What is Carrie Classon reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Carrie Classon, author of Loon Point: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

At this moment, I don’t dare start to read another thing because I am smack dab in the middle of Abraham Verghese’s latest astonishing yarn, The Covenant of Water. I will have the privilege of hearing him speak at the writers’ conference in San Miguel de Allende in February, and I’ve had this book sitting on the shelf for a while because I’ve read all his previous books and he is one of my favorite writers. So why, you may well wonder, has it taken me until 2026 to read this book that came out in 2023?

The answer is simple:...[read on]

About Loon Point, from the publisher:

Set against the rugged beauty of the northern woods, the heartwarming first novel by columnist Carrie Classon explores how chosen family can sweeten bitterness into surprising joy.

Alone in the Northwoods, Norry Last settles in for another springtime lull at the remote resort she inherited from her father. She’s content with the solitude, maybe resigned. But when a blizzard hits, those little cabins by the lake start to fill up fast.

First to arrive is Lizzie, an eight-year-old with resilience and wisdom beyond her years, neglected by a mother struggling with addiction. Next comes Wendell, a cantankerous old fellow whose house collapses in the storm, the same way hope collapsed inside him long before. And then there’s Bud, the helpful handyman who’s always buzzing around, his kindness thawing something Norry thought she’d buried deep in the Minnesota snow.

As white melts to green, the Last Resort’s unlikely companions learn to share space, stories, and quiet comforts―an unexpected family that makes perfect sense. After all, Lizzie needs to be cared for. Wendell needs to care. Norry needs to open up. And Bud? Bud just might fix everything.

Visit Carrie Classon's website.

The Page 69 Test: Loon Point.

Writers Read: Carrie Classon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Andromeda Romano-Lax

From my Q&A with Andromeda Romano-Lax, author of What Boys Learn:

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

This thriller asks what boys learn from the world around them in terms of what manhood means, what counts as acceptable behavior, and what a man can expect to get away with (possibly even rape or murder)—so I think What Boys Learn is spot on!

What's in a name?

My main character, a struggling single mom living on Chicago’s affluent North Shore, is named Abby Rosso. I wanted a common first name and an Italian last name that says “Chicago,” as my own maiden name does. You might also note...[read on]

Visit Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

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

The Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax.

My Book, The Movie: What Boys Learn.

Q&A with Andromeda Romano-Lax.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lydia Murdoch's "What We Mourn"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Lydia Murdoch.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a new culture of bereavement changed the relationship of the Victorian state to its most vulnerable subjects

When the Tory Member of Parliament Michael Sadler argued in 1832 for state intervention on behalf of Britain’s dying child factory workers, he elicited smirks and ridicule from his Liberal adversaries—a response that would have been unimaginable by the century’s end. What We Mourn traces the changing understandings of child death within British, imperial, and transatlantic contexts and reveals the importance of youth and emotion to constructions of the modern state.

As childhood took on new meanings over the course of the long nineteenth century, public mourning for the premature deaths of children emerged as a way of asserting and even redefining British rights and citizenship. Factory hands and abolitionists, sanitation reformers and suffragists democratized and politicized their grief as they called upon the state to recognize their lives as part of a new, reimagined political order. As Lydia Murdoch shows, carrying their own and others’ private grief into the public sphere—with petitions and marches, public lectures and poetry—allowed marginalized members of society to assert their claim to rights. What We Mourn explores both the power and the limitations of a new politics founded on grief and the protection of child life.

Learn more about What We Mourn at the the University of Virginia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: What We Mourn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten perfect books to gift this Valentine’s Day

One title on Tertulia's list of books that make a perfect Valentine’s Day gift:

Tartufo
Kira Jane Buxton

In this buzzworthy new release an Italian village is on the brink of collapse, and the mayor is convinced the end is near. With a disgraced postman, a shuttered ristorante, and grim prospects, things look bleak—until a truffle is discovered that could either save or doom the town. “Kira Jane Buxton’s story about truffle mania whisks us away to Italy and serves up one buttery page of comedy after another,” raves The Washington Post.

Read about another book on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Tartufo.

The Page 69 Test: Tartufo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Carrie Classon's "Loon Point"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Loon Point: A Novel by Carrie Classon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set against the rugged beauty of the northern woods, the heartwarming first novel by columnist Carrie Classon explores how chosen family can sweeten bitterness into surprising joy.

Alone in the Northwoods, Norry Last settles in for another springtime lull at the remote resort she inherited from her father. She’s content with the solitude, maybe resigned. But when a blizzard hits, those little cabins by the lake start to fill up fast.

First to arrive is Lizzie, an eight-year-old with resilience and wisdom beyond her years, neglected by a mother struggling with addiction. Next comes Wendell, a cantankerous old fellow whose house collapses in the storm, the same way hope collapsed inside him long before. And then there’s Bud, the helpful handyman who’s always buzzing around, his kindness thawing something Norry thought she’d buried deep in the Minnesota snow.

As white melts to green, the Last Resort’s unlikely companions learn to share space, stories, and quiet comforts―an unexpected family that makes perfect sense. After all, Lizzie needs to be cared for. Wendell needs to care. Norry needs to open up. And Bud? Bud just might fix everything.

Visit Carrie Classon's website.

The Page 69 Test: Loon Point.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Carney's "My Father's List," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free by Laura Carney.

The entry begins:

My memoir My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free has been optioned for TV and we're still having conversations about it. But when the notion that it might be a movie first came into play, I envisioned Brie Larson playing the role of the newlywed journalist at midlife who lives out the 54 unrealized dreams of her late free-spirited father, who died at the hands of a distracted driver when she was 25. I felt she had the right zaniness, athleticism and depth for the part, and she strikes me as nerdy and intellectual in real life. She also has a certain innocence about her.

As for who might play my dad, I've often felt Jim Carrey would be the right choice, as far as matching my dad's energy. Appearance-wise, someone like Kyle Chandler would be a good fit.

I'm not sure which director I'd like to see do the movie version, but maybe...[read on]

Visit Laura Carney's website.

The Page 99 Test: My Father's List.

My Book, The Movie: My Father's List.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Samuele Collu's "Into the Loop"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition by Samuele Collu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Into the Loop asks how, and under what conditions, we can interrupt the repetitions that define us. Drawing from more than 200 hours of ethnographic observations of Systemic couples therapy in Buenos Aires, alongside auto-ethnographic recordings of Samuele Collu’s own hypnotherapy sessions, this study traces the psychic forces that compel people to repeat, interrupt, or drift aside from relational loops. Grounding his analysis in affect theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, Collu examines how identification, affective transmission, compulsive repetition, and hypnosis play out within therapeutic encounters observed by teams of psychotherapists through one-way mirrors and closed-circuit television systems. This focus on visual mediation reveals how screens and observational devices both capture and distort the therapeutic process itself—a dynamic that connects to broader questions about digital media and user-screen relations in contemporary society. Written in an experimental and literary style that moves fluidly between the academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens, Into the Loop offers a unique window into the repetitive cycles that shape our most intimate relationships and the possibilities for transformation within them.

Learn more about Into the Loop at the Duke University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Into the Loop.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top historical mysteries with pirates and smugglers

Linda Wilgus grew up in the Netherlands and lived in Italy, Belgium, and the United States before settling in England. A graduate of the University of Amsterdam, she worked as a bookseller and a knitting pattern designer before becoming a full-time writer. Her short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines. Wilgus shares her home with her husband, three children, and their dog.

[The Page 69 Test: The Sea Child; Q&A with Linda Wilgus]

The Sea Child is Wilgus's debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "eight cracking reads about smugglers, pirates and mutineers." One title on the list:

S. Thomas Russell, Under Enemy Colors

Last but certainly not least, S. Thomas Russell’s Under Enemy Colors is a seafaring tale in the tradition of Hornblower and Jack Aubrey. Set in the late eighteenth century, it’s the story of Charles Saunders Hayden, an ambitious young lieutenant born to an English father and a French mother.

Thanks to lack of connections, Hayden finds himself assigned to HMS Themis, a frigate under the command of the cruel and cowardly Josiah Hart. With a captain as committed to terrorizing his sailors as to avoiding enemy warships, Hayden finds himself caught between his superior and a crew increasingly bent on mutiny.

In a way this is as much a crime novel as an Age of Sail story, as a sizeable portion of the book is devoted to the court martial following the crew’s eventual mutineering. High-paced, full of action and with a dash of romance too, Under Enemy Colors is a first-rate seafaring read.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Madeleine Dunnigan reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Madeleine Dunnigan, author of Jean: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

That They May Face the Rising Sun [US title: By the Lake] by John McGahern

I'm ashamed to say I had read none of McGahern's work until I picked up his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun. Set in County Leitrim, Ireland, it tells the story of Joe and Kate Ruttledge who have moved from busy London to this rural idyll, giving up their literary lives in order to run a farm. This novel unfurls with slow, quiet precision; days are measured by the change in seasons; lives are rituals of repetition; relationships demarcated by patterns of conversation. It has some of the most beautiful descriptions of nature I have ever read, it is also extremely funny. Nothing happens and everything happens: birth, death, love, change.

Such Fine Boys by Patrick Modiano

I am a huge fan of all of Modiano's works. Most are set in post-Occupation steeped Paris and present themselves like detective novels, yet refuse to resolve the central mystery. Such Fine Boys is...[read on]

About Jean, from the publisher:

Set over one hot summer, a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole.

Seventeen-year-old Jean, a troubled Jewish boy caught in the countercultural swirl of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, a rural alternative boarding school for boys with “problems.” Dyslexic, antisocial, and prone to violent outbursts, Jean has never made friends easily and school has never been a place of safety or enjoyment.

Compton Manor is his last chance, but even here, despite the unconventional teaching methods, Jean is marked by difference. The other boys are fee-paying, while Jean is on a grant; they have good, English families, while Jean’s mother, Rosa, is a German-Jewish refugee and his father is an absent memory. Having broken the rules several times, Jean is on thin ice. But there is only one summer to get through and then Jean will pass his exams and get out.

All of a sudden, he is befriended by Tom―confident, charming, buoyed by years of good breeding and privilege―and it seems as if Jean’s world might change. When things turn romantic, Jean is tipped into a heady, overwhelming infatuation. Now Jean skips class to venture into the woods, or sneaks across moonlit fields to see Tom, wondering whether the relationship might offer a way out of a life marked by alienation. But what if the only true path to freedom is to disappear altogether

Spellbinding and evocative, Jean is a meditative narrative of loss and escape distilled into the heartrending story of an intense and dangerous adolescent love.

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

The Page 69 Test: Jean.

Writers Read: Madeleine Dunnigan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top thrillers about secrets & lies

Isabelle Popp's first attempt at writing a romance novel came in middle school, when she began a story about a weirdo girl who could photosynthesize. That project was abandoned, but she has plenty of other silly ideas in the hopper. When she isn't reading or writing, she's probably knitting, solving crossword puzzles, or scouring used book stores for vintage Gothic romance paperbacks. Originally from New York, she's as surprised as anyone that she lives in Indiana. Let's Give 'Em Pumpkin to Talk About is her first novel.

At Book Riot Popp tagged six "compelling thrillers about secrets and lies." One title on the list:

Becoming Marlow Fin by Ellen Won Steil

I will always snap up a book about a celebrity with a mysterious past. In 1995, Isla Baek found an abandoned girl near her family’s cabin. Adopted by the Baek family, Marlow Fin becomes a model and actress. She also becomes all too familiar with the pitfalls of fame and fortune. Marlow’s presence within the Baek family was always fraught, but the family kept its secrets and tragedies close. As Marlow spins her tale in a primetime interview, she reveals one shocking truth after another. If you crave a story with a Gillian Flynn-level dysfunctional family, here’s the book for you.

Read about the other entries on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Becoming Marlow Fin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Laura Carney's "My Father's List"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free by Laura Carney.

About the book, from the publisher:

On the cusp of middle age, a newlywed journalist discovers and finishes the bucket list of her late free-spirited father.

Fifty-four adventures in six years. That’s what thirty-eight-year-old journalist Laura Carney embarked on when she discovered her late father Mick’s bucket list.

Killed in a car crash when Laura was twenty-five, Mick seemed lost forever. My Father’s List is the story of how one woman—with the help of family, friends, and even strangers—found the courage to go after her own dreams after realizing those of a beloved yet mysterious man. This is a story about secrets—and the freedom we feel when we learn to trust again: in life, in love, and in a father’s lessons on how to fully live.

Visit Laura Carney's website.

The Page 99 Test: My Father's List.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Kelli Stanley

From my Q&A with Kelli Stanley, author of The Reckoning (A Renata Drake Thriller, 1):

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

Ah, titles. Always difficult. I like to choose a title while I’m writing the book because it helps give me focus, a kind of preview of what I want the book to be. I also like titles that make readers think. An early consideration for The Reckoning was Red Harvest—borrowing Hammett’s title—and it very much fits because of the setting (cannabis harvest in Humboldt County, CA) and the fact that the book is inspired by Hammett’s Red Harvest. Another possibility was Run Down Like Water, from Amos 5:24, and a quote made very famous by Martin Luther King: “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Both are very suitable in different ways. Ultimately, I chose The Reckoning as my working title, and was surprised the publisher kept it because there are so many other properties with the name.

It most definitely fits the novel. There are many reckonings, large and small, throughout the narrative, so—despite the overuse of this particular title—I think it perfectly expresses what happens in the book, and hopefully will lead to...[read on]

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley.

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

Q&A with Kelli Stanley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Theodor Mommsen's "History of Rome"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

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.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome. It begins:

Visiting Berlin in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Mark Twain found himself in a restaurant in which everyone seemed to go mad. Dozens of university students, raising their sabres, suddenly shot to their feet. “There was an excited whisper at our table,” Twain reported. Everyone stomped and clapped and banged their beer mugs. A little man with long hair and an “Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could have touched him with my hands - Mommsen! - think of it!”

Theodor Mommsen, the historian of the Roman Republic, was not just famous; he was considered a very great man. It was generally agreed, among the literate public on both sides of the Atlantic, that, as one prominent scholar put it, “There is probably no other instance in the history of scholarship in which one man has established so complete an ascendancy in a great department of learning.” And this when learning, serious learning, was more respected than it had been before or would be again. Born in 1817, Mommsen had studied Roman law and antiquities as a university student and then, in 1843, received a grant from the Danish government for a journey to Italy that would prove decisive for his later career. He studied Roman inscriptions - the words and phrases, the language, on Roman medals and Roman buildings - and became the leading authority in the field. In 1848, a professor of civil law at Leipzig, he supported the monarchy over the Republicans in the attempted revolution of that year, and then, when the reaction came, opposed the measures taken against those who had been involved in the revolt. Dismissed from his position, he found asylum in Switzerland where from 1854 to 1856 he wrote his monumental History of Rome.

Because Mommsen was not only German but a German professor, the first thought of an American reader is that his History of Rome...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten thrillers & suspense novels for fans of "His & Hers" and "Tell Me Lies"

At People magazine senior books editor Lizz Schumer tagged ten thrillers and suspense novels for fans of His & Hers and Tell Me Lies. One title on the list:

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley

It’s the summer of 1986, and the Creel sisters have decided it’s time for their uncle to die. Georgia Ayyar and Agatha Krishna have just welcomed their Indian aunt, uncle and cousin into their rural Wyoming home. But as the sisters’ once-unshakeable bond begins to unravel and the violence in their house and history intensifies, the tweens kill their uncle and blame it all on the British.

A bold, inventive tale that’s unflinchingly honest and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder offers a vivid portrait of an extended family, a moving story of sisterhood, and a playful ode to the 80s — all packaged as a murder mystery (of sorts).

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Q&A with Nina McConigley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Eran Shalev's "The Star-Spangled Republic"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation by Eran Shalev.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examining the cosmic conceit at the heart of early American political rhetoric

Why does the American flag use stars to represent the states? In The Star-Spangled Republic, Eran Shalev answers this and many other questions, considering the cosmic imagery—so familiar today but so peculiar on reflection—that suffused the United States’ early political culture. In this comprehensive study, Shalev uncovers how “political astronomy”—the discussion and representation of politics through astronomical models, allusions, and metaphors—reflected and facilitated the emerging worldview that enabled Americans to justify and find meaning in the country’s new democratic modes of governance and its federal system. No other scholar has looked at American political rhetoric through this lens; in so doing, Shalev is able to explain in fascinating detail how Americans turned away from the sun of heliocentric monarchy toward the night sky full of federated constellations, and to discover republicanism imprinted in the firmament.

Learn more about The Star-Spangled Republic at the University of Virginia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: American Zion.

The Page 99 Test: The Star-Spangled Republic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Amy Hagstrom's "Now That I Know You By Heart"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Now That I Know You by Heart: A Novel by Amy Hagstrom.

About the book, from the publisher:

A young widow embraces a life-changing new start on San Juan Island in a joyful and redemptive novel about closure, self-discovery, chosen family, and the courage it takes to live truthfully.

Newly widowed Shelby Wright has left the Portland suburbs for a new life on Washington’s San Juan Island to fulfill her late husband’s dying wish. Running the shuttered Captain Merrick Inn, where they’d honeymooned twenty years before, is also a chance for Shelby to prove she can go it solo. Miles from home and her young adult son, Shelby is ready to finally acknowledge to herself that she is gay. But becoming the person she’s hidden away for so long isn’t going to be easy.

As Shelby renovates and rebrands the inn, she meets charismatic winemaker Holly Caster. Their fast connection challenges Shelby to confront her emerging identity and lingering attachment not only to her husband, whom she loved, but to the best friend she left behind. When Shelby is welcomed by a supportive group of local queer women dubbed “the San Juan Sisters,” she’s on her way to making a professional venture―and a long-awaited personal quest―come true.

Both she and the inn may be in need of a little TLC, but Shelby is about to find love and purpose in the most unexpected places.

Visit Amy Hagstrom's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Wild Between Us.

Q&A with Amy Hagstrom.

Writers Read: Amy Hagstrom.

The Page 69 Test: Now That I Know You by Heart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Linda Wilgus

From my Q&A with Linda Wilgus, author of The Sea Child: A Novel:

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

The Sea Child was not the original title of the book. It went out to publishers with the title The Sea Bucca’s Daughter which is also the title I used to query agents. I think by the time we went out on submission to publishers though everyone felt that the title may need to be changed as, even though the Sea Bucca legend from Cornish folklore is very important in the story, hardly anybody would know who the Sea Bucca was before they read it. After some brainstorming with my US and UK editors and my agent, we settled on The Sea Child and I feel it is the perfect title for the book. The title refers to Isabel, the main character, and to her connection to the sea which is such an important part of the book and a driving force in the narrative. It also hints at the magic in the story, because it raises questions for readers, namely, why is Isabel the sea child and what...[read on]

Visit Linda Wilgus's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Sea Child.

Q&A with Linda Wilgus.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Andrew K. Scherer's "As the Gods Kill"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: As the Gods Kill: Morality and Social Violence among the Precolonial Maya by Andrew K. Scherer.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of war, violence, and sacrifice in precolonial Maya culture and its importance in religious practices.

As the Gods Kill delivers new insights into warfare, weaponry, violence, and human sacrifice among the ancient Maya. While attending to the particularity of a singular historical context, anthropologist and archaeologist Andrew Scherer also suggests that Maya practices have something to tell us about human propensities toward violence more broadly.

Focusing on moral frameworks surrounding deliberate injury and killing, Scherer examines Maya justifications of violence—in particular the obligations to one another, to ancestors, and to the gods that made violence not only permissible but necessary. The analysis isolates key themes underpinning the morality of violence—including justice, vengeance, payment, and costumbre (ritual)—and explores the ethics of violent agents, including warriors, ritual specialists, and the gods. Finally, Scherer addresses motivations for warfare, including the acquisition of spoils, tribute, captives, and slaves. An interdisciplinary case study of morality in an ancient society, As the Gods Kill synthesizes scholarship on an important dimension of precolonial American culture while taking stock of its implications for the social sciences at large.

Learn more about As the Gods Kill at the University of Texas Press website.

The Page 99 Test: As the Gods Kill.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top novels about Ohio

Lauren Schott was born in Akron, Ohio, and is a graduate of Duke University. She has spent twenty-five years working in publishing. Very Slowly All at Once is her first novel for adults. She currently lives in Henley-on-Thames, UK, with her family.

At Lit Hub Schott tagged six books that "show, even the darker side of life in Ohio offers up rich lives worth examining." One title on the list:

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

Shaker Heights, the suburban Cleveland setting for Ng’s novel about motherhood, race, and privilege, is the perfect location for a novel about middle class America. The real-life regulations on what color to paint your house, how short to cut your grass, and exactly where to put your garbage can on trash day make this suburb ripe for an outsider and her teenage daughter to come along and shake things up. Ng perfectly captures the strange otherness of the place; in reality, there’s no physical barrier between Shaker Heights and the neighborhoods that surround it, but when you cross into Shaker, you’ll know it immediately. The grass really is greener, at least for some.

Read about another novel on the list.

Little Fires Everywhere is among Sara Foster's six thrillers where mothers fight for their children, Isabelle McConville's five favorite dysfunctional book families, Beth Morrey‘s top ten single mothers in fiction, R.J. Hoffmann's six titles featuring adoptions gone awry, Amy Stuart's five thrilling novels with deeply flawed fictional characters you’ll learn to appreciate as you turn the pages and Kate Hamer's top ten teenage friendships in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Amy Hagstrom reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Amy Hagstrom, author of Now That I Know You by Heart: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I am, like many writers, a voracious reader, and my choices in reading material seem to reflect my writing style…in that I write—and read—a variety of genres. I stick with fiction, primarily, and I lean toward upmarket, book club-type fiction, character-driven suspense, and mystery. My only ‘must’: I have to truly like and be ready to root for the protagonist.

Currently, I’m tackling my ‘meatiest’ writing project yet, and it would appear that my current reading list reflects this. I just finished Wally Lamb’s The River is Waiting, which I found to be a phenomenal character study of human nature at its best and worst (set primarily in the men’s prison system in the U.S.). I also tackled Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which I believe is arguably the best book of fiction in the 21st century so far. Timely, relevant, heart- wrenching, and redeeming (ultimately, though Kingsolver certainly makes you wait for it).

I work on my property and walk my dog a lot, so I find...[read on]

About Now That I Know You by Heart, from the publisher:

A young widow embraces a life-changing new start on San Juan Island in a joyful and redemptive novel about closure, self-discovery, chosen family, and the courage it takes to live truthfully.

Newly widowed Shelby Wright has left the Portland suburbs for a new life on Washington’s San Juan Island to fulfill her late husband’s dying wish. Running the shuttered Captain Merrick Inn, where they’d honeymooned twenty years before, is also a chance for Shelby to prove she can go it solo. Miles from home and her young adult son, Shelby is ready to finally acknowledge to herself that she is gay. But becoming the person she’s hidden away for so long isn’t going to be easy.

As Shelby renovates and rebrands the inn, she meets charismatic winemaker Holly Caster. Their fast connection challenges Shelby to confront her emerging identity and lingering attachment not only to her husband, whom she loved, but to the best friend she left behind. When Shelby is welcomed by a supportive group of local queer women dubbed “the San Juan Sisters,” she’s on her way to making a professional venture―and a long-awaited personal quest―come true.

Both she and the inn may be in need of a little TLC, but Shelby is about to find love and purpose in the most unexpected places.

Visit Amy Hagstrom's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Wild Between Us.

Q&A with Amy Hagstrom.

Writers Read: Amy Hagstrom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Edward Baring's "Vulgar Marxism"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931 by Edward Baring.

About the book, from the publisher:

Offers a transformative reading of the Marxist tradition by uncovering its connections to the institutions and practices of worker education.

For the past hundred years, “vulgar Marxism” has been the go-to insult among socialist and communist intellectuals, a shorthand for the ways Marxist theory could go wrong. But why would thinkers advocating for working-class emancipation use “vulgarity” as an epithet?

In Vulgar Marxism, Edward Baring seeks an answer by delving into debates over Marxism in the first decades of the twentieth century. He shows that this common phrase wasn’t aimed primarily at popular understandings of Marx. Rather, it was used to attack intellectuals for failing to teach Marx’s theory to the working masses correctly. His history of “vulgar Marxism” homes in on the project of mass worker education at a time when the project was both widely pursued and fiercely contested.

Worker education offered a mechanism through which Marxist theory was meant to promote large-scale social and political change, and it drew on a massive infrastructure of schools, publishing houses, and educational bureaus that stretched across Europe and reached millions. By centering this project, Baring radically recasts the history of Marxism from the Second International to World War II. He challenges classic oppositions between “economistic” and “cultural” versions of Marxism; rereads many of the most significant Marxist theorists of the time, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci; and offers new resources for understanding how Marxist ideas transformed as they traveled around Europe and then spread throughout the world.

Learn more about Vulgar Marxism at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Vulgar Marxism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five historical fiction titles about resistance

Rachel Brittain is a writer, Day Dreamer, and Amateur Aerialist. Her short fiction has appeared in Luna Station Quarterly, Andromeda Spaceways, and others. She is a contributing editor for Book Riot, where she screams into the void about her love of books. Brittain lives in Northwest Arkansas with a rambunctious rescue pup, a snake, and a houseful of plants (most of which aren’t carnivorous).

At Book Riot she tagged "five historical fiction books [which] depict resistance against violence and authoritarianism in many forms." One entry on the list:

The Lilac People by Milo Todd

The persecution of LGBTQ people throughout the Nazi regime in Germany is often overlooked when discussing WWII. Given the ongoing (and worsening) persecution of trans people in the United States and elsewhere, this book feels especially important to highlight right now. In it, a trans man and his girlfriend living in Berlin manage to escape capture by assuming fake identities and living in isolation for years. But when a young man stumbles onto their farm on the brink of death, wearing prison garb, Bertie and Sofie know that they have no choice but to help him, even if it means risking the very fate he’s likely just escaped.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Lilac People is among Susie Dumond's ten must-read LGBTQ+ historical fiction books.

Q&A with Milo Todd.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Nina McConigley

From my Q&A with Nina McConigley, author of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel:

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

The book had another title while I was working on it. It was originally called The Call of Migratory Things. Which is a line from Angels in America. That play had a huge influence on me, and since my book was set in the 80’s, I loved it as a title. When I first started working on the book with my editor, she asked me about the title. And mentioned she felt it was very lyrical, and made people think of more typical immigrant narratives – a more familiar story. I agreed with her. We agreed my book wasn’t that. It was weird – so why not have a little cheekier title? We went through a list and quickly settled on How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder. It summed up the book – race, murder, a kind of how-to. And then I saw the cover image of anti-freeze and knew it was all perfect. The book is serious, but also really playful, and...[read on]

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Writers Read: Nina McConigley.

Q&A with Nina McConigley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Linda Wilgus's "The Sea Child"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Sea Child: A Novel by Linda Wilgus.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this enchanting, adventurous debut novel, a band of seafaring smugglers lands on the Cornish coast, where a young widow with a mysterious past becomes entangled in their schemes—and with their charismatic captain.

England, early 1800s: Destitute and forced to leave her home in London, Isabel, a young widow of the Napoleonic Wars, returns to the village on the rugged Cornish coast where she was found as a small child, dripping wet and alone. Hoping to learn more about her enigmatic origins, she’s shocked to find herself at the center of a local legend claiming that she is the daughter of a sea spirit.

As Isabel adjusts to life in her rented cottage, the coast is rife with smugglers and the Revenue Officers who hunt them. One evening, a group of dangerous raiders arrives at her door, carrying their wounded captain, Jack. Remembering her late husband’s fatal injuries, Isabel decides to care for Jack and soon feels a powerful connection to him. Even after Jack recovers, Isabel finds herself unable to forget him. Meanwhile, the sea calls to her, and a Revenue Officer who likes to hang smugglers poses a threat in more ways than one. Before long, Isabel finds herself caught on the wrong side of the law, with violence and heartbreak looming.

From the coves of Cornwall to the wild coast of Brittany, during perilous raids at sea and society dinner parties, Isabel fights to understand her kinship with the ocean while seeking answers about her past. But when the threat catches up with them and Jack’s life hangs in the balance, she must draw on all her courage and delve deep into the mythical heart of the Cornish coast. For only a sea child can turn the tide...

Visit Linda Wilgus's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Sea Child.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susannah Wilson's "A Most Quiet Murder"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France by Susannah Wilson.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Most Quiet Murder examines the death of a five-year-old girl in late nineteenth-century France, unfolding the mystery through judicial investigations, psychiatric medical evaluations, and ultimately, a trial for murder.

The investigators quickly learned that the child, Henriette, had been abducted by Marie-Françoise Fiquet, an employee at the city tobacco factory and known troublemaker. Fiquet had taken the child back to her home and kept her there all day. But what actually happened between the abduction at midday and the discovery of the child's body at five o'clock in the morning remained a mystery.

Susannah Wilson uses archival records, press coverage, and psychiatric reports to reveal how the troubled history and reputation of Marie-Françoise Fiquet, marked by suspicions of sexual debauchery, infanticide, abortions, poisoning, theft, and extortion, was a case study in an emerging medical paradigm. Her signs of trauma, psychological disturbance, and medical morphine abuse provide insight into factitious disorders―or simulated illnesses―that would be more commonly observed in the following century.

A Most Quiet Murder provides a new view of nineteenth-century France, where the law and public authorities intervened in the lives of the working classes and their children during moments of crisis to exercise the law of the land. The murder of a child reveals the connections between the psychology of female violence, the emergent understanding of factitious disorders, and the psychologically complex motives that extend beyond simple altruism.

Learn more about A Most Quiet Murder at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Most Quiet Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about women who lose the plot

Sara Levine is the author of the novels The Hitch and Treasure Island!!! and the short story collection Short Dark Oracles. She earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Brown University and was awarded a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities.

Levine teaches creative writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and on Substack at Delusions of Grammar.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven novels that "celebrate reckless speed, dizzying intensity, audacious rudeness, and the abandonment of social norms." One title on the list:

The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith

The Vegetarian (ch’aesikchuŭija, translated into English by Deborah Smith) centers on a Korean housewife who abruptly stops eating meat. Told in three sections, the novel is full of surprises, partly because it’s told from three points of view, none of which belongs to the vegetarian herself. Yeong-hye’s husband, a loveless man who views his wife as “completely unremarkable in every way,” begins the story of his recalcitrant wife, but his contribution can’t explain her motives, only document his growing fury that she resembles a “hospital patient” and no longer wears a bra or willingly provides sex. The second part documents her brother-in-law’s erotic obsession with her, even as Yeong-hye descends into psychosis and physically wastes away. The third part turns to her sister, In-hye, a hard-working, well-organized mother who is appalled, for her own reasons, at her sister’s transformation. We’ve all read books about women suffering under patriarchy, but has any protagonist ever responded to the violence by willing herself to become a tree?

Read about another title on the list.

The Vegetarian is among Kate Hamilton's eight books about complicated desire, Monika Kim's five best body horror novels, Adam Biles's top ten allegories, M. S. Coe's eleven titles about women on the brink, and Amy Sackville's ten top novels about painters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andromeda Romano-Lax's "What Boys Learn," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Andromeda Romano-Lax's What Boys Learn.

The entry begins:

To play Abby, my single mother character worried about whether her teenage son was involved in the deaths of two schoolmates, I nominate Elizabeth Olsen (Eternity, WandaVision, Avengers, Love & Death). Abby is struggling, stressed-out, and hopefully sympathetic. She also has a brother in prison and secrets in her past. Ideally, the reader will understand most of her choices yet still wonder if they know the whole story. Olsen manages to pack emotional nuances into every performance. She can be charming, sly, sincere, solemn, or murderous. If she won’t play Abby, I am willing to keep writing characters until we hit upon one that excites her. (Kidding, but I really do love Olsen.)

To play Benjamin, I need a young actor who...[read on]

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

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

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

The Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax.

My Book, The Movie: What Boys Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Nina McConigley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Nina McConigley, author of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I am reading two books right now at once. One is the background for a new writing project I am just starting, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia by Santilla Chingaipe. I haven’t written a lot of historical fiction, but this is connected to family ancestry, and so I am doing a deep dive to understand the slave trade and convicts in Australia. Especially women convicts. It makes me realize how narrow my view of history and place is. And how we are so taught the history of where we are from, and not...[read on]

About How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, from the publisher:

A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader—she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.

According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:

a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence

Or maybe it’s really:

f) all of the above.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

The Page 69 Test: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.

Writers Read: Nina McConigley.

--Marshal Zeringue