginning I pictured Polly as Catherine Keener. I am a huge fan of her performances as witty, slightly acerbic, vulnerable women in indie films like Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and Please Give.

Adam is youthful-looking and young at heart—naturally my mind goes to Paul Rudd. Not only is Rudd seemingly age-defying, but I’ve been watching him since the nineties, in classics like Clueless, in which he looked how Adam might have in the novel’s flashbacks to his college years.

For Hope, upbeat and popular, the actor of my dreams is...[read on]

Visit Elise Juska's website.

The Page 69 Test: Reunion.

My Book, The Movie: Reunion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alex Edmans's "May Contain Lies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It by Alex Edmans.

About the book, from the publisher:

How our biases cause us to fall for misinformation—and how to combat it.

Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, executives, and authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.

In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples—from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death—Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.

Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics—the science of cause and effect—ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and better decisions.

Visit Alex Edmans's website.

The Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best Alice Munro short stories

Lisa Allardice is the Guardian's chief books writer.

She tagged five of the best Alice Munro short stories, including:

"Dance of the Happy Shades," 1968

Margaret Atwood cried when she first read this story, because “it was so well done”. “Spinster” Miss Marsalles, piano teacher to generations of children in the genteel southern Ontario town of Rosedale, is giving one of her annual piano-recital parties, a source of dread and scorn for the young mothers who feel obliged to attend. The story is narrated by the teenage daughter of one of the mothers, both past students of Miss Marsalles. The teacher and her elder sister (who has had a stroke – “She’s not herself though, poor thing”) no longer live in the smart family house, but have moved to a bungalow in the wrong part of town: “This aspect of Miss Marsalles’ life had passed into that region of painful subjects which it is crude and unmannerly to discuss.”

The Marsalles sisters, with their “kindly and grotesque faces” and insistence on throwing parties despite their reduced circumstances, have committed the female sins of being unmarried, elderly and poor. “It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be so marked in so many ways.” Such is Munro’s attention to detail – the flies buzzing around sandwiches put out too early, the dress that “smells of the cleaners”, the presents tied with silver ribbon, “not real ribbon, the kind that splits and threads” – that the reader squirms as uncomfortably as the mothers on that “hot gritty” afternoon. When a group of children with Down’s syndrome arrive to give recitals, none of the nice ladies of Rosedale know where to look – literally. “For it is a matter of politeness, surely not to look closely at such children, and yet where else can you look during a piano performance, but at the performer?”

In barely 10 pages (Munro’s early work was much shorter), Dance of the Happy Shades is a masterclass in authorial irony. The women’s well-mannered facades sliding like their makeup in the heat to reveal their snobbery and unkindness. A celebration of innocence and unexpected joy – but without a single note of sentimentality – it might make you cry too, and not just because it is so good, which it is, but because it is so sad and strange.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Leah Stecher's "The Things We Miss"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Things We Miss by Leah Stecher.

About the book, from the publisher:

When You Reach Me meets Starfish in this heartfelt contemporary middle grade about a misfit girl who finds a way to skip all of the hard parts of life.

J.P. Green has always felt out of step. She doesn't wear the right clothes, she doesn't say the right things, and her body…well, she'd rather not talk about it. And seventh grade is shaping up to be the worst year yet. So when J.P. discovers a mysterious door in her neighbor's treehouse, she doesn't hesitate before walking through. The door sends her three days forward in time.

Suddenly, J.P. can skip all the worst parts of seventh grade: Fitness tests in P.E., oral book reports, awkward conversations with her mom…she can avoid them all and no one even knows she was gone.

But can you live a life without any of the bad parts? Are there experiences out there that you can't miss?

This moving middle grade novel about mental health, body acceptance, and self-confidence asks what it truly means to show up for the people you love-and for yourself.

Visit Leah Stecher's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Things We Miss.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld's "The Hollow Parties"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major history of America's political parties from the Founding to our embittered present

America’s political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today’s parties, at once overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.

Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party’s first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today’s fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s. Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties. Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system, deeming it a mere instrument for power.

Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers powerful answers to pressing questions about how the nation’s parties became so dysfunctional—and how they might yet realize their promise.

Visit Sam Rosenfeld's website and Daniel Schlozman's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Polarizers by Sam Rosenfeld.

The Page 99 Test: When Movements Anchor Parties by Daniel Schlozman.

The Page 99 Test: The Hollow Parties.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight coming of age novels about immigrants and first generation Americans

Melissa Mogollon holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from the George Washington University. Originally from Colombia and raised in Florida, she now teaches at a boarding school in Rhode Island, where she lives with her partner and dog.

Oye is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Mogollon tagged eight "incredible books that I hope will inspire the chaotic, weird, unrestrained, and glorious, blossoming 1st-gen immigrant in you." One title on the list:

A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar

When I first read A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar I probably fell out of my chair. I didn’t know fiction could do half the things that Jarrar was doing, and I didn’t think I’d ever love a protagonist more than Nidali, the book’s captivating and righteous Palestinian-Egyptian-Greek-American narrator, who migrates across time to and from Kuwait, Egypt, and the United States. Nidali is defiant and curious, questioning her circumstances while embracing the traditions and people around her. We see Nidali flee war, search for a sense of a homeland, indulge in normal teen behaviors, grapple with her place in her family, and ultimately, define who she is on her own terms. Jarrar’s sentences control humor and heartbreak in this book magnificently. A valiant and gorgeous coming-of-age novel about power, identity, and the complex dance of growing up in the global immigrant diaspora.

Read about another entry on the list.

A Map of Home is among Laila Lalami's eight books about Muslim life for a nation that knows little about Islam and Ahmed Ali Akbar's 14 novels about Muslim life that open up worlds for their audiences.

My Book, The Movie: A Map of Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Kate White

From my Q&A with Kate White, author of The Last Time She Saw Him: A Novel:

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

I really love the title of my newest book, The Last Time She Saw Him, because it gets a potential reader into the story right away, and in some ways it’s a microcosm of the novel. In the book, Kiki Reed has a brief conversation with her ex-fiancé, Jamie, at a party, and then minutes later he’s found dead outside. Kiki soon becomes convinced he was murdered, but since the cops aren’t on the same page, she has to do everything in her power to make them see the light. Thus, she spends a lot of time thinking about the last time she saw Jamie. Was there something he said or something she saw that...[read on]

Visit Kate White's website, Facebook page, and Instagram page.

The Page 69 Test: Even If It Kills Her.

The Page 69 Test: Eyes on You.

The Page 99 Test: The Gutsy Girl Handbook.

The Page 69 Test: Have You Seen Me?.

The Page 69 Test: The Second Husband.

Q&A with Kate White.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top thrillers that explore a mother's worst nightmare

Andromeda Romano-Lax has been a journalist, a travel writer, and a serious amateur cellist. She is the author of The Spanish Bow, The Detour, and Behave, among others.

[The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow; The Page 69 Test: The Detour; Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012)]

Romano-Lax's new novel The Deepest Lake, set in Guatemala, is about a mother’s search for answers about her missing daughter.

At CrimeReads the author tagged four "emotional page-turners that convinced me the missing-child trope is both powerful and capacious, with room for further writerly exploration and interpretation." One title on the list:

Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier

The trail has gone even colder in another young-missing-child quest, Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier. A year and a half after her five-year-old son is grabbed from Pike’s Place Market by a man in a Santa suit, successful salon owner Marin hires a private investigator, whose digging leads not to the child but to other unsavory revelations, starting with the fact that Marin’s husband is having an affair with an art student named Kenzie. Numerous other secrets and twists follow. Unlike many novels of this kind, Hillier packs in surprises without depending on unreliable narration. The storyline jets beyond doubtful grief into red-hot anger, as Hillier’s Marin uses her rage to get to the bottom of things. If you enjoy flawed characters and a dual POV structure that complicates readers’ sympathies, this one’s for you.

Read about another entry on the list.

Little Secrets is among Jessica Hamilton's six top novels about extra marital affairs and Lisa Regan's ten riveting reads filled with shocking secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Laikwan Pang's "One and All"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty by Laikwan Pang.

About the book, from the publisher:

The concept of sovereignty is a crucial foundation of the current world order. Regardless of their political ideologies no states can operate without claiming and justifying their sovereign power. The People's Republic of China (PRC)—one of the most powerful states in contemporary global politics—has been resorting to the logic of sovereignty to respond to many external and internal challenges, from territorial rights disputes to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, Pang Laikwan analyzes the historical roots of Chinese sovereignty. Surveying the four different political structures of modern China—imperial, republican, socialist, and post-socialist—and the dramatic ruptures between them, Pang argues that the ruling regime's sovereign anxiety cuts across the long twentieth century in China, providing a strong throughline for the state–society relations during moments of intense political instability. Focusing on political theory and cultural history, the book demonstrates how concepts such as popular sovereignty, territorial sovereignty, and economic sovereignty were constructed, and how sovereign power in China was both legitimized and subverted at various times by intellectuals and the ordinary people through a variety of media from painting and literature to internet-based memes. With the possibility of a new Cold War looming large, globalization disintegrating, and populism on the rise, Pang provides a timely reevaluation of the logic of sovereignty in China as power, discourse, and a basis for governance.

Learn more about One and All at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: One and All.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Peter Colt reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Peter Colt, author of The Judge (An Andy Roark mystery, 5).

His entry begins:

I am currently reading Robert Mazur’s excellent book The Infiltrator: The True Story of One Man Against the Biggest Drug Cartel in History. Mazur’s story is a riveting look inside his complicated and dangerous undercover assignment to infiltrate the Medellin Cartel in the 1980’s. Mazur used his business and family background to pose as money launderer. He simultaneously got close to high-ranking members of the cartel as well as corrupt banking officials at Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The book, which I bought for research, reads like a spy novel. It is a must read for anyone interested in the 1980’s drug cartels or daring undercover operations.

I also just finished...[read on]

About The Judge, from the publisher:

When a Boston judge is being blackmailed, Andy Roark must find out who is behind the threat before lives get ruined in this thrilling mystery featuring the Vietnam veteran turned private investigator.

Boston, 1985. With the late December cold comes a new job for ex-military operative turned private investigator Andy Roark. Boston judge Ambrose Messer is being blackmailed, and he needs Roark's help to stop the culprit.

Messer is judging the bench trial of a chemical company accused of knowingly dumping chemical waste in an unsafe manner, causing birth defects and cancer. The evidence against them is overwhelming, but the message from the blackmailer is clear: If you don't want the world to know your secret, the chemical company wins. Messer doesn't want to let a threat corrupt his judgement . . . but then again, he could lose everything if his secret comes out!

Judging his client to be a man with morals, Roark plunges into action, determined to find the blackmailer before it's too late. But the disturbing, unexpected revelations he uncovers make him a target of some very dangerous people, who soon seem determined not only to wreck the life of his client, but to destroy Roark's too...

Written by a US Army veteran and New England police officer, this new instalment in the Andy Roark mystery series will appeal to fans who love a hard-boiled protagonist with a complex backstory and a plot filled with unexpected twists and action-packed scenes.

Visit Peter Colt's website.

My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues.

Q&A with Peter Colt.

The Page 69 Test: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: Death at Fort Devens.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (June 2022).

My Book, The Movie: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Judge.

My Book, The Movie: The Judge.

Writers Read: Peter Colt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kate Feiffer's "Morning Pages"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Morning Pages by Kate Feiffer.

About the book, from the publisher:

When her professional and family life collide, a playwright starts journaling every morning to push through her writer’s block in this laugh-out-loud and fresh take on family, friendship, and the chaos of midlife.

Elise Hellman was once heralded by audiences and critics as a “playwright to watch.” Then they forgot all about her. When a prestigious theater company unexpectedly offers her a generous commission to write a new play, she has an opportunity to turn her career around. With sixty-five days left until her deadline, Elise starts scribbling a few pages of stream-of-consciousness first thing every morning as a way to get over her writer’s block—a technique called Morning Pages, popularized in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

What emerges is a witty confessional in which Elise chronicles her life with her teenage stoner son and her overbearing and eccentric mother, who is losing her memory but not her profanity. She writes about her lingering feelings for her ex-husband, her best friend who is acting oddly, and the confusing encounters she has with a handsome stranger in an elevator.

As she writes, the marked-up scenes from her play, Deja New, are revealed, as a story within the story.

Morning Pages is about what life throws at you when you’re trying to write. It is both a humorous exploration of the creative process and a relatable coming-of-age tale for the generation sandwiched between caring for their parents and caring for their kids.

Visit Kate Feiffer's website.

Writers Read: Kate Feiffer (May 2011).

The Page 69 Test: Morning Pages.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susan D. Blum's "Schoolishness"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning by Susan D. Blum.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread.

Drawing on critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy in conversation with the anthropology of learning, and building on the insights of her two previous books Blum proposes less-schoolish ways of learning in ten dimensions, to lessen the mismatch between learning in school and learning in the wild. She asks, if learning is our human "superpower," why is it so difficult to accomplish in school? In every chapter Blum compares the fake learning of schoolishness with successful examples of authentic learning, including in her own courses, which she scrutinizes critically.

Schoolishness is not a pedagogical how-to book, but a theory-based phenomenology of institutional education. It has moral, psychological, and educational arguments against schoolishness that, as Blum notes, "rhymes with foolishness."

Visit Susan D. Blum's website.

The Page 99 Test: Schoolishness.

--Marshal Zeringue

The twenty-five best time travel books

At the Waterstones blog Mark Skinner tagged twenty-five of the best time travel books. One title on the list:

Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel

Another tour de force of imagination and dazzling construction from the author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, Mandel's audacious time travel novel intertwines the stories of an Edwardian exile in British Columbia and an Earth-hopping writer two centuries later.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Holly Smale's five time travel novels that explore what it means to be human and Damian Dibben's top ten time travel books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marjorie McCown's "Star Struck," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Star Struck by Marjorie McCown.

About the book, from the publisher:

Movie costumer Joey Jessop is working on a film with two of the biggest box office stars in the world. The leading man, Andrew DeRossi, is not only a serious actor but also a philanthropist and climate change warrior -- while his costar, Gillian Best, is an aging beauty who pours most of her time and energy into becoming the next celebrity entrepreneur with her start-up lifestyle brand.

When a fatal traffic accident happens within sight of the movie's shooting location in downtown Los Angeles, Joey realizes the car involved belongs to Gillian, and she starts to wonder if the star is hiding something. Gillian's strange behavior in the wake of the tragedy only deepens Joey's suspicions. When the authorities show no interest in further investigation of the circumstances surrounding the accident, Joey is faced with a choice: she can either maintain her professional detachment from the swirling orbits of the movie stars she works with and turn a blind eye to Gillian's scheming -- or she must launch her own search for the truth.

I have lots of ideas for casting the movie version of my book! Since I spent most of my career working as a costume designer and costumer for feature films, it's almost second nature for me to think about casting the characters.

I think Jennifer Lawrence would be perfect to play Joey. She projects an understated aura of personal confidence and competence that feels authentic on screen. And she has an easy intelligence about her along with a sense of humor that she just naturally brings to all her characters.

For Gillian Best, I think...[read on]

Visit Marjorie McCown's website.

Q&A with Marjorie McCown.

My Book, The Movie: Star Struck.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Larry Tye's "The Jazzmen"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America by Larry Tye.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.

This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America.

• Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category.
• Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom.
• William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans—the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller.

What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.

Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country’s most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians.

Visit Larry Tye's website.

The Page 99 Test: Demagogue.

My Book, The Movie: Demagogue.

The Page 99 Test: The Jazzmen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten novels about resisting productivity culture

Eliza Browning is an intern at Electric Literature.

She tagged ten writers who "use workplace fiction as a lens to examine late-stage capitalism, the gig economy, and the inevitable burnout." One title on the list:

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman

Help Wanted focuses on a group of underpaid workers at the big-box store Town Square who plan to get rid of their bad boss by getting her promoted to a position so high she won’t be able to bother them. The novel is a comedic critique of contemporary labor and a corporate culture that prioritizes efficiency above all else, even when it’s derived from underpaying workers. Adelle Waldman’s second novel traces the desperate striving for stability by minimum wage workers in America.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Abraham Chang

From my Q&A with Abraham Chang, author of 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers: A Novel:

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

The title 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers came to me in three distinct parts. It was quick and yet it was slow. I knew my book would address the big idea of belief, as a whole – and how much control we have over our destinies – especially, in luck and love.

I had the “888 Love” part figured out once I was well on my way into writing about the Eastern numerology, superstitions, and the things you pick up from your family growing up that can influence susceptible young minds – especially when there are mental health issues. I had always known that Chinese people loved the number 8, because the number (“bah”) sounds like the word “fah” for “grow, thrive” – so “88” was a common sight, especially around the Lunar New Year. The extra 8 was natural for my main character, Young, to add on as his personal extra bit of “oomph” to ensure that additional stamp of good luck in his life.

I wasn’t aware that the Triple 8, the “888” was circulating around as well. I had not noticed it until I had completed my book and happened across it while walking through a casino! But it’s a “thing” and you’ll see it on license plates, names of restaurants, all sorts of things. Chances are if there are 8s – a Chinese person is likely nearby.

Working through our mental and spiritual health is what I believe is at the core of the meaning of life. We are constantly carrying the weight of our own humanity – this “divine burden” – it can come in different forms, to different people. For Young, he wants to understand the...[read on]

Visit Abraham Chang's website.

Q&A with Abraham Chang.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: John Soluri's "Creatures of Fashion"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia by John Soluri.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalization. Creatures of Fashion upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region's transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chile. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, John Soluri traces the circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe's houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, and textile manufacturers with those of fur seals, guanacos, and sheep at the "end of the world."

From the nineteenth-century rise of commercial hunting to twentieth-century sheep ranching to contemporary conservation-based tourism, Soluri's narrative explains how struggles for control over the production of commodities and the reproduction of animals drove the social and environmental changes that tied Patagonia to global markets, empires, and wildlife conservation movements. By exposing seams in national territories and global markets knit together by force, this book provides perspectives and analyses vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond.

Learn more about Creatures of Fashion at the University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Creatures of Fashion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books featuring killer women

Julie Mae Cohen is a UK-bestselling author of book club and romantic fiction, including the award-winning novel Together. Her work has been translated into 17 languages. She is vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK. Cohen grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the University of Reading, where she is now an associate lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Berkshire in the United Kingdom.

Cohen's new novel is Bad Men, her first thriller.

[The Page 69 Test: Bad Men; Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen]

At CrimeReads Cohen tagged six top female killer books, including:

Wahala by Nikki May

In Nigeria, ‘Wahala’ means ‘trouble’, and that’s what friends Ronke, Boo and Simi get when they welcome glamorous and rich Isobel into their group. Issues about friendship and culture take the star places in this novel but there’s murder, too, all set in the Anglo-Nigerian community of London. Unlike the killer protagonists of the other novels on this list, Ronke is totally sympathetic—a food-loving dentist on the lookout for love—and the violence in the book is an expression of the toxic unspoken jealousy that can simmer beneath some female friendships.

Read about another entry on the list.

Wahala is among Justine Sullivan's ten novels with heroines who are hot messes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Elise Juska's "Reunion"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Reunion: A Novel by Elise Juska.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the beloved author of the “uniquely poignant” (Entertainment Weekly) novel The Blessings comes a gripping story about three friends in their forties forced to reckon with their lives during a college reunion in coastal Maine.

It’s June 2021, and three old college friends are heading to New England and the twenty-fifth reunion that was delayed the year before. Hope, a stay-at-home mom, is desperate for a return to her beloved campus, a reprieve from her tense marriage, and the stresses of pandemic parenting. Adam is hesitant to leave his bucolic but secluded life with his wife and their young sons. Single mother Polly hasn’t been back to campus in more than twenty years and has no interest in returning—but changes her mind when her struggling teenage son suggests a road trip.

But the reunion isn’t what any of them had envisioned. Hope, always upbeat, is no longer able to downplay the pressures of life at home or the cracks in her longstanding friendships. Adam finds himself energized by the memory of his carefree, reckless younger self—which only reminds him how much has changed since those halcyon days. Polly cannot ignore the ghosts of her college years, including a closely guarded secret. When the weekend takes a startling turn, all three find themselves reckoning with the past—and how it will bear on the future.

Beautifully observed and insightful, Reunion is a page-turning novel about the highs and lows of friendship from a writer at the height of her powers.

Visit Elise Juska's website.

The Page 69 Test: Reunion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Yolanda Ariadne Collins's "Forests of Refuge"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield by Yolanda Ariadne Collins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Forests of Refuge questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. Yolanda Ariadne Collins interrogates the most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities: the United Nations–endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores REDD+ in Guyana and neighboring Suriname, two highly forested countries in the Amazonian Guiana Shield with low deforestation rates. Yet REDD+ implementation there has been fraught with challenges. Adopting a multisited ethnographic approach, Forests of Refuge takes readers into the halls of policymaking, into conservation development organizations, and into forest-dependent communities most affected by environmental policies and exploitative colonial histories. This book situates these challenges in the inattentiveness of global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It advocates that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization.

Visit Yolanda Ariadne Collins's website.

The Page 99 Test: Forests of Refuge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about video games

Keith Stuart is an author and journalist; he writes about video games, technology and digital culture.

His books include A Boy Made of Blocks, The Frequency of Us, and the newly released Love is a Curse.

At the Guardian Stuart tagged five books from which "avid gamers and utter newcomers alike will learn much about video games and our modern digital world." One title on the list:

Masters of Doom by David Kushner

An experienced New York Times and Rolling Stone journalist, Kushner brought keen reporting skills and cultural nous to this examination of seminal 1993 shooter Doom and the young men who made it. Masters of Doom captures the haphazard and anarchic process behind game development in the 1990s – the late nights, the pizza, the questionable personal hygiene – but it’s also a thrilling and emotional story about inspiration, friendship and, yes, creative genius.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nolan Chase's "A Lonesome Place for Dying," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: A Lonesome Place for Dying: A Novel by Nolan Chase.

The entry begins :

Clint Eastwood is my favorite director—no other American filmmaker better embodies what Keats called ‘negative capability;’ in films like Bird, Mystic River, Honkytonk Man, The Bridges of Madison Country, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven of course, he’s able to tell stories about complex personalities without putting his hand on the scale. He’d direct the hell out of A Lonesome Place for Dying.

As for Ethan Brand, the small-town chief of police and former Marine...[read on]

Visit Nolan Chase's website.

Writers Read: Nolan Chase.

The Page 69 Test: A Lonesome Place for Dying.

My Book, The Movie: A Lonesome Place for Dying.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski's "The Price of Empire"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire by Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski.

About the book, from the publisher:

The United States was an upside-down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North America. However, decades before the Spanish-American War, the United States quietly began to establish an empire across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. While conventional wisdom suggests that large interests – the military and major business interests – drove American imperialism, The Price of Empire argues that early American imperialism was driven by small entrepreneurs. When commodity prices boomed, these small entrepreneurs took risks, racing ahead of the American state. Yet when profits were threatened, they clamoured for the US government to follow them into the Pacific. Through novel, intriguing stories of American small businessmen, this book shows how American entrepreneurs manipulated the United States into pursuing imperial projects in the Pacific. It explores their travels abroad and highlights the consequences of contemporary struggles for justice in the Pacific.

Visit Miles M. Evers's website and Eric Grynaviski's website.

The Page 99 Test: Constructive Illusions by Eric Grynaviski.

The Page 99 Test: The Price of Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven self-help books that might change your life

At Vogue Mia Barzilay Freund tagged eleven self-help books that will change your life, including:

The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk

A leading expert in trauma studies, van der Kolk offers a life-changing look into how the brain and body respond to painful experiences. His research deals with a range of widely occurring traumas, from alcoholism to sexual violence to domestic abuse. With attention to the brain’s ability to be shaped and reshaped, his analysis allows readers to understand the ways trauma lingers—and our capacity to heal from it.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Clea Simon reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Clea Simon, author of Bad Boy Beat.

Her entry begins:

This is such a great topic because, of course, writers are first and foremost readers first. The problem comes when I’m asked to name just one book. Like a lot of us (I suspect), I’ve always got a couple of books going.

I recently finished Caroline Leavitt’s new Days of Wonder and I’ve been dipping into Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women, a massive history of the half of humanity that’s been left out of 800 years of English history.

But the books I keep coming back to these days are...[read on]

About Bad Boy Beat, from the publisher:

When a rookie reporter for the Boston Standard is convinced a series of street crimes are connected, she is willing to go the extra mile to chase down the big story. The newest mystery by Clea Simon is a page-turning story featuring a female protagonist and set in Boston's underground.

Boston Standard journalist Emily - Em - Kelton is desperate for a big story. As a new reporter Em covers the police beat, which has her responding to every crime that comes across the newsroom scanner. Despite the drudgery and the largely nocturnal hours, it's a beat that suits her - especially with her affinity for the low-level criminals she regularly interacts with and what she considers a healthy scepticism for the rules.

But she's sick of filing short news briefs about random street murders that barely merit a byline, and when she sets out to cover yet another shooting of a low-level dealer, she begins to wonder if these crimes are somehow connected.

With not much to go on but her instincts, Em sets out to uncover the truth behind these sordid crimes. But the more she investigates and uncovers a pattern, the more she digs herself into a hole from which she might not come out of alive...

Clea Simon draws on her career as a journalist and delivers a fast-paced and intricate plot and intriguing characters with the city of Boston coming to life. This mystery will appeal to fans who love a strong female protagonist, unexpected twists and turns and a mind-blowing ending!

Visit Clea Simon's website.

The Page 69 Test: To Conjure a Killer.

The Page 69 Test: Bad Boy Beat.

Writers Read: Clea Simon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Nolan Chase's "A Lonesome Place for Dying"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Lonesome Place for Dying: A Novel by Nolan Chase.

About the book, from the publisher:

Perfect for fans of C. J. Box and William Kent Krueger, a sleepy town is rocked to its core when a dead body is found in this debut novel.

In the quiet seaside town of Blaine, Washington, the most serious police work involves dealing with stray coyotes or ticketing speeders along the I-5. But on Ethan Brand's first day as the town's chief of police, he finds a threat on his porch, along with a gruesome souvenir, a bloody animal heart.

There are plenty of people who are upset about Ethan replacing the last Chief, but when a body shows up on the railroad tracks, Ethan has to turn his focus from the threats against him to the first homicide case the town has seen in years. Blaine's population is only five thousand, but eight million vehicles pass through its railroad crossing every year. It’s the perfect site for drug smuggling, human trafficking, larceny, and murder.

Ethan begins to realize that the small town has many more secrets than its quiet surface suggests. With no one to trust, his job already on the line, and the threats getting bolder and more reckless, Ethan Brand must find the killers and bring them to justice before anyone else winds up dead.

Visit Nolan Chase's website.

Writers Read: Nolan Chase.

The Page 69 Test: A Lonesome Place for Dying.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Grant Bollmer & Katherine Guinness's "The Influencer Factory"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube by Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness.

About the book, from the publisher:

Influencers are more than social media personalities who attract attention for brands, argue Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness. They are figures of a new transformation in capitalism, in which the logic of the self is indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation. Influencers are emblematic of what Bollmer and Guinness call the "Corpocene": a moment in capitalism in which individuals achieve the status of living, breathing, talking corporations. Behind the veneer of leisure and indulgence, most influencers are laboring daily, usually for pittance wages, to manufacture a commodity called "the self"—a raw material for brands to use—with the dream of becoming corporations in human form by owning and investing in the products they sell. Refuting the theory that digital labor and economies are immaterial, Bollmer and Guinness search influencer content for evidence of the material infrastructure of capitalism. Each chapter looks to what literally appears in the backgrounds of videos and images: the houses, cars, warehouses, and spaces of the market that point back to the manufacturing and circulation of consumer goods. Demonstrating the material reality of producing the self as a commodity, The Influencer Factory makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of contemporary economic life.

Visit Grant Bollmer's website and Katherine Guinness's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Influencer Factory.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top novels about women living alone

Amy Key is a poet and essayist based in London. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe and Isn’t Forever.

Her new book, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone, was inspired by her viral Granta essay, “A Bleed of Blue.”

At Electric Lit Key tagged nine "novels about women living alone." Her "list—by accident rather than intent—is formed of books where in solitude women contemplate their relationship to other women (in the main), rather than to men." One novel on the list:

Take What You Need by Idra Novey

Jean is an artist who doesn’t need anyone to confer the status of artist upon her. Her home, where she lives alone (other than an occasional, tacitly invited houseguest), is her studio and gallery. She longs to connect to her estranged stepdaughter Leah, and the novel is told in their alternating voices. Jean welds scrap metal together to create towers she embellishes with words and symbols and trinkets. The towers are imposing totems of Jean’s vitality, of all she’s learned from her experiences and from her beloved artists Louise Bourgeoise and Agnes Martin. The novel is uncomfortable and confronting at times, but it is invigorating too. An artist can create themselves at any stage of life and be aflame with artistic intent until the very end.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen

From my Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen, author of Bad Men: A Novel:

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

My novel, Bad Men, is about a female serial killer who kills bad men who hurt women—rapists, murderers, abusers. The title is slightly misleading and ironic in that the novel isn’t about the bad men; it’s about the protagonist, Saffy, who is by all normal moral standards quite a bad woman, as she has murdered a lot of people. The novel is meant to be funny and highly satirical, and one of the fun parts about writing the story was the inversion of ‘bad’ and ‘good’—with almost all of the ‘bad’ men going unpunished and even abetted by normal society, and almost all of the ‘good’ characters, including Saffy and her love interest, Jon, doing lots of things that are extremely morally questionable. Suffice it to say that the serial killers in this book, while not necessarily cuddly, would be fun to have a drink with.

Of course, there’s a serious intent behind this story, which is to highlight the epidemic of male violence against women. So in that aspect...[read on]

Visit Julie Mae Cohen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Bad Men.

Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joshua O. Reno's "Home Signs"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language by Joshua O. Reno.

About the book, from the publisher:

An intimate account of an anthropologist’s relationship with his non-verbal son and how it has shaped and transformed his understanding of closeness and communication.

Home Signs grew out of the anthropologist Joshua Reno’s experience of caring for and trying to communicate with his teenage son, Charlie, who cannot speak. To manage interactions with others, Charlie uses what are known as “home signs,” gestures developed to meet his need for expression, ranging from the wiggle of a finger to a subtle sideways glance. Though he is nonverbal, he is far from silent: in fact, he is in constant communication with others.

In this intimate reflection on language, disability, and togetherness, the author invites us into his and Charlie’s shared world. Combining portraits of family life and interviews with other caregivers, Reno upends several assumptions, especially the idea that people who seem not to be able to speak for themselves need others to speak on their behalf. With its broad exploration of nonverbal communication in both human and nonhuman contexts, Home Signs challenges us to think harder about what it means to lead a “normal” life and to connect with another person.

Learn more about Home Signs at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Waste Away.

The Page 99 Test: Military Waste.

The Page 99 Test: Home Signs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six novels whose crimes & mysteries grow out of place and manners

Peter Nichols is the author of the bestselling novel The Rocks, the nonfiction bestsellers A Voyage for Madmen, Evolution's Captain, and three other books of fiction, memoir, and non-fiction. His novel Voyage to the North Star was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC literary award. His journalism has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has an MFA degree from Antioch University Los Angeles, and has taught creative writing there and at Georgetown University, Bowdoin College, and New York University in Paris.

Nichols's newest novel is Granite Harbor.

At CrimeReads he tagged six (plus) "novels whose crimes and mysteries grow out of place and manners," including:

Tana French, In the Woods

Tana French’s stories are set in Ireland. Like [Jane] Harper, she has a series of novels, The Dublin Murder Squad, beginning with her debut, In The Woods, that feature returning detective characters, with revolving points of view, and stand-alone novels with new characters. Like Harper, her stories are slow-burners: an inciting incident draws the reader in, and the long, deliberate development of her plots is sustained by the convincing details of place, characters, and the quality of French’s writing.

Read about another entry on the list.

In the Woods is among Amy Tintera's five top thrillers featuring amnesiacs, Emily Schultz's eight top novels about memory loss, Gabino Iglesias's fifty best mysteries of all time, Kate Robards's five thrillers unfolding in wooded seclusion, Paula Hawkins's five novels with criminal acts at their heart, Alafair Burke's top ten books about amnesia, Caz Frear's five top open-ended novels, Gabriel Bergmoser's top ten horror novels, Kate White's favorite thrillers with a main character who can’t remember what matters most, Kathleen Donohoe's ten top titles about missing persons, Jessica Knoll's ten top thrillers, Tara Sonin's twenty-five unhappy books for Valentine’s Day, Krysten Ritter's six favorite mysteries, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Emma Straub's ten top books that mimic the feeling of a summer vacation, the Barnes & Noble Review's five top books from Ireland's newer voices, and Judy Berman's ten fantastic novels with disappointing endings.

The Page 69 Test: In the Woods.

--Marshal Zeringue