Pg. 69: Katherine Rothschild's "Wider than the Sky"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Wider than the Sky by Katherine Rothschild.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the wake of sudden tragedy, twin sisters uncover a secret that rips open their world. Katherine Rothschild explores the pain and power of forgiveness in a stunning debut novel that will shatter your heart and piece it back together, one truth at a time.

Sixteen-year-old Sabine Braxton doesn’t have much in common with her identical twin, Blythe. When their father dies from an unexpected illness, each copes with the loss in her own way—Sabine by “poeting” (an uncontrollable quirk of bursting into poetry at inappropriate moments) and Blythe by obsessing over getting into MIT, their father’s alma mater. Neither can offer each other much support . . . at least not until their emotionally detached mother moves them into a ramshackle Bay Area mansion owned by a stranger named Charlie.

Soon, the sisters unite in a mission to figure out who Charlie is and why he seems to know everything about them. They quickly make a life-changing discovery: their father died of an HIV- related infection, Charlie was his lover, and their mother knows the whole story. The revelation unravels Sabine’s world, while practical Blythe seems to take everything in stride. Once again at odds with her sister, Sabine chooses to learn all she can about the father she never knew. Ultimately, she must decide if she can embrace his last wish for their family legacy—along with forgiveness.

Visit Katherine Rothschild's website.

The Page 69 Test: Wider than the Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top feminist retellings of mythology

Christine Hume is the author of an experimental memoir in the form of three interlinked essays, Saturation Project (2021), as well as three books of poetry. Her chapbooks include Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense; Ventifacts; Atalanta: an Anatomy; a collaboration with Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face, a Brooklyn Rail Best Nonfiction Book of 2017, and A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story. She recently curated and introduced two issues, on #MeToo and on Girlhood, of the American Book Review. Since 2001, she has been faculty in the Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University.

At Electric Lit, Hume tagged ten "modern stories that turn patriarchal folklore on its head," including:

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

I exchanged letters last year with a writer incarcerated in Texas (through Deb Olin Unferth’s marvelous PenCity Writers Program) about Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. He was especially vivid at accounting for the way Ward uses fractured and recombinant myth (ancient Greek, biblical, American South) to pick up narrative speed.

Read about another entry on the list.

Salvage the Bones is among Michelle Sacks's five books with complex and credible child narrators, Amy Brady's seven books that provocatively tackle climate change, Jodi Picoult's six recommended books, Peggy Frew's ten top books about "bad" mothers, and Jenny Shanks's five least supervised children in literature. 

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susan Lee Johnson's "Writing Kit Carson"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West by Susan Lee Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this critical biography, Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tales of two white women who, in the 1960s, wrote books about the fabled frontiersman Christopher "Kit" Carson: Quantrille McClung, a Denver librarian who compiled the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy, and Kansas-born but Washington, D.C.- and Chicago-based Bernice Blackwelder, a singer on stage and radio, a CIA employee, and the author of Great Westerner: The Story of Kit Carson. In the 1970s, as once-celebrated figures like Carson were falling headlong from grace, these two amateur historians kept weaving stories of western white men, including those who married American Indian and Spanish Mexican women, just as Carson had wed Singing Grass, Making Out Road, and Josefa Jaramillo.

Johnson’s multilayered biography reveals the nature of relationships between women historians and male historical subjects and between history buffs and professional historians. It explores the practice of history in the context of everyday life, the seductions of gender in the context of racialized power, and the strange contours of twentieth-century relationships predicated on nineteenth-century pasts. On the surface, it tells a story of lives tangled across generation and geography. Underneath run probing questions about how we know about the past and how that knowledge is shaped by the conditions of our knowing.

Learn more about Writing Kit Carson at the University of North Carolina Press.

The Page 99 Test: Writing Kit Carson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Megan Chance

From my Q&A with Megan Chance, author of A Splendid Ruin: A Novel:

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

I think it does a lot of work. The two words are nearly an oxymoron: ruin has a negative connotation, certainly, and splendid a positive one, so how is it possible to have a splendid ruin? But in fact, May, the protagonist in the book, has exactly that, and I think the title leads you into anticipating a journey through hell but with a positive outcome. The original title for the book was Poor Relations, which I liked because it had a double meaning, not just in the fact that May, in coming to her aunt’s house in San Francisco after her mother’s death, was a poor relation, but also because the relationships between all the characters in the book were so fraught with misunderstandings, lies and secrets. But the editorial team at my publisher wanted something different, and we spent months tossing things about until we came up with A Splendid Ruin, which I think now is...[read on]

Visit Megan Chance's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Splendid Ruin.

The Page 69 Test: A Splendid Ruin.

Q&A with Megan Chance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeannie Mobley's "The Jewel Thief," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Jewel Thief by Jeannie Mobley.

The entry begins:

While I typically do see the scenes playing out in my head as I write them, I think the advantage to books over movies is their ability to dig deep inside the characters in their portrayal, so I don’t tend to focus on the outward appearances of characters as much. Of course, I would love to see my books made into movies, and I think The Jewel Thief would be an excellent choice right now, with the popularity of historic costume dramas, so it’s always worth thinking about.

When I hear Louis XIV speaking in my head, it is in that cool, smooth voice of Alan Rickman, so in my anything-is-possible dreamcast, I would bring back a young Alan Rickman and cast him as the king just for the luxurious voice.

Casting it with people who are actual possibilities, though, I think Aiden...[read on]

My Book, The Movie: The Jewel Thief.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that straddle the line between honest & too honest

Michael Leviton is a writer, musician, photographer, and storyteller. He is the host of the storytelling series and podcast The Tell. He has worked as a screenwriter and contributed music to television shows, including HBO’s Bored to Death.

Leviton's new memoir is To Be Honest.

At LitHub he tagged six books that straddle the line between being honest and being too honest, including:

Joyce Maynard, At Home In The World

This memoir tells the story of how Maynard’s upbringing led her to a teenage romance with 53-year-old recluse J.D. Salinger and how that experience influenced the rest of her life. As is the fate of most “too honest” books, this one was met with a lot of vitriol. When it came out, Maynard noted that many critics attempted to insult her with the same script, repeatedly referring to her as “shameless” as if shame were a good thing. Her memoir is very much about unlearning the shame that she was unfairly taught to carry and the critics responded by calling the book “shameless!” When criticized for maligning Salinger, Maynard pointed out that our culture often considers exposing wrongdoing worse than wrongdoing itself. At one of my favorite moments in the book, Maynard confronts Salinger and gives him a chance to tell his side of the story. Truth-tellers often do this –I used to all the time– and barely anyone accepts the invitation. There’s a big difference between those who long to tell their story and those who would never tell their story in a million years.

Read about another entry on the list.

At Home In The World is among Elizabeth Abbott's five best books about inamoratas and other women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Aaron Passell's "Preserving Neighborhoods"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn by Aaron Passell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Historic preservation is typically regarded as an elitist practice. In this view, designating a neighborhood as historic is a project by and for affluent residents concerned with aesthetics, not affordability. It leads to gentrification and rising property values for wealthy homeowners, while displacement afflicts longer-term, lower-income residents of the neighborhood, often people of color.

Through rich case studies of Baltimore and Brooklyn, Aaron Passell complicates this story, exploring how community activists and local governments use historic preservation to accelerate or slow down neighborhood change. He argues that this form of regulation is one of the few remaining urban policy interventions that enable communities to exercise some control over the changing built environments of their neighborhoods. In Baltimore, it is part of a primarily top-down strategy for channeling investment into historic neighborhoods, many of them plagued by vacancy and abandonment. In central Brooklyn, neighborhood groups have discovered the utility of landmark district designation as they seek to mitigate rapid change with whatever legal tools they can. The contrast between Baltimore and Brooklyn reveals that the relationship between historic preservation and neighborhood change varies not only from city to city, but even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In speaking with local activists, Passell finds that historic district designation and enforcement efforts can be a part of neighborhood community building and bottom-up revitalization.

Featuring compelling narrative interviews alongside quantitative data, Preserving Neighborhoods is a nuanced mixed-methods study of an important local-level urban policy and its surprisingly varied consequences.

Visit Aaron Passell's website.

The Page 99 Test: Preserving Neighborhoods.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Liese O'Halloran Schwarz's "What Could Be Saved"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: What Could Be Saved: A Novel by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Washington, DC, 2019: Laura Preston is a reclusive artist at odds with her older sister Bea as their elegant, formidable mother slowly slides into dementia. When a stranger contacts Laura claiming to be her brother who disappeared forty years earlier when the family lived in Bangkok, Laura ignores Bea’s warnings of a scam and flies to Thailand to see if it can be true. But meeting him in person leads to more questions than answers.

Bangkok, 1972: Genevieve and Robert Preston live in a beautiful house behind a high wall, raising their three children with the help of a cadre of servants. In these exotic surroundings, Genevieve strives to create a semblance of the life they would have had at home in the US—ballet and riding classes for the children, impeccable dinner parties, a meticulously kept home. But in truth, Robert works for American intelligence, Genevieve finds herself drawn into a passionate affair with her husband’s boss, and their serene household is vulnerable to unseen dangers in a rapidly changing world and a country they don’t really understand.

Alternating between past and present as all of the secrets are revealed, What Could Be Saved is an unforgettable novel about a family shattered by loss and betrayal, and the beauty that can exist even in the midst of brokenness.

Visit Liese O'Halloran Schwarz's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Possible World.

Writers Read: Liese O'Halloran Schwarz (August 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Possible World.

The Page 69 Test: What Could Be Saved.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten climate change novels about endangered & extinct species

Julie Carrick Dalton's debut novel is Waiting for the Night Song.

[Julie Carrick Dalton's top ten works of fiction about climate disaster]

At Electric Lit she tagged ten books that bring "together a wide range of novels from science fiction to literary fiction to romance, all with an eye on how the loss of species affects how we imagine the future of life on planet Earth," including:

The Effort by Claire Holroyde

The Effort imagines an alternate present with mass extinctions caused by climate change and habitat loss. This reality also features a comet on course to collide with Earth and possibly wipe out all species—including humans. As world leaders flee to their bunkers, scientists rise up as heroes who join together to save the planet. The Effort offers a vision for how humanity could avoid an existential crisis with international collaboration while also highlighting the environmental threats created by humans.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susan B. Levin's "Posthuman Bliss?"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Posthuman Bliss? The Failed Promise of Transhumanism by Susan B. Levin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A tightly argued and expansive examination of the pitfalls of transhumanism that reacquaints us with what it means to live well.

Advocates of transhumanism, or "radical" enhancement, urge us to pursue the biotechnological heightening of select capacities -- above all, cognitive ability -- so far beyond any human limit that the beings with those capacities would exist on a higher ontological plane. For proponents of such views, humanity's self-transcendence through advancements in science and technology may even be morally required. Consequently, the human stakes of how we respond to transhumanism are immeasurably high.

In Posthuman Bliss? The Failed Promise of Transhumanism, Susan B. Levin challenges transhumanists' overarching commitments regarding the mind and brain, ethics, liberal democracy, knowledge, and reality, showing their notion of humanity's self-transcendence into "posthumanity" to be little more than fantasy. Uniting philosophical with scientific arguments, Levin mounts a significant challenge to transhumanists' claim that science and technology support their vision of posthumanity. In a clear and engaging style, she dismantles transhumanists' breezy assurances that posthumans will emerge if we but allocate sufficient resources to that end. Far from offering theoretical and practical "proof of concept" for the vision that they urge upon us, Levin argues, transhumanists engage inadequately with cognitive psychology, biology, and neuroscience, often relying on questionable or outdated views within those fields. Having shown in depth why transhumanism should be rejected, Levin argues forcefully for a holistic perspective on living well that is rooted in Aristotle's virtue ethics but that is adapted to liberal democracy. This holism is thoroughly human, in the best of senses: It directs us to consider worthy ends for us as human beings and to do the irreplaceable work of understanding ourselves rather than relying on technology and science to be our salvation.

Learn more about Posthuman Bliss? at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Posthuman Bliss?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Molly Ringle

From my Q&A with Molly Ringle, author of Lava Red Feather Blue:

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

The title was originally Lava Red and Feather Blue, but my publisher suggested it was more poetic and intriguing without the “and,” so we went with that. Other than that, the title hasn’t changed since early draft days, and I like it because it fits some of my central criteria for a good title—people can pronounce it and spell it—and also because it has multiple meanings for the story. Lava red and feather blue are the royal colors in the fictional country of Eidolonia, where the book takes place, and it’s mentioned that they represent, respectively, the powerful fae and the delicate humans who share the island. But in addition, “lava red” and “feather blue” could each represent various characters. A red-haired prince, a half-fae human born with blue feathers on his skin, a fire faery who can attack with lava, a gentle faery who can turn into a blue bird…readers have options...[read on]

Visit Molly Ringle's website.

Q&A with Molly Ringle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine great science-fiction thrillers

Nick Petrie is the author of six novels in the Peter Ash series, most recently The Breaker. His debut, The Drifter, won both the ITW Thriller award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel, and was a finalist for the Edgar and the Hammett Awards.

At CrimeReads, Petrie tagged nine top science fiction novels built on the chassis of crime fiction, including:

The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch (2018)

The Gone World was recommended to me by my local indie bookseller and I was immediately smitten. The protagonist is Naval investigator Shannon Moss, who is chasing the killers of a Navy Seal’s family and trying to find his missing teenage daughter.

The wrinkle is here is a secret Navy program sending astronauts forward in time to solve the riddle of the impending end of the world that gets closer with each attempt to solve the problem. The storytelling is complex, lyrical, and metaphysical without sacrificing intensity—I could not turn the pages fast enough. Sweterlitsch is very, very good and I can’t wait for his next book.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Noah Wardrip-Fruin's "How Pac-Man Eats"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: How Pac-Man Eats by Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

About the book, from the publisher:

In How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers two questions: What are the fundamental ways that games work? And how can games be about something? Wardrip-Fruin argues that the two issues are related. Bridging formalist and culturally engaged approaches, he shows how the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean.

Wardrip-Fruin proposes that games work at a fundamental level on which their mechanics depend: operational logics. Games are about things because they use play to address topics; they do this through playable models (of which operational logics are the primary building blocks): larger structures used to represent what happens in a game world that relate meaningfully to a theme. Game creators can expand the expressiveness of games, Wardrip-Fruin explains, by expanding an operational logic. Pac-Man can eat, for example, because a game designer expanded the meaning of collision from hitting things to consuming them. Wardrip-Fruin describes strategies game creators use to expand what can be said through games, with examples drawn from indie games, art games, and research games that address themes ranging from border policy to gender transition. These include Papers, Please, which illustrates expansive uses of pattern matching; Prom Week, for which the game's developers created a model of social volition to enable richer relationships between characters; and Dys4ia, which demonstrates a design approach that supports game metaphors of high complexity.

Learn more about How Pac-Man Eats at the MIT Press website.

The Page 99 Test: How Pac-Man Eats.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Megan Chance's "A Splendid Ruin"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Splendid Ruin: A Novel by Megan Chance.

About the book, from the publisher:

A mesmerizing novel of dark family secrets and a young woman’s rise and revenge set against the backdrop of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The eve of destruction. After her mother’s death, penniless May Kimble lives a lonely life until an aunt she didn’t know existed summons her to San Francisco. There she’s welcomed into the wealthy Sullivan family and their social circle.

Initially overwhelmed by the opulence of her new life, May soon senses that dark mysteries lurk in the shadows of the Sullivan mansion. Her glamorous cousin often disappears in the night. Her aunt wanders about in a laudanum fog. And a maid keeps hinting that May is in danger. Trapped by betrayal, madness, and murder, May stands to lose everything, including her freedom, at the hands of those she trusts most.

Then, on an early April morning, San Francisco comes tumbling down. Out of the smoldering ruins, May embarks on a harrowing road to reclaim what is hers. This tragic twist of fate, along with the help of an intrepid and charismatic journalist, puts vengeance within May’s reach. But will she take it?

Visit Megan Chance's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Splendid Ruin.

The Page 69 Test: A Splendid Ruin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five recent books featuring superpowered characters

Mike Chen is a lifelong writer, from crafting fan fiction as a child to somehow getting paid for words as an adult. He has contributed to major geek websites (The Mary Sue, The Portalist, Tor) and covered the NHL for mainstream media outlets. A member of SFWA and Codex Writers, Chen lives in the Bay Area, where he can be found playing video games and watching Doctor Who with his wife, daughter, and rescue animals.

Chen is the author of the novels We Could Be Heroes, Here and Now and Then and A Beginning At The End.

[My Book, The Movie: Here and Now and Then.]

At Tor.com Chen tagged five recent books featuring superpowered characters, including:

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

When people think about superpowers, it often leads to things like speed, strength, flight, and other physical characteristics. And when they consider the mechanism for those powers, it’s usually something to do with harnessing the potential of the human body beyond normal ways. The Ten Thousand Doors of January isn’t necessarily a book about superpowers or superheroes, but it IS a book about powers and heroes—in a much different way than you’d expect.

January Scaller encountered her first mysterious door when she was seven years old; years later, as her parents’ mysterious circumstances leave her isolated and under the thumb of polite-but-oppressive caretaker, she encounters a book that uncovers the truth of that door—and the many other doors that create portals to other places, even other worlds. Alix E. Harrow’s gorgeous novel is about the power of intent, writing, and purpose, and its heroes draw that power from names, books, and yes, doors. Once you start, you’ll quickly see why it’s one of the most acclaimed books in recent memory.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is among A.K. Larkwood's five favorite fantasy multiverses.

The Page 69 Test: The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Stacy G. Ulbig's "Angry Politics"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Angry Politics: Partisan Hatred and Political Polarization among College Students by Stacy G. Ulbig.

About the book, from the publisher:

At a time of political tribalism and ideological purity tests, when surveys tell us that pluralities of the people in each party deem the opposition “downright evil,” it can be hard to remember that cross-party hatred isn’t an inherent feature of partisan politics. But, as this book reminds us, a backward glance—or a quick survey of so many retiring members of Congress—tells us that even in the past decade partisan rancor has grown exponentially. In Angry Politics, Stacy G. Ulbig asks why. Even more to the point, she traces the trend to the place where it all might begin—the college campus, among the youngest segment of the electorate.

A distinguished researcher and scholar of political psychology and public opinion, Ulbig gets right to the heart of the problem—the early manifestation of the incivility pervading contemporary US politics. With an emphasis on undergraduates at four-year universities, she gauges the intensity and effects of partisan animosities on campus, examines the significance of media consumption in forming political attitudes, and considers the possibility that partisan hostility can operate like racial and ethnic animosities in fomenting intolerance for other groups. During the college years, political attitudes are most likely to be mutable; so, as Angry Politics explores the increasing combativeness on campus, it also considers the possibility of forestalling partisan hatred before attitudes harden. Finally, Ulbig finds hope in the very conditions that make college a breeding ground for political ill will. Embracing their responsibility for developing responsible citizens capable of productive political engagement, colleges and universities may well be able to inject more reason, and thus more civility, into future partisan debate.

Learn more about Angry Politics at the University Press of Kansas website.

The Page 99 Test: Angry Politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Gerald Brandt

From my Q&A with Gerald Brandt, author of Threader Origins:

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

Threader Origins wasn't the working title for the book. During our first revision pass, my editor (two time Hugo Award winning Editor) Sheila Gilbert and I hashed out the titles for all three books in the series. At the time, I had no idea what to call books two and three, but once we had Threader Origins they fell into place. The working title was Qabal. The problem with that is that it focused on the wrong things in the book. This really is an origin story on a couple of levels, the first being Darwin's (the main character's) introduction to Threads and how to use them, and the second is on the Threads themselves and the power they give and take. This is Darwin's first step into a new world, and he finds out more about himself than he could have in his own.

What's in a name?

Character names was a big issue for me in this novel. As I...[read on]

Visit Gerald Brandt's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Operative.

Writers Read: Gerald Brandt (January 2017).

The Page 69 Test: Threader Origins.

Q&A with Gerald Brandt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top dinner parties in modern fiction

Emma Rous grew up in England, Indonesia, Kuwait, Portugal and Fiji, and from a young age she had two ambitions: to write stories, and to look after animals. She studied veterinary medicine and zoology at the University of Cambridge, then worked as a small animal veterinary surgeon for eighteen years before switching to full time writing in 2016.

The Perfect Guests is her new novel.

At CrimeReads, Rous tagged ten of the best dinner parties in modern fiction, including:

Atonement by Ian McEwan

The dinner here involves a gathering of family, plus a couple of friends. An asphyxiating silence at the beginning of the meal is eventually broken by a guest, Paul, who rudely turns away from the hostess to start a private conversation. Several of the diners are wrestling with their own private issues, and the scene is set for events to get much, much worse before the evening is over.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Atonement also appears on David Leavitt's top ten list of house parties in fiction, Abbie Greaves's top ten list of books about silence, Eliza Casey's list of ten favorite stories--from film, fiction, and television--from the early 20th century, Nicci French's top ten list of dinner parties in fiction, Mark Skinner's list of ten of the best country house novels, Julia Dahl's top ten list of books about miscarriages of justice, Tim Lott's top ten list of summers in fiction, Ellen McCarthy's list of six favorite books about weddings and marriage, David Treuer's six favorite books list, Kirkus Reviews's list of eleven books whose final pages will shock you, Nicole Hill's list of eleven books in which the main character dies, Isla Blair's six best books list, Jessica Soffer's top ten list of book endings, Jane Ciabattari's list of five masterpieces of fiction that also worked as films, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best birthday parties in literature, ten of the best misdirected messages in literature, ten of the best scenes on London Underground, ten of the best breakages in literature, ten of the best weddings in literature, and ten of the best identical twins in fiction. It is one of Stephanie Beacham's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Gavin Weightman's "The Great Inoculator"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Great Inoculator: The Untold Story of Daniel Sutton and his Medical Revolution by Gavin Weightman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Smallpox was the scourge of the eighteenth century: it showed no mercy, almost wiping out whole societies. Young and old, poor and royalty were equally at risk – unless they had survived a previous attack. Daniel Sutton, a young surgeon from Suffolk, used this knowledge to pioneer a simple and effective inoculation method to counter the disease. His technique paved the way for Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination – but, while Jenner is revered, Sutton has been vilified for not widely revealing his methods until later in life.

Gavin Weightman reclaims Sutton’s importance, showing how the clinician’s practical and observational discoveries advanced understanding of the nature of disease. Weightman explores Sutton’s personal and professional development, and the wider world of eighteenth-century health in which he practised inoculation. Sutton’s brilliant and exacting mind had a significant impact on medicine – the effects of which can still be seen today.

Visit Gavin Weightman's website.

The Page 99 Test: Eureka: How Invention Happens.

The Page 99 Test: The Great Inoculator.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Doug Engstrom's "Corporate Gunslinger"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Corporate Gunslinger: A Novel by Doug Engstrom.

About the book, from the publisher:

Doug Engstrom imagines a future all too terrifying—and all too possible—in this eerie, dystopic speculative fiction debut about corporate greed, debt slavery, and gun violence that is as intense and dark as Stephen King’s The Long Walk.

Like many Americans in the middle of the 21st century, aspiring actress Kira Clark is in debt. She financed her drama education with loans secured by a “lifetime services contract.” If she defaults, her creditors will control every aspect of her life. Behind on her payments and facing foreclosure, Kira reluctantly accepts a large signing bonus to become a corporate gunfighter for TKC Insurance. After a year of training, she will take her place on the dueling fields that have become the final, lethal stop in the American legal system.

Putting her MFA in acting to work, Kira takes on the persona of a cold, intimidating gunslinger known as “Death’s Angel.” But just as she becomes the most feared gunfighter in TKC’s stable, she’s severely wounded during a duel on live video, shattering her aura of invincibility. A series of devastating setbacks follow, forcing Kira to face the truth about her life and what she’s become.

When the opportunity to fight another professional for a huge purse arises, Kira sees it as a chance to buy a new life ... or die trying.

Structured around a chilling duel, Corporate Gunslinger is a modern satire that forces us to confront the growing inequalities in our society and our penchant for guns and bloodshed, as well as offering a visceral look at where we may be heading—far sooner than we know.

Visit Doug Engstrom's website.

The Page 69 Test: Corporate Gunslinger.

--Marshal Zeringue