Four great novels of subtle espionage

Flynn Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of Under the Harrow, winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; A Double Life, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Northern Spy, a Reese’s Book Club pick that was named one of the ten best thrillers of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Northern Spy is being adapted for film by Netflix.

Berry's new novel is Trust Her.

At CrimeReads she tagged four

favorite novels about amateur spies. These characters go undercover, without extensive training, an extraction team, expensive equipment, or any idea of what damage might lie ahead.

One title on the list:

Ilium by Lea Carpenter

An aimless young woman marries a charismatic older man, and on their honeymoon on the Dalmatian Coast, her new husband recruits her for an intelligence operation. “What was laid out before me, then, felt less like a risk than like a promotion. I was being invited into something very special, important. He was handing me an identity I had been looking for without even knowing it.” She is to pose as an art advisor, and spy on the owner of a compound in France. The writing is cool, perceptive, and smart, and Ilium reads like a spy thriller by Joan Didion.

Read about another entry on the list.

Q&A with Lea Carpenter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Marjorie N. Feld's "The Threshold of Dissent"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism by Marjorie Feld.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores the long history of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist American Jews

Throughout the twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders projected a unified position of unconditional support for Israel, cementing it as a cornerstone of American Jewish identity. This unwavering position served to marginalize and label dissenters as antisemitic, systematically limiting the threshold of acceptable criticism. In pursuit of this forced consensus, these leaders entered Cold War alliances, distanced themselves from progressive civil rights and anti-colonial movements, and turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Israel. In The Threshold of Dissent, Marjorie N. Feld instead shows that today’s vociferous arguments among American Jews over Israel and Zionism are but the newest chapter in a fraught history that stretches from the nineteenth century.

Drawing on rich archival research and examining wide-ranging intellectual currents―from the Reform movement and the Yiddish left to anti-colonialism and Jewish feminism―Feld explores American Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel from the 1880s to the 1980s. The book argues that the tireless policing of contrary perspectives led each generation of dissenters to believe that it was the first to question unqualified support for Israel. The Threshold of Dissent positions contemporary critics within a century-long debate about the priorities of the American Jewish community, one which holds profound implications for inclusion in American Jewish communal life and for American Jews’ participation in coalitions working for justice.

At a time when American Jewish support for Israel has been diminishing, The Threshold of Dissent uncovers a deeper―and deeply contested―history of intracommunal debate over Zionism among American Jews.

Learn more about The Threshold of Dissent at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Threshold of Dissent.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Maggie Nye

From my Q&A with Maggie Nye, author of The Curators: A Novel:

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

For many years, while I was shopping my manuscript around, my title was How do you like these bad days? That original title came from a line in a postcard I found from murder victim Mary Phagan to her cousin. I dug up said postcard in the archives of the Breman Museum of Jewish History in Atlanta. I loved that it gave Mary a chance to speak, but editors and readers agreed that it was too long and obscure.

After much agonizing, I landed on The Curators because that title accurately depicts the desires of the adolescent girls who narrate my novel. They seek to collect and to control a historical perspective that is denied to them. An audience member at my book launch asked me recently: “Why not The Creators? They create a golem, so wouldn’t that title make more sense?” And my answer is that though they bring a golem to life, even that is an act of curation. Their golem can only...[read on]

Visit Maggie Nye's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Curators.

Q&A with Maggie Nye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: David Housewright's "Man in the Water"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Man in the Water: A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright.

About the book, from the publisher:

When his wife finds the body of an Army veteran in the lake, it is inevitable that former cop, now unofficial P.I. Rushmore McKenzie will get enmeshed in a complicated case of possible murder.

It all starts with the body in the water—on what should be the first boat day of the season, McKenzie’s wife Nina finds a dead Army vet. As the dock owner and the insurance companies claim that it was suicide, despite the deceased, E.J. Woods, having no obvious reason to kill himself, his widow starts acting suspiciously. McKenzie finds himself pulled into the fight when Naveah, the victim’s daughter, convinced her father was murdered, asks him to investigate.

Further complicating the situation are uncooperative boaters, allegations of PTSD, and the simple fact that there was no reason for E.J. to be in the water. McKenzie’s investigation unearths not only the petty squabbles surrounding the lake and its dock, but details of her father’s past that Naveah is perhaps better off not knowing. With Nina haunted by dreams of the body and the legal fight over cause of death becoming increasingly nasty, McKenzie may be the only one interested in finding justice for E.J.— and uncovering the truth before another person dies.

Learn more about the book and author at David Housewright's website and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Kind Word.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Kind Word.

The Page 69 Test: Stealing the Countess.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Leave Behind.

The Page 69 Test: First, Kill the Lawyers.

Writers Read: David Housewright (January 2019).

The Page 69 Test: In a Hard Wind.

Q&A with David Housewright.

Writers Read: David Housewright.

The Page 69 Test: Man in the Water.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David N. Gibbs's "Revolt of the Rich"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America's Class Divide by David N. Gibbs.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inequality in the United States has reached staggering proportions, with a massive share of wealth held by the very richest. How was such a dramatic shift in favor of a narrow elite possible in a democratic society? David N. Gibbs explores the forces that shaped the turn toward free market economics and wealth concentration and finds their roots in the 1970s. He argues that the political transformations of this period resulted from a “revolt of the rich,” whose defense of their class interests came at the expense of the American public.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Gibbs examines how elites established broad coalitions that brought together business conservatives, social traditionalists, and militarists. At the very top, Richard Nixon’s administration quietly urged corporate executives to fund conservative think tanks and seeded federal agencies with free-market economists. Even Jimmy Carter’s ostensibly liberal administration brought deregulation to the financial sector along with the imposition of severe austerity measures that hurt the living standards of the working class. Through a potent influence campaign, academics and intellectuals sold laissez-faire to policy makers and the public, justifying choices to deregulate industry, cut social spending, curb organized labor, and offshore jobs, alongside expanding military interventions overseas.

Shedding new light on the political alliances and policy decisions that tilted the playing field toward the ultrawealthy, Revolt of the Rich unveils the origins of today’s stark disparities.

Learn more about Revolt of the Rich at Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Revolt of the Rich.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that explore the emotional legacy of family life

Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. She has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University.

Takacs's debut novel, Pearce Oysters, is a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Electric Lit Takacs tagged seven titles "about the ways our family leave their mark on us," including:

Absolution by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s most recent novel is, like all her work, unparalleled in its emotional nuance and observation. It’s also the most difficult to summarize of the books on this list, weaving in epistolary form through the decades. The major events of the novel take place in 1963, Saigon. Two American women—the young idealistic Patricia and the worldly “dynamo” Charlene—are brought to Vietnam by their husbands’ work during the war. Together, the women concoct their own unofficial charity to raise money for a Vietnamese hospital. Now, sixty years later, Patricia begins writing Charlene’s grown daughter to revisit the past. They weigh the women’s well-meaning attempts at “inconsequential good.” And though the novel takes up far more than a mother-daughter relationship as its subject, the letters paint a vivid picture of Charlene as a mother. I read this novel in a gallop, mesmerized.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue