Nine novels about being the poorest person in the room

Carla Vass holds a degree in English literature and economics from Barnard College, Columbia University. She began her career at Goldman Sachs before joining Uber in 2013. At Uber, she helped build the rideshare business in New York City and was part of the founding UberEATS team. In 2018, Vass was recruited by Waymo, Google's self-driving car division, to develop their delivery business, and then went on to found Civi in 2020, a tech startup focused on safety in Latin America. Born in New York City, Vass and her husband now live in Miami, Florida. When not writing or reading, she enjoys spending time with loved ones, traveling, cooking, and horseback riding.

Vass's new novel is The Rally.

At Lit Hub the author tagged nine novels featuring the poorest person among rich people behaving badly. One title on the list:

Rules of Civility, Amor Towles

A whip-smart Brooklyn girl from a working-class immigrant family, stationed in a Wall Street typing pool, meets a charming banker named Tinker Grey in a Greenwich Village jazz bar on the last night of 1937. The chance encounter tips her into the upper reaches of Manhattan society. What makes it more than a climbing story is that Tinker turns out to be a guest too—his old-money polish is being quietly financed by a wealthy patron. It’s all set against the most vivid Manhattan on this list: the city that has always been the great stage for the guest, where everyone is from somewhere else and busy becoming someone new.

Read about another book on the list.

Rules of Civility is among the Times of India's six remarkable books set on New Year's eve and day, Glamour magazine's list of the fifty-seven best books of the 2010s, and Michael Hogan's ten best New Year’s Eves in culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mark B. Kelley's "Crimes Against Feeling"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Crimes Against Feeling: Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture by Mark B. Kelley.

About the book, from the publisher:

Demonstrating how emotion became central to the legal and literary meanings of piracy in nineteenth-century America

Pirates have long occupied a central yet unstable place in American law and national identity. In the decades leading up to and including the U.S. Civil War, the charge of piracy was leveled against an unusually wide range of figures: foreign heads of state, imperial filibusters, transoceanic enslavers, enslaved mutineers, radical abolitionists, and others who challenged established forms of authority. Early American literature reflects this instability, portraying pirates who vary dramatically in politics, race, gender, and allegiance. As Mark B. Kelley shows, these characters are united less by ideology than by their challenge to landed social norms and fixed national belonging. The pirate, in both law and literature, emerges as an individual defined by multiplicity rather than political coherence.

Crimes Against Feeling examines how Americans made sense of this ambiguous figure by turning to emotion. Drawing on legal materials including treaties, trial transcripts, congressional debates, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as well as popular sentimental fiction (often written by women), Kelley argues that piracy was codified as an offense against moral feeling rather than being a singular political position. Legal thinkers and writers such as John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Maria S. Cummins relied on shared affective frameworks―sympathy, sentiment, and domestic vulnerability―to render piracy legible and punishable. American pirate law, Kelley demonstrates, was shaped by the same emotional logics that structured the era’s popular fiction.

By tracing piracy across debates over domestic sovereignty, global enslavement and abolition, imperial expansion, postbellum reparations, and international copyright, Crimes Against Feeling reveals the pirate as a key figure for understanding gender, home, family, and nation in early America. Reading law and literature together, the book shows how emotional judgment―not political consensus―became a foundational tool for managing oceanic violence and transnational disorder in the nineteenth-century United States.

Visit Mark B. Kelley's website.

The Page 99 Test: Crimes Against Feeling.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Heidi Czerwiec reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Heidi Czerwiec, co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts from Contemporary Writers and Teachers.

Her entry begins:

I’m usually reading for several different purposes, so this grouping reflects that. Because I got in the habit of doing mini-reviews of books that I paired with perfume on Twitter, I’m going to continue that practice here.

I recently heard Aisha Sabatini Sloan read, and while I loved Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, I hadn’t read her newest, Borealis: An Essay, so I grabbed a copy. It’s a magical, funny, thoughtful book-length lyric essay about a Black, queer body moving through White spaces—in this case, the expansive glacial landscape of Alaska. I would pair this with Zoologist’s Snowy Owl, which smells cold: a woodsy base, but the icy notes of iris, mint, and green galbanum lend an austere beauty.

Because I’ll be teaching it this fall, I’m reading Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. It’s ostensibly a memoir of...[read on]

About The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, from the publisher:

FEATURING ESSAYS FROM: Chelsea Biondolillo • KJ Cerankowski • Ching-In Chen • Oliver de la Paz • Danielle Cadena Deulen • Camille T. Dungy • Jeannine Hall Gailey • Rigoberto González • torrin a. greathouse • Kimiko Hahn • Lily Hoàng • Michael Kleber-Diggs • Rowan McCandless • Sarah Minor • Rajiv Mohabir • Vi Khi Nào • Aimee Nezhukumatathil • Natanya Ann Pulley • Diane Seuss • Sun Yung Shin • Brian Turner • Katrina Vandenberg • Julie Marie Wade • chaun webster • The Cyborg Jillian Weise • Marco Wilkinson

The fifth volume in the immensely popular Field Guide series, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay gives readers an extraordinary window into the methods of 26 expert practitioners at the leading edge of this ever-evolving genre.

With original craft essays, exercises, and examples, each contributor offers reflection and instruction on how lyric essays can be constructed and what makes them unique. As experts in the field, they offer their various approaches to creative nonfiction that uses an essay form, but is lyric in function, meaning that it pays special attention to patterning in language and the resonances of sound and imagery. The anthology’s expertise spans possible forms (braid, fragment, hermit crab, zuihitsu), lyric techniques (anaphora, fractal repetition, word associations, use of white space), and lyric processes (incorporating research or visual elements, engineering leaps, sustaining a longform lyric essay). Editors Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh further illuminate the genre in their introduction, exploring the history of the lyric essay and its vital place in contemporary literature. This field guide is an indispensable addition to the bookshelf of any reader, writer, or instructor intrigued by this inventive and expressive genre.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Visit Heidi Czerwiec's website.

Writers Read: Heidi Czerwiec.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five horror novels set in grand country homes

Jennifer Thorne is the USA Today bestselling author of Diavola and Lute, as well as several books for younger readers. With Lee Kelly, she is the co-writer of novels The Midnight Show, My Fair Frauds, The Starlets, and The Antiquity Affair. Born in the US, she now lives with her husband and two sons in the west of England.

Thorne's latest novel is Newbourne Park.

At CrimeReads she tagged "five literary country houses that also play host to devils." One title on the list:

Ian McEwan, Atonement

Regret is the ghost that haunts this Booker shortlisted 2001 novel, but the true monster is the narrator herself. Now a successful author, Briony was once a precocious teen whose cosseted childhood on the fairytale grounds of the Tallis family’s sprawling estate lends her an unearned assuredness…one that ultimately leads to devastation, wrongful imprisonment, and death.

As in so many other tales set in country retreats, class is the killer here—Briony’s privilege tipping into prejudice, the effects of which ripple through the rest of her life.

Read about another novel on the list.

Atonement also appears on Megan Cummins's list of seven novels with storyteller main characters, Rebecca Romney's list of six books that owe a debt to Jane Austen’s work, Kaley Rohlinger's list of fifteen top books with unreliable narrators, Ore Agbaje-Williams's list of seven scandalous betrayals in literature, Brittany Bunzey's list of 23 books about backstabbing and betrayal, Emma Rous's list of the ten top dinner parties in modern fiction, 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. 69: Humphrey Hawksley's "Operation Icebreaker"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Operation Icebreaker (A Rake Ozenna Thriller, 5) by Humphrey Hawksley.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Major Rake Ozenna faces dangerous choices and deadly consequences in this rip-roaring political thriller that takes you from the icy plains of Greenland to Washinton D.C., London and back again . . . Buckle up, this is a thrilling ride!

It was meant to be a routine visit. It became a bloodbath.

Special Forces veteran Major Rake Ozenna lands at America’s remote Arctic base in Greenland. His mission is simple. Build trust between allied communities on the frontline of a changing world. Instead, violence erupts, leaving Rake with a loss he cannot forget.

The devastating attack is blamed on Inuit extremists. Rake knows it’s a lie. There were assassins in the snow. And he will make sure they’re brought to justice.

But when things take a sinister political twist, Rake finds himself on the run from his own country. Someone deep inside in the Pentagon is determined to stop him and turn the base attack into something far bigger.

As global tensions reach breaking point, Rake must expose the truth before a war is ignited at the top of the world—pitting America against its closest allies…

Operation Icebreaker is the fifth Rake Ozenna thriller and will leave readers breathless . . . and eagerly anticipating the next heart-racing adventure!

Visit Humphrey Hawksley's website.

The Page 69 Test: The History Book.

My Book, The Movie: Security Breach.

My Book, The Movie: Man on Ice.

Writers Read: Humphrey Hawksley (May 2018).

The Page 69 Test: Man on Ice.

The Page 69 Test: Man on Fire.

My Book, The Movie: Operation Icebreaker.

The Page 69 Test: Operation Icebreaker.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top YA mysteries/thrillers for adult readers

Jamie Canaves is a contributing editor at Book Riot. She tagged six "excellent books written for young adults that understand and love the crime genre in a way that adults will deeply appreciate," including:

Bianca Torre Is Afraid of Everything by Justine Pucella Winans

Currently, many adults’ obsession with taking away transgender and nonbinary people’s rights to exist is gross, absurd, and “flames, on the side of my face” rage-inducing. Instead of amplifying their hatred, read great books written by trans and nonbinary authors to see the reality of their lived experiences.

Fans of amateur sleuths and the trope of accidentally witnessing a murder while being a nosy neighbor will be delighted with this fun and funny murder mystery. Bianca Torre is currently dealing with so many anxieties that they’ve made a list of them. They’ve also recently joined a bird-watching group. But maybe they’re doing more spying than birding with binoculars, because they end up watching their neighbor get murdered. Problem? The police label it a suicide, forcing Bianca, with the help of their best friend, to solve the murder mystery!

Read about another entry on the list.

Q&A with Justine Pucella Winans.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Anna Vincenzi's "Echoes of a Distant Republic"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Echoes of a Distant Republic: Italian Perspectives on the American and French Revolutions by Anna Vincenzi.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the American and French Revolutions were interpreted in the Italian states and how that understanding helped redefine the concept of revolution itself

In Echoes of a Distant Republic, Anna Vincenzi explores the evolving meaning of “revolution” in the eighteenth century by surveying the reactions in Italy to the upheavals in America and later France. Drawing on a wide range of sources―from periodicals and gazettes to diplomatic correspondence, ecclesiastical documents, and private letters―Vincenzi reveals how observers in Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples made sense of events across the Atlantic from the 1770s to the 1790s.

Italian political thinkers at first did not treat the American experience as a revolution in the modern sense―a radical break with the past meant to establish an egalitarian society―but rather as the culmination of a long age of reform. It was the French Revolution, Vincenzi shows, that made the American Revolution appear, only in retrospect, as the beginning of a new age. What had once seemed a circumscribed, reformist movement within the anglophone world came to be understood as an epoch-making event―an invitation to revolution in Europe against the monarchies of the Old Regime.

Learn more about Echoes of a Distant Republic at the University of Virginia Press.

The Page 99 Test: Echoes of a Distant Republic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top Agatha Christie-inspired mysteries

Katherine Reay is a national bestselling and award-winning author who has enjoyed a lifelong affair with books. She publishes both fiction and nonfiction, holds a BA and MS from Northwestern University, and currently lives outside Bozeman, MT, with her husband and too many dogs.

Her new novel is The Undercover Bookshop.

At People magazine Reay tagged eight "contemporary novels I’ve devoured this past year and offerings I believe any Christie aficionado will love." One title on the list:

Still Life by Louise Penny

This was Chief Inspector Armand Gamache’s first novel and our first visit to Three Pines. Twenty books later, we are still riveted by Penny’s acute inspector, her quirky and endearing characters and her strong sense of place. Thank goodness she’s not done yet — Gamache’s twenty-first mystery, Miss Wolcott’s Ghost, will be released this October. Considering Christie gave us 12 full Miss Marple mysteries and 33 Hercule Poirot novels, I’d say Louise Penny is settling in very nicely alongside Christie as a household name.

Read about another mystery on the list.

Still Life is among Amanda Chapman's five top subtly paranormal mysteries and Brittany Bunzey's ten sinister small town thrillers.

The Page 69 Test: Still Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Humphrey Hawksley's "Operation Icebreaker," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Operation Icebreaker by Humphrey Hawksley.

The entry begins:

The key for an Operation Icebreaker movie is casting a compelling lead character whose script demands he is economical with words yet has a vivid screen presence that will hold a movie theatre. He should also be an Alaskan native. I’m looking for a modern-day blend of Charles Bronson in Chato’s Land, Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare and Yul Brunner in The Magnificent Seven. Martin Sensemeier would work well playing Red Harvest the Comanche Warriot in the 2016 Magnificent Seven remake. Kiowa Gordon, who plays Jim Chee, the tribal police officer in Dark Winds would be great, and he’s mid-thirties, Rake’s age. Asivak Koostachin could also work well. He was in Red Snow, about an Inuit soldier captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan who draws on his Indigenous heritage to survive. Another idea would be...[read on]

Visit Humphrey Hawksley's website.

The Page 69 Test: The History Book.

My Book, The Movie: Security Breach.

My Book, The Movie: Man on Ice.

Writers Read: Humphrey Hawksley (May 2018).

The Page 69 Test: Man on Ice.

The Page 69 Test: Man on Fire.

Writers Read: Humphrey Hawksley.

My Book, The Movie: Operation Icebreaker.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Molly M. Brookfield's "Watching the Girls Go By"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States by Molly M. Brookfield.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ogling, catcalling, wolf-whistling: such everyday intrusions from male strangers have greeted American women from their first forays into urban space. Watching the Girls Go By is the first book-length history of the phenomenon we know today as street harassment. Spanning more than a century, from the 1860s to the 1980s, this book reveals how street harassment became normalized as part of urban life and restricted women’s freedom of movement through the city.

Historian Molly M. Brookfield charts how American social and cultural discourses cast behaviors like catcalling as the natural entitlement of white, middle-class men, while scapegoating and punishing men of color and working-class men as the stereotypical—and supposedly more dangerous—harassers. She mines a rich archive of newspaper reports, popular culture, women’s writings, public policy, and more to uncover how class, race, and gender shaped Americans' experiences of public space, including who claimed a “right” to women’s bodies, who was seen as a sexual threat, and how women fought back against harassment. Watching the Girls Go By challenges readers to reckon with how the long history and lasting impact of the seemingly trivial intrusions that constitute street harassment continue to shape public space today.

Visit Molly M. Brookfield's website.

The Page 99 Test: Watching the Girls Go By.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books with big secrets

Julia Cohen's latest book is Freak Lip (2026). She is the author of I Was Not Born (2014), a collection of lyric essays, which was translated into German and released by Literaturverlag Droschl. She’s also written two books of poetry, Collateral Light (2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (2011). Her nonfiction and poetry appear in issues of The Georgia Review, Southeast Review, The New England Review, Fugue, Heavy Feather Review, Boston Review, and BOMB.

Cohen has a BA from Wesleyan University, an MFA from The New School, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She’s an Associate Professor of English and Literature at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design. She teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses. Cohen lives in Colorado Springs with her husband and fellow writer, Noel Black, and their kids.

At Lit Hub she tagged "nine books that guided my understanding of how holding or exposing long-kept secrets creates a palpable tension between regret and relief." One title on the list:

Amy Long, Codependence

Amy Long’s Codependence broke my heart like a long-lost song popping on the radio as you speed down the highway that you find yourself suddenly crying and hoarsely shout-singing along to. In this memoir, Long’s secrets are woven into private patterns—obsessively counting pills, visiting different Duane Reade pharmacies—as she documents with dark humor her chronic pain and the opioid addiction attached to the only medication that makes living sustainable.

I grew up with an invisible chronic illness that was a challenge to explain to anyone my own age. I lost friends who didn’t understand that when I felt too tired to even take a shower and had to cancel plans, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to see them. Without a proper diagnosis, I lost months of my life every year to sleeping and fighting bacterial infections. Long exposes how secrecy builds up when even doctors don’t have the language to identify one’s pain. Long’s memoir spans three decades, deftly jumping into memories that track the development of her unrelenting headaches and the divide it creates in her family. How do you tell your mother you’ve gone back on opioids when she was there feeding you soup and ice cream five years ago during your last withdrawal? How do you tell your father, who thinks it’s the easy way out rather than the only viable choice to survive?

With neurologists unable to find a diagnosis, Codependence captures the unspoken, excruciating choices Long faces when confronting the loneliness in suffering and the cost of making art. Inextricable to Long’s art, though, is a self-awareness and acerbic wit that elevates the narrative and reminds us that humor is integral to survival, too.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Humphrey Hawksley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Humphrey Hawksley, author of Operation Icebreaker (A Rake Ozenna Thriller, 5).

His entry begins:

I have several on the go, all on my Kindle, and all in the swirl around my curiosity research on Arctic action.

The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger is a heart-warming tale about small communities and the wider world. This is one of the few novels with a setting in Qaanaaq, in far north Greenland, the Arctic area where my latest Operation Icebreaker is set. It’s a hard place to get to, and John wrote from talking to people and his own research, and his vivid descriptions are pretty much spot on.

Alongside, I’m deep into Cold Rush: The Astonishing True Story of the New Quest for the Polar North by Martin Breum, a gripping non-fiction account of...[read on]

About Operation Icebreaker, from the publisher:

Major Rake Ozenna faces dangerous choices and deadly consequences in this rip-roaring political thriller that takes you from the icy plains of Greenland to Washinton D.C., London and back again . . . Buckle up, this is a thrilling ride!

It was meant to be a routine visit. It became a bloodbath.

Special Forces veteran Major Rake Ozenna lands at America’s remote Arctic base in Greenland. His mission is simple. Build trust between allied communities on the frontline of a changing world. Instead, violence erupts, leaving Rake with a loss he cannot forget.

The devastating attack is blamed on Inuit extremists. Rake knows it’s a lie. There were assassins in the snow. And he will make sure they’re brought to justice.

But when things take a sinister political twist, Rake finds himself on the run from his own country. Someone deep inside in the Pentagon is determined to stop him and turn the base attack into something far bigger.

As global tensions reach breaking point, Rake must expose the truth before a war is ignited at the top of the world—pitting America against its closest allies…

Operation Icebreaker is the fifth Rake Ozenna thriller and will leave readers breathless . . . and eagerly anticipating the next heart-racing adventure!

Visit Humphrey Hawksley's website.

The Page 69 Test: The History Book.

My Book, The Movie: Security Breach.

My Book, The Movie: Man on Ice.

Writers Read: Humphrey Hawksley (May 2018).

The Page 69 Test: Man on Ice.

The Page 69 Test: Man on Fire.

Writers Read: Humphrey Hawksley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew Warner Osborn's "Night Hawk"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture by Matthew Warner Osborn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Unmasks the long-forgotten story of how a flying, superhuman vigilante played a pivotal role in the founding of the American labor movement.

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title “The Night-Hawk, No. 1” with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: “I’ll be a candleholder and look on.” Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Matthew Warner Osborn reveals, this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press, the first radical socialist newspaper in America. Dressed in a mysterious cloak, the Night Hawk soared over Philadelphia, revealing the evil crimes of prominent gentlemen, fighting murderous criminals, and calling out fraudulent moral authorities.

The Night Hawk was the ingenious invention of an impoverished actor, Cornelius A. Logan, who created the character as a public champion of Philadelphia’s Working Men’s movement, the first successful American labor party. The Night Hawk’s nocturnal adventures transformed their socialist ideology into an entertaining fantasy that dramatized the struggle against industrial exploitation and the degradation of working people. The success of the character made Logan into a celebrity, and he went on to become a popular and innovative comedian on the antebellum stage.

A harbinger of the superheroes we know today, the Night Hawk promises to illuminate dark secrets from the past, but he can also shed light on our present. He ignites our need to see corrupt elites unmasked and held accountable for their actions, all while protecting the innocent and oppressed. Americans have always loved to fantasize about powerful superheroes who hide behind masks while chasing bad guys, and Osborn shows in this entertaining history how the Night Hawk was perhaps the first standard bearer for that enduring mystique.

Learn more about Night Hawk at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Night Hawk.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four bewitching novels for fans of "Practical Magic"

At Book Riot Megan Mabee tagged "four beautifully written books for fans of Practical Magic." One title on the list:

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

For those who like the more spine-tingling elements of Practical Magic, like the creepy murdered boyfriends brought back from the dead, or the tangled webs woven by backfired love spells, you may also want to try this witchy horror read by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Plus, you’ll find multigenerational women connected by magic in this book, too. As a grad student named Minerva investigates an elusive horror author named Beatrice Tremblay, her findings begin to mirror a witch encounter her great-grandmother Nana Alba faced in 1900’s Mexico.

Read about another title on the list.

The Bewitching is among Carolina Ciucci's eight books of immersive dark gothic fantasy for horror fans and Daphne Fama's eight folklore-inspired horror novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jessica Siskin's "Looks Perfect"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Looks Perfect: A Novel by Jessica Siskin.

About the book, from the publisher:

What comes between a fashion icon’s perfect image and her genuine self? The perfect stranger―in a sharp and witty novel about identity, performance, and what it takes to make a true connection.

One million people follow Stella Lerner’s every move. And now the buzzy fashion designer is fulfilling her lifelong dream and taking her indie clothing brand global with the help of the industry’s biggest investor. Sounds perfect. Except offline, the optics aren’t so great.

Her relationship with her boyfriend, Alex, is crumbling just as the pressure to curate her image online only builds. Feeling trapped between the picture-perfect life she’s promised her followers and the messy reality she’s facing, Stella anonymously joins a new dating app. Blindr promises deep, private conversations, free from the burden of anyone’s expectations, especially her own. That’s when Stella connects with a stranger called Pineapple who’s intuitive, honest, and empathetic. Stella may be watched by millions, but this man, who’s never even laid eyes on her, makes her feel seen.

What starts as a diversion becomes a journey of radical transformation. As Stella’s search for authenticity intensifies, every chat with Pineapple takes her further down a path she never could’ve imagined.

Visit Jessica Siskin's website.

The Page 69 Test: Looks Perfect.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five powerful horror novels for animal lovers

Carrie Lee South earned her MFA at the Arkansas Writers Workshop where she served as the fiction editor for the literary magazine Arkana. She's currently the fiction editor at StoryBottle Co. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, F(r)iction, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tales to Terrify, and elsewhere. She is the author of In the Woods They Wait. When she's not reading and writing, she's spending time with birds: the ones outside and the four parrots that live in her house.

At CrimeReads South tagged five powerful horror novels in which "the animal characters are given agency." One title on the list:

Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

Speaking of The Incredible Journey, if it took place in the world of 28 Days Later, you’d get something like Kira Jane Buxton’s Hollow Kingdom. A pet crow named Shit Turd narrates this bizarre but heartwarming zombie apocalypse story. The humans (or as ST calls them, Mofos) have all succumbed to a strange sickness. It’s making them violent and unrecognizable–literally, their body parts are falling off.

ST and his fellow pet, Dennis the dog, set out to find help for their owner, Big Jim. It looks like the Mofos might be beyond saving. But you know who else needs saving? All the pet cats and dogs and birds trapped in their zombified owners’ houses. Hilarious, devastating, disturbing, and gorgeously written, I seriously cannot recommend this book enough.

Read about another novel on the list.

Hollow Kingdom is among Liberty Hardy's five top SFF novels centering older characters and E.B. Bartels's thirteen books about the joy in a life filled with non-human creatures.

My Book, The Movie: Hollow Kingdom.

The Page 69 Test: Hollow Kingdom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Philippe Huneman's "Profiling"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric by Philippe Huneman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this book, philosopher Philippe Huneman aims to offer an unprecedented and systematic understanding of a simultaneously banal and singular phenomenon of modern life: the digital profile. Diving deeply into the algorithms that produce these profiles, Huneman examines the way in which an individual becomes a predictable subject, both as unwilling producer of their digital profile and unwitting subject of digital marketing's attempts to influence beliefs and behaviors.

As the book demonstrates, today's society of profiling has profound implications for our understanding of self and politics. The book unfolds across three sections. In the first, Huneman explains profiles and profiling as they operate today and describes their contemporary pervasiveness, using examples from a variety of fields and considering the wide range of types of data that can be digitalized―be they traces, search histories, metadata or the like. In the second section, on profiles, Huneman reflects on who is the subject of profiling societies and what kind of consequences profiling has on individuals―from behavior to memory. And, finally, entering into metaphysical questioning, the book shines a spotlight on the feedback loop that develops between algorithmic profiling and reality.

Visit Philippe Huneman's website.

The Page 99 Test: Profiling.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Denise Derya Brandt

From my Q&A with Denise Derya Brandt, author of Istanbul Dreaming: A Novel:

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

A lot, I hope! I was originally going to title the novel A Modern Turkish Woman, but ultimately I think I went with the better choice. I wanted Istanbul in the title for a few reasons. It’s my favorite city in the world, and it’s where my main character’s life changes in ways she could previously only have dreamed of.

I was cautioned against using a gerund in the title, but I kept coming back to “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and Papas. If it worked for them, I figured it could work for me too! My main character, Ayten, really does dream about Istanbul.

What’s in a name?

The names in Istanbul Dreaming were very important for me to...[read on]

Visit Denise Derya Brandt's website.

Writers Read: Denise Derya Brandt.

The Page 69 Test: Istanbul Dreaming.

Q&A with Denise Derya Brandt.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is W. Jason Miller reading?

Featured at Writers Read: W. Jason Miller, author of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power.

His entry begins:

I was delighted when author Lerone Martin extended my earlier connection between Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. to find— through his own resourcefulness— that King began reciting Hughes’s poetry as early as ten years old when he was a 5th grade student in Miss Lemon’s class in Atlanta. For any Tina Fey | 30 Rock fans, Miss Lemon’s first name was (unbelievably) ... Elizabeth!

Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King, Jr, portrays a wide-smiling King dancing the Charleston in front of his classmates while he...[read on]

About Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, from the publisher:

The story behind the Priestess and the Poet

On March 24, 1965, Nina Simone performed at a rally for twenty-five thousand people on the last night of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march. Though luminaries like Martin Luther King Jr., Mahalia Jackson, and Dick Gregory were in attendance, it was Langston Hughes, celebrated poet and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, who was the singer’s closest confidant and supporter. They had one of the most important—yet unheralded—friendships of the Black Power era.

Simone’s performance on that Montgomery night catapulted her into a lead role in the civil rights movement, with Hughes as her guide. In Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, W. Jason Miller offers a riveting history of how their relationship helped spark the birth of Black Power—indeed, the phrase itself, made famous by Stokely Carmichael, was a quote from collaborative lyrics by the two. Hughes gave Simone the fuel to be one of the most politically charged artists of the era, while Simone offered Hughes a way to carry his influence into pop music and shape a national movement. Drawing on new firsthand accounts, Miller takes readers inside one of the most powerful friendships in music and civil rights history.

Visit W. Jason Miller's website.

The Page 99 Test: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.

My Book, The Movie: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.

Writers Read: W. Jason Miller.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the best mystery books of all time

Andy Minshew is an author and book reviewer who explores the intersections between queerness, faith, and neurodivergence in fiction and nonfiction.

At Book Riot he tagged fifteen of "the best mystery books of all time that have defined the genre in meaningful ways." One title on the list:

Summer of the Big Bachi (Mas Arai #1) by Naomi Hirahara

This thoughtful and character-driven novel is the first in the Edgar-Award winning Mas Arai mystery series. Gardener and widower Mas Arai is visited by a stranger who, like him, is a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. The bombing and racism towards Japanese American immigrants brings back traumatic memories for Mas. But when the stranger is found dead, Mas must unravel a murder connected to secrets that he himself has fought to keep hidden.

Read about another mystery on the list.

Summer of the Big Bachi is among Alex Kenna's five top modern LA noir titles by women writers.

--Marshal Zeringue