The Containment, by Michelle AdamsRead about another entry on the list.
Legal scholar Michelle Adams traces school desegregation efforts in her native Detroit and their reverberations throughout the North. She focuses her compelling narrative on the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley, which ruled that majority-white suburban school districts could not be forced to desegregate.
it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
In the late l940s, before television made those who watched at best passive observers, radio engaged the attention, and the imagination, of those who listened. One show did this in what even then was considered an unusual way, The Whiz Kids, in which several young teenagers answered, or tried to answer, serious questions about serious things. Their age told part of the story. Instead of high school freshmen, they were already in college, and not just any college, places like the University of Chicago. One of them could easily have been Allan Bloom, who would years later write The Closing of The American Mind, a critique of American higher education that was not expected to sell more than the initial print run of 10,000 copies, but ended up selling more than a million copies in the Untied States and another million in the rest of the world. It was a book that would never have been written had Bloom not begun his undergraduate career at the University of Chicago just after the end of the Second World War, in 1946, when he was only fifteen years old.Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
Bloom understood the moment he stepped on campus that the University of Chicago was different. The buildings might be fake Gothic, gray stones that had the look of wind worn battlements, but they “were a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life.” A great university, it announced that “there are questions that…are not asked in ordinary life.” These were the kind of questions Bloom wanted to explore. Fifteen when he began his undergraduate education, he was eighteen when he graduated and began graduate school in the Committee on Social Thought which, in a way, was almost a university within the university. The only students taken were those who wanted to devote themselves, in that now quaint-sounding phrase, to the “life of the mind.” Bloom studied Greek history andthought, wrote his dissertation on the Greek statesman and orator Isocrates, was eighteen when he started and almost twenty-five when he finished.
Whatever else Bloom learned as a student in his years at Chicago, nothing was as important, or as influential, as what he learned from Leo Strauss. When Leo Strauss began talking about something Socrates had said in one of the dialogues Plato had written, it was as if you were listening to someone tell you what he had just heard in a conversation he had had with Socrates himself early that morning. Strauss knew what was worth reading and how that reading should be done. He explained it in a way that was really quite simple: The mind needs teachers, teachers are themselves pupils, but there cannot be an infinite regress, i.e. there must be teachers who are not pupils. These are the great minds, the greatest minds, and they are extremely rare. The only access to them are through the books they have written - the great books. It is what liberal education is all about.
One of the greatest minds - some would say the greatest mind - is Plato, who of course wrote in Greek. There are translations, but those who did the translations were not themselves very close students of what they were translating and were, many of them, satisfied with giving a kind of general account of what they thought Plato was trying to say. F. N. Cornford, whose translation was the most widely used, removed many of the exchanges between Socrates and other participants in the dialogues because he thought they were too formal and tended to become tedious. Bloom decided that a better translation was needed. In l968, his literal translation of Plato’s Republic was published and for the first time Plato could be understood by English speaking students as Plato understood himself. That did not mean students had to like it.
This is the thrust of Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind. The proof, which at first does not appear to prove anything, is that “Classical music is dead among the young.” If this seems irrelevant to the question whether the American mind is open, as most would like to believe, or closed, as Bloom insists, his dismissal of the music those same young people came to embrace, will strike many as the closed-minded sentiment of a hopeless reactionary. Rock music, he writes, is nothing so much as a barbaric appeal to sexual desire. If...[read on]
Romanticism is often reduced to nostalgic pastoralism and solitary contemplation of the sublime. But a radical strand of Romantic writers and thinkers offered sweeping political, ecological, and religious critiques of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction. Interweaving canonical nineteenth-century authors with Black and Indigenous thinkers who transformed their work, this book is a bold new account of Romanticism for today’s deeply entrenched crises.Learn more about Radical Romanticism at the Columbia University Press website.
Mark S. Cladis examines the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed European Romantic literature and its sustained legacies in North America. His interpretation interweaves diverse voices such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Marmon Silko while also revealing the progressive visions of Romantic authors such as Rousseau, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Forging connections among literary and philosophical traditions while closely reading a wide range of texts, Radical Romanticism shows how storytelling is central to the pursuit of justice and flourishing for the human and the more-than-human worlds. Bringing together environmental humanities, literary theory, political theory, and religious studies, this book makes the case for a renewed radical Romanticism, offering urgent resources for a world beset by catastrophe, uncertainty, and despair.
Saint of the Narrows Street, William BoyleRead about another entry on the list.
Boyle continues filling out the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn with powerful, emotionally complex crime stories. In Saint of the Narrows Street, two sisters arrange for a terrible secret to be hidden, reverberating across the generations. Boyle’s work is always traced with melancholy and never shies away from the tough moral predicaments his characters face.
In this stunning contemporary fantasy novel for fans of V. E. Schwab and Kaliane Bradley, a historian’s dream job in Italy takes a dark turn when she discovers her employers aren’t exactly human…Visit Crystal King's website.
After losing her book deal and her academic position, historian Aida Reale needs a new career, and fast. After all, she and her fiancé, Graham, have a wedding to pay for. So when a friend recommends her for an extremely high—paying position at a company called MODA, it feels like the perfect stroke of luck. And with a move to Italy and a breathtaking palazzo included, how could she say no?
Aside from a snooty assistant, a daunting NDA and some very stringent rules about the use of personal technology, working for MODA is a dream come true—at least at first. But the more research Aida conducts for this elusive company, the more things feel off. Not only does her relationship with Graham suffer, but it seems like every site she visits either vanishes or is struck by tragedy soon after she’s been there.
It’s only after a mysterious woman approaches Aida and Luciano, her devastatingly handsome and equally concerned MODA colleague, that they learn the truth—they are just mortal pawns in a game between gods. Now Aida must find answers to the question she's been avoiding: What's really happening to all the happiness she's been collecting…and can she stop the gods’ plans before it’s too late?
Joshua R. Shiver’s War Fought and Felt advances our grasp of the links between masculinity, emotion, and relationships during the American Civil War. It is the first broadly researched, multidisciplinary, and statistically supported approach to understanding the pivotal role of emotions in the everyday lives of Confederate soldiers. Using a source base of more than 1,790 letters and diaries from two hundred Confederate soldiers from North Carolina and Alabama, it builds upon traditional sociocultural and ideological arguments for why Confederate soldiers fought. Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it underscores the necessity of examining primal emotions when looking to understand soldiers’ motivations. It argues that the heightened emotions felt by these soldiers drove them to suffer, fight, desert, and willingly die.Learn more about War Fought and Felt at the LSU Press website.
Shiver examines the vital role of emotions within the context of soldiers’ relationships with their parents, children, wives, sweethearts, and comrades. These relationships and the emotions they engendered defined Confederate soldiers’ firsthand experiences of war and ultimately redefined the Confederate cause itself. A war that began steeped in ideology ended, for the soldiers, as one fought for the protection and future of one’s loved ones. Shiver demonstrates that the emotionally overwhelming nature of the war forced a tectonic shift in American masculinity in which the prewar emphasis on stoic individualism gave way to an outpouring of emotional expression and mutual interdependence. As a result, Confederate soldiers pragmatically embraced emotional and relational norms that were previously considered taboo.
By placing emotion alongside traditional ideological and sociocultural explanations for motivation, Shiver sheds light on a new area of research that promises to promote a deeper understanding of why the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest, most emotionally influential, and world-changing events of the last two centuries.
Tanya Grant writes twisty thrillers full of secrets, murder, and gossipy group dynamics. When not conducting highly suspicious web searches (for research!), she also writes romances. Her essays have appeared on HelloGiggles.com and Bust.com, and she's spoken about creativity on various podcasts. When she's not writing, you can find the author listening to the coyotes howl outside her Seattle-area home, drinking cinnamon tea, and chasing her two children.
Read about another thriller on Grant's list.May Cobb, The Hollywood Assistant
When a personal assistant to a famous Hollywood couple gets caught in their secrets and lies, she lands in the middle of a murder investigation. May Cobb is the queen of writing unlikeable women, and in this thriller she delivers plenty to enjoy, from the assistant who continues to make questionable choices to the angsty drama-magnet wife she works for.
I don't cast actors while I'm writing. For me, that comes after, when the manuscript is finished, and I can look back at who my characters became on the page. In The Happiness Collector, my protagonist, Aida Reale, emerges as a historian who loses everything: her book deal, her academic position, and her sense of purpose. When she accepts a too-good-to-be-true job at a mysterious Italian company called MODA, she thinks she's salvaging her career. Instead, she discovers she's been hired by gods using mortals as pawns in their nefarious machinations.Visit Crystal King's website.
Looking back at Aida now, I'd cast Emma Stone without hesitation.
Stone has that rare ability to play intelligence without making it feel performative. In The Favourite, she navigated court intrigue with a combination of calculation and vulnerability that would serve Aida perfectly. My protagonist isn't a warrior or a chosen one. She's a researcher who solves problems by digging through archives and asking uncomfortable questions. She needs to be smart enough to piece together what's happening, stubborn enough to keep pushing when things turn dangerous, and human enough that we feel her fear when she realizes the people she works for aren't people at all.
Stone also excels at playing women whose relationships are messy and complicated. The romance in this book is woven into Aida's transformation from someone who thinks she knows what she wants to someone forced to reckon with who she actually is. Stone can play that kind of internal conflict without spelling it out in dialogue.
What I appreciate most is Stone's gift for balancing drama with moments of levity. The Happiness Collector has humor woven through the tension. There's absurdity in discovering your boss is a god, in signing an NDA that binds you to divine employers, in trying to have normal conversations about happiness disappearing as part of your job. Stone can...[read on]
The story of the medieval world’s most extraordinary organisations, the Assassins and the TemplarsVisit Steve Tibble's website.
The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels.
In this engaging account, Steve Tibble traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.
Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.
Read about another entry on the list.Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo (2021)
This novel gives its female protagonist, Anna, a rich storyline beyond the bounds of her recent separation from her husband: Anna, a young biracial woman living in England, returns to her Nigerian hometown to seek out the truth about her father’s death, richly complicating the divorce narrative.
I am currently reading The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee. In it, we follow Alice Chow, a single mother struggling to juggle the delicate balance (or imbalance) of her life. A haunting intergenerational tale that is as heart wrenching as it is unnerving, it interrogates the legacies and violence the women in her family have inherited. I find myself drawn to horror by Asian women and other writers of color, in particular when...[read on]About Twin Tides, from the publisher:
Long-lost twin sisters unravel the mystery behind their mother's disappearance and face the family betrayal that ultimately separated them in this breathtaking speculative young adult thriller.Visit Hien Nguyen's website.
Heiress and influencer Caliste Ha lives a glamorous life in an LA high rise, her perfectly curated social media feed hiding the cracks in herfamily. Across the country, Aria Nguyen is barely surviving as a freshman and academic scammer at Georgetown University. They have never met.
That changes with one unexpected and grim phone call. Their long-missing mother has been found dead in Les Eaux, Minnesota. Upon arrival in the sleepy town, Caliste and Aria discover another shocker—they are identical twins.
Ready to unearth the secrets that led to their mother’s death and their separation, they start looking for answers. But a vengeful ghost is haunting the waters, and an unknown enemy is watching their every move.
Can Aria and Caliste unravel all the sinister mysteries of Les Eaux, or will the town’s deadly secrets ultimately drag them under?
Breadfruit trees are staples of the tropics, bearing cantaloupe-sized green-skinned fruits whose taste and texture resemble potatoes. More than three thousand years ago, breadfruit fueled the Pacific voyages of discovery that settled islands throughout Oceania. In the late eighteenth century, the British expedition that ended with the mutiny on the Bounty aimed, but failed, to introduce breadfruit to the West Indies as food for enslaved African laborers on sugar plantations. A later voyage resulted in the fruit’s widespread distribution and complicated role within modern Caribbean food cultures. In recent years, breadfruit has been touted as a tool for sustainable development and as a “superfood” with both health benefits and culinary versatility.Visit Russell Fielding's website.
Russell Fielding tells these stories and many others, exploring breadfruit’s fascinating global history and varied present-day uses. Bringing together extensive research and vivid travelogues, including learning directly from local agriculturists, chefs, scientists, and holders of traditional knowledge, he provides an immersive narrative of breadfruit’s contributions. Fielding argues that breadfruit’s history comprises two journeys: first, from its origins in Southeast Asia across the Pacific; and second, its transplantation to the Caribbean. Today, a third journey is taking place, one that is spreading breadfruit throughout the world.
Engagingly written and compellingly argued, this book draws timely lessons from breadfruit’s past to forecast its future potential.
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis (1980)Read about another entry on the list.
Walter Tevis is better known for his novels like “The Hustler” and “The Colour of Money” which were adopted for the screen resulting in creation of some all-timegreat movies. But he also wrote a dystopian novel called “Mockingbird” in 1980, which ironically, is often overlooked by most readers in predisposition to Tevis’s own aforementioned more famous works.
Man is an endangered species in “Mockingbird”. But unlike the book from which the first sentence is borrowed, “Mockingbird” is a highly interesting novel which manages to avoid all the standard clichés of dystopian fiction. Robots do all the toiling for humans – be it cooking, cleaning, or driving. Perpetually stoned, suicidal, illiterate, and inevitably moving towards extinction, humanity’s only salvation rests with an android named Spofforth who himself has no desire to live (but was designed in such a way that he couldn’t commit suicide), and with a man named Paul Bentley and a woman named Mary Lou, who must rekindle the human desire to live through love.
Set in a dilapidating 25th century New York, the book follows a university professor Paul Bentley, who himself doesn’t know how to read. Comically enough, while watching old silent movies, he notices the subtitles at the bottom of the screen and it dawns on him that it represents what is actually being said in the movie. Eventually, he starts learning basic words of English language by watching numerous movies. A clash of motives happens between the human and the android when Bentley expresses his desire to teach other human beings to read to Spufford, because the android considers reading a crime as it deviates from the norm of the society.
“A stunning work of suspense that’s impossible to put down. Christina Kovac masterfully combines a twisty missing person mystery, a heartbreaking love story, and an insightful exploration of the nature of obsession and trauma. I loved this novel.” —Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle CreekVisit Christina Kovac's website.
Lucy and her three best friends share a glamorous but decaying house in the heart of Georgetown. They call themselves “the Sweeties” and live an idyllic post-grad lifestyle complete with exciting jobs, dramatic love lives, and, most importantly, each other.
But when Addie, the group’s queen bee, discovers that her ex-boyfriend Josh has gone missing, the Sweeties’ worlds are turned upside down. In the days leading up to his disappearance, Josh, a star investigative journalist from a prominent political family, was behaving erratically—and Lucy is determined to find out why. All four friends upend their lives to search for him, but detectives begin to suspect that the Sweeties might know more than they’re letting on.
As the investigation unfolds, Lucy’s obsession with the case reaches a boiling point, and with it, her own troubling secrets begin bubbling to the surface of her carefully curated life. A thrilling account of the lies and delusions that lurk beneath cloistered groups of female friends and the sinister realities of celebrity, Watch Us Fall is a gripping mystery and an examination of the things we tell ourselves when we can’t face the truth.
The fascinating story of gravity, from its intimate role in our daily lives to its cosmic significance.Visit James Riordon's website.
Gravity is at once familiar and mysterious. It’s the reason for the numbers on your bathroom scale, the intricate dance of the stars and planets, and the evolution and eventual fate of the universe. In Crush, James Riordon takes readers on a tour of gravity from its vanishing insignificance on the microscopic scale to its crushing extreme inside black holes.
From the moment we lift our heads as infants until the moment we lie down and ultimately surrender to its pull at the end of our lives, we labor under the burden of gravity. It has guided the shape and structure of our bodies over eons of evolution and sculpted the Earth as it cooled from a blob of molten rock. As Riordon explains, the stars couldn’t shine without gravity holding them together. Even the atoms that form you and everything around you were forged in stellar furnaces that gravity built. It took Einstein to realize that gravity is not, in fact, a force at all, but instead the curvature of space and time.
A fascinating and memorable read, Crush examines our personal relationships with gravity, explores gravity’s role in making the universe uniquely hospitable for life, and even reveals how the mundane flow of water in your kitchen sink offers a glimpse into the secrets of black holes.
Book Riot she tagged "eight lovely nonfiction books about pets." One title on the list:
Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by Jennifer Finney BoylanRead about another title on the list.
Jennifer Finney Boylan looks at her life in eras, and each era is marked by a particular dog. This chronicle of her life, including her transition, is full of beautiful memories of her furry friends and their love. Always, primarily, the book is about love. And who can love better than a dog?
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Lexi Alexander's website.
A title can make or break a book – so choosing the title for Dead Set on You was many iterations in the making. In fact, my original working title was Hating You, Interrupted, because I knew from the beginning I wanted something that telegraphed rivals-to-lovers energy (“hating you”) with a twist in the relationship (“interrupted”), plus a nod to the supernatural hiccup at the heart of the story: my heroine waking up as a ghost tethered to her former friend, now rival.
Along the publishing journey, the title changed to Dead Set on You. This was also many ideas in the making – there’s a notepad with all the scribbled options shoved into a desk drawer somewhere. As for Dead Set on You – it does so much work as a title. It signals the paranormal element, keeps the romantic tension front and center, and still winks at the rivalry at the core of the book. I’m biased but I also think it’s sharp, memorable, and...[read on]
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan's first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till's killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs's rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson—two of Diggs's better-known Black contemporaries.Learn more about House of Diggs at the University of North Carolina Press website.
Vividly written and deeply researched, House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in US history. Congressman Diggs was a legislative lion whose unfortunate downfall punctuated his distinguished career and pushed him and his historic accomplishments out of sight. Now, for the first time, House of Diggs restores him to his much-deserved place in the history of American politics.
Laura Griffin is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than thirty books and novellas. She is a two-time RITA Award winner, as well as the recipient of the Daphne du Maurier Award.
Rachel Howzell Hall, Fog and FuryRead about another entry on the list.
Irony is alive and well in Rachel Howzell Hall’s thriller about a private investigator who moves to Haven, California,hoping to escape the violence of L.A. but ends up getting embroiled in a murder investigation. Hall sets her story in a town nicknamed “Mayberry by the Sea,” but savvy readers will clue into the surprise she is creating for her protagonist, Sonny Rush, who soon after arrival gets called upon to help solve the mysterious death of a teenage boy.
It doesn’t take long for Sonny to figure out that nothing is as it seems in Haven, and that charming little communities can hide dangerous secrets.
Addie James, who is the pivotal love interest/best friend, should be played by Zendaya. I always imagined Zendaya. In fact, when Josh first sees her, he notices Addie’s “big eyes and sharp cheeks, her warm brown skin... the way she moved. Like a dancer, or an athlete. Someone joyful in their body.” And Zendaya moves like that.Visit Christina Kovac's website.
Anya Taylor-Joy from Queen’s Gambit would be an interesting choice for Lucy. She’s got a...[read on]
Finding Mr. Perfect explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. Author Min Joo Lee argues that disparate racialized erotic desires of Korean pop culture fans, foreign tourists to Korea, Korean men, and the Korean nation converge to configure the interracial and transnational relationships between these tourists and Korean men. Lee observes how racial prejudices are developed and manifested through interracial and transnational intimate desires and encounters. This book is the first to examine the interracial relationships between Hallyu tourists and Korean men. Furthermore, it is the first to analyze Korea as a popular romance tourist destination for heterosexual women. Finding Mr. Perfect illuminates South Korean popular culture’s transnational fandom and tourism as a global phenomenon where fantasies and realities converge to have a tangible impact on individual lives.Learn more about Finding Mr. Perfect at the Rutgers University Press website.
The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It BackRead about another entry on the list.
Madiba K. Dennie
Blending scholarship with accessible analysis of Constitutional law, this book underscores the ambition of the Reconstruction Amendments, which were adopted in the wake of the Civil War and sought to build a democracy with equal membership for marginalized people. The author argues the law must serve to make that promise of democracy real in spirit, not in following the original interpretation of a bygone era.
Right now I'm reading Generation (Volume 1) published in 1987 by Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman.About Huguette, from the publisher:
This is a non-fiction book in French (and I confess DeepL for translation is very helpful in reading this 600 page book!)
I found this book secondhand in Paris at the wonderful Gibert Joseph bookstore near Saint Michel.
My friend recommended to read this since I'm doing research on May 1968 and the Sorbonne student uprising for my next book. He was right - it's got everything - firsthand accounts of protestors, journalists, police actions. Descriptions of...[read on]
In the lawlessness of post–World War II France, a resilient young woman fights to survive and make a living, no matter the cost—from the New York Times bestselling author of Three Hours in Paris and the Aimée Leduc seriesVisit Cara Black's website and follow her on Instagram and Threads.
After Libération, spring 1945: Seventeen-year-old Huguette Faure is a survivor. The war has taken everything from her—both her parents and her sense of safety.Now, pregnant and on the lam, she cannot return to her childhood home in Paris. Forced to reinvent herself, she must outrun her father’s enemies, who want her dead. After narrowly avoiding jail time—thanks to the help of a kindhearted police officer named Claude Leduc—Huguette lands a job assisting a legendary film director. As her role develops from helping him with chores to cooking his books, she sees an opportunity to break free from the ghosts of her past once and for all.
In this big-hearted story of resilience, New York Times bestselling author Cara Black offers a wholly original depiction of postwar France as well as introduces Claude Leduc—the man who decades later inspired his granddaughter, Aimée, to become a private investigator.
For fans of Nita Prose, Benjamin Stevenson, and Jessa Maxwell, this delightfully witty and tightly-written new locked room culinary mystery from the MasterChef semi-finalist, cookbook writer, and bestselling author of Knife Skills for Beginners features a charming chef, delicious original recipes, and a killer cruise aboard a luxurious superyacht.Visit Orlando Murrin's website.
“If it weren’t for all the terrible things that have been happening, I’d consider myself the luckiest man alive...”
While his flooded house undergoes repairs, chef-turned-writer Paul Delamare has been offered an accommodation upgrade—an all-expenses-paid trip aboard a private superyacht in the company of Xéra, one of his dearest friends. Paul will help Xéra work on her memoirs as Maldemer glides its sumptuous way to the Caribbean. The scenery is stunning, the luxury is unparalleled, and the food…well, at least the dishes that Paul is roped into preparing are delicious. The hired chef, meanwhile, seems completely out of her depth.
She’s not the only one. Much as Paul adores Xéra, a Parisian socialite who he was introduced to by his late lover, Marcus, he has little in common with the other guests, a motley crew consisting of Xéra’s new husband and his grasping family.
When Xéra’s priceless new necklace goes missing, Paul falls under suspicion. But there’s far worse in store, as one of the passengers is found dead in mysterious and grisly circumstances. The stormy weather matches the threatening mood onboard, and as Maldemer veers off course, every semblance of order goes with it.
Above and below deck there are secrets and dangerous alliances. And as he untangles the truth, it becomes clear that Paul’s sharing close quarters with a killer eager to make this his final voyage...
A new history of literary narration rooted in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation.Learn more about Fictions of God at the University of Chicago Press website.
We often identify secularization's characteristic literary form as the modern novel: out with divine scripture, in with human fictions. In Fictions of God, Raphael Magarik argues that this story overlooks the cultural upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. Early reformers imagined a Bible that was neither infallible nor inerrant but fictional, composed by a divine counterfactual: God crafted the text, they said, as if it had been written by the prophets. Early modern Protestants now found in their Bibles not a source of foundational truths but a model for unreliable narration, even fiction.
Fictions of God traces how this approach to literature passed from biblical commentators to poets like Abraham Cowley, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson amid the violent emergence of a new religious and political order—long before the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel. The result is a transformative account of the Reformation’s effect on imaginative literature and the secularization of the Bible itself.
Murder Takes a Vacation, Laura LippmanRead about another novel on the list.
Stalwart mystery author Lippman takes up the Agatha Christie mantle in her newest novel, Murder Takes a Vacation, in which Tess Monaghan’s longtime sidekick, Mrs. Blossom, gets her turn in the spotlight. The action sees Blossom head to France for a once-in-a-lifetime cruise; her interest is sparked by a man on board, but, naturally, the man soon turns up dead in Paris, and the ship begins looking more like a vipers’ nest, as Blossom unspools a mystery among the passengers. The new novel adds a welcome layer of depth to the character and constructs a worthy mystery for her to solve, all set against the splendors of a voyager’s France. –
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Matthew Pearl's website.
I like to flatter myself that I'm a title aficionado, actually, in that I put a fair amount of energy into landing what I hope is the just-right title for a project, whether it comes easily or takes longer, and I try to be a student of other titles out in the world. The title for The Award came to me once I had the plot for this novel in mind, which involves an up-and-coming writer navigating twists and turns of the literary world, including elite soirees and fancy awards, which ultimately lead into life and death stakes. It also plays on the idea that we sometimes trust books that won awards to ...[read on]
Bolivia's troubled efforts to develop a commercial lithium industry.Visit Mark Goodale's website.
Bolivia's lithium accounts for a significant percentage of the world's known reserve. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Mark Goodale traces the development of Bolivia's closely guarded lithium project through the perspectives of a wide array of people and institutions, including workers at the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat; the state lithium company in La Paz; Latin America's first electric vehicle company; and energy entrepreneurs in Bolivia, the United States, and Germany. He points to a fundamental contradiction: a so-called green energy transition dependent on the ever-greater extraction of yet another nonrenewable resource.
But without access to Bolivia's lithium, and at megaindustrial scales that far outstrip current production, there won't be sufficient lithium supply to make the batteries needed for a truly global EV revolution. Extracting the Future shows how the lithium economy is deeply embedded in a global capitalist system that continues to rely on resource extraction, unsustainable economic growth, and geopolitical violence.
for her family, working out at the gym, and finding new ways to keep her house spotlessly clean. Truth is, she's an expert at calling for take-out, she grumbles about walking the dog, and the dust bunnies under the bed have grown into dust lions. Action, adventure, mystery, and humor are the things Mulhern loves when she's reading. She loves them even more when she's writing!
Catriona McPherson, After the Armistice BallRead about another entry on the list.
After the Armistice Ball by Catriona McPherson drops us into a chilly Scottish winter where the unhealed wounds left by the Great War still color every conversation. The sleuth, Dandy Gilver, is an aristocratic woman finding new purpose as a detective, and McPherson captures both the privilege and the suffocating expectations of Dandy’s class with equal precision.
Dandy doesn’t rail against the bars of her golden cage. Instead, she subversively slips through them. And we love her for it. The mystery itself is clever, but it’s the atmosphere—the tension between old certainties and new possibilities—that keeps readers hooked.
In the lawlessness of post–World War II France, a resilient young woman fights to survive and make a living, no matter the cost—from the New York Times bestselling author of Three Hours in Paris and the Aimée Leduc seriesVisit Cara Black's website and follow her on Instagram and Threads.
After Libération, spring 1945: Seventeen-year-old Huguette Faure is a survivor. The war has taken everything from her—both her parents and her sense of safety. Now, pregnant and on the lam, she cannot return to her childhood home in Paris. Forced to reinvent herself, she must outrun her father’s enemies, who want her dead. After narrowly avoiding jail time—thanks to the help of a kindhearted police officer named Claude Leduc—Huguette lands a job assisting a legendary film director. As her role develops from helping him with chores to cooking his books, she sees an opportunity to break free from the ghosts of her past once and for all.
In this big-hearted story of resilience, New York Times bestselling author Cara Black offers a wholly original depiction of postwar France as well as introduces Claude Leduc—the man who decades later inspired his granddaughter, Aimée, to become a private investigator.
