Q&A with Kathleen S. Allen

From my Q&A with Kathleen S. Allen, author of The Resurrectionist: A Tale of Gothic Horror:

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

The title sets up an image in the reader’s mind that this is a story about a resurrectionist, which it is. I went through many title changes before my agent suggested the current title....

The book cover goes further in that readers will guess it’s about a young woman in Victorian times trying to become a resurrectionist. Yet, there’s something sinister as evidenced by the bloody scalpel in her hand and the blood spots on her gown and handkerchief she carries. The Masquerade Venetian half mask she wears also suggests...[read on]

Visit Kathleen S. Allen's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Resurrectionist.

My Book, The Movie: The Resurrectionist.

Writers Read: Kathleen S. Allen.

Q&A with Kathleen S. Allen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kate Haulman's "The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America by Kate Haulman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to the battlefields at Gettysburg or Antietam, nor to Mount Vernon, but to the gravesite of Mary Ball Washington, mother of George. While dedicating the new monument that marked it in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Cleveland honored “the woman who gave our Nation its greatest and best citizen.” There could be no clearer valorization of eighteenth-century republican motherhood and its centrality to the nation's origin story.

The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America examines the role of motherhood in the commemoration of the American Revolution by tracing the creation and evolution of the Mother of Washington figure. Kate Haulman explores the nineteenth-century memory of an eighteenth-century woman known for and through her famous son, the nation's first president. Underpinned by a canon of stories about Mary that often involved George, the monument and the figure it memorialized overlapped, sometimes in surprising and even paradoxical ways. In print, in images, and on the landscape, memorializing Mary foregrounded maternal ideals based in traditional gender roles and ancestry in the public memory of the nation's founding. As some women framed their engagement with the state in maternal terms, other men and women used the Mother of Washington to link the virtues she represented to the nation's origins. Women memorialists finally took up the cause to complete the monument, finishing what elite men had begun decades earlier.

Then as now, groups used the past to construct American motherhood, as well as using motherhood to engage with the founding past. The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America offers fresh arguments about gender, race, and the politics of Revolutionary history and memory still contested 250 years later.

Learn more about The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight horror books about the power of nature & the environment

Leah Rachel von Essen is an editor, writer, and book reviewer. She is a copyeditor and fact-checker at Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as a contributing editor, Adult Books, for American Library Association’s magazine Booklist. She writes regularly for Chicago Review of Books and is a senior contributor at Book Riot.

At Book Riot she tagged eight horror reads about the power of nature and the environment. One title on the list:

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Nature is absolutely trying to kill you in the Southern Reach novels (it’s a series, but you can read this one on its own as well). Four female explorers are part of the 12th expedition to attempt to explore the menacing Area X, a place that nature has fully reclaimed. Why did previous expeditions go mad? What lurks in this dark swamp of a past, in the lighthouse, in the tower? Mystery, decay, horrible insects, a green that infiltrates you, a mold that can write. It’s full of shudders and Lovecraftian horror, the kind that you feel in the pit of your stomach when confronted by the uncanny.

Read about another entry on the list.

Annihilation is among Nina Allan's top ten strangest alien invasion novels, Martin MacInnes's top ten visionary books about scientists, John Searles's five novels set in abandoned places, Rin Chupeco's five top stories where nature does its best to kill you, and Nicholas Royle's ten top lighthouses in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Use And Abuse Of History" by Friedrich Nietzsche

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 "The Use And Abuse Of History" by Friedrich Nietzsche. It begins:

Everyone now understands that nothing in the past was what it should have been. No one in the past, none of those whose names are still remembered, measured up, fully measured up, to what we today understand are the standards all decent, right thinking people should meet. Washington and Jefferson, all the others who were once given credit for their commitment to the cause of freedom, either owned slaves themselves or did nothing to bring slavery to an end. History, especially American history, the history that was taught to children in schools and to everyone else in Fourth of July orations, was, if not a conscious lie, a failure to see things as they really were.

What everyone now understands, what everyone now thinks he knows, is not, surprising as it may seem, a new discovery, an original insight of the present age; it is what Friedrich Nietzsche went to war against a hundred fifty years ago. In "The Use And Abuse Of History," the second of four essays known collectively as Thoughts Out Of Season, Nietzsche complained about “unreflective people who write as historians in the naive faith that, according to all popular opinions, their age is right, and that to write in conformity with this age amounts to exactly the same thing as being just.” It is worse than that; the historians want more than to criticize, they want to condemn. “Measuring past opinions and deeds according to the widespread opinions of the present moment is what these naive historians call ‘objectivity.’ It is there that they discover the cannons of all truth; their aim is to force the past to fit the mold of their fashionable triviality.” And as to the worth of these historians, the worth, we must add, of our own over-confident historians, he remarks, “every man’s vanity is directly proportional to his lack of intelligence.” They believe, mistakenly, that, in the present, they stand higher than those in the past, when, instead, they “merely come after them.”

The belief that the present is in all important respects superior to the past would once have been thought a mark of ignorance. The Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, spoke, if in different ways, of...[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".

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Randee Dawn's "Leave No Trace"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Leave No Trace by Randee Dawn.

About Leave No Trace, from the publisher:

Seventeen-year-old Lexi has been living in a remote stretch of the Rocky Mountain woods since her father dragged her there ten years ago, after her mother and baby brother were afflicted with a magical sickness. Her paranoid father thinks they've escaped the magic, and that as long as they never leave the woods, they'll be safe.

So Lexi never tells him about her friend Gil, who turns up sometimes in a birch copse that travels with him, and who is definitely not human. She especially doesn't mention the magic he taught her, which can open a path to wherever she needs to go. After all, she's been in the woods for most of her life: she can find her way without magic.

But when pop star TJ Furey hires them to help him hunt down a bear, Lexi's secret is threatened. The bear he wants to kill is under Gil's protection, and if Lexi doesn't prevent its death, she'll never see Gil again. But she can't do so without risking her father's wrath – and when it turns out that TJ's manager is harboring a similar grudge of his own, Lexi feels trapped. If she wants her own life, she'll have to find a way to break all their expectations.

Leave No Trace plays the clash of worlds – magic and technology, future and past, rural and urban – against the backdrop of a bear hunt.

Visit Randee Dawn's website.

The Page 69 Test: Tune in Tomorrow.

Q&A with Randee Dawn.

My Book, The Movie: Tune in Tomorrow.

Writers Read: Randee Dawn.

My Book, The Movie: Leave No Trace.

The Page 69 Test: Leave No Trace.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lukas Gage's four favorite celebrity memoirs

Lukas Gage is an actor/writer/producer who is best known for his role in the first season of the Emmy Award–winning HBO limited series, The White Lotus. Gage also starred in Netflix’s You; Euphoria on HBO; Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline; Down Low for FilmNation, which he cowrote and stars opposite Zach Quinto and Simon Rex; and Fargo on FX/HULU. Gage can also be seen in the remake of Road House for Amazon/MGM, Smile 2 for Paramount, and the highly anticipated film, Rosebush Pruning.

Gage's new memoir, I Wrote This for Attention, "details his upbringing in the west coast—including a broken family, struggles with addiction, sex, borderline personality disorder—and his commitment to being the center of attention at all times, even as he actually becomes a star."

At Lit Hub Gage tagged four celebrity memoirs that "didn’t just entertain me; they also gave me permission to overshare, to own my most cringe qualities, and to actually embrace them." One title on the list:

Demi Moore, Inside Out

Demi doesn’t sugarcoat a thing. Addiction, breakdowns, heartbreak… and she spills it all. You expect Hollywood glam, but what you really get is someone clawing their way back to themselves. And the way she writes (and reads on Audible, in that raspy, velvety voice) is both brutal and beautiful.

Read about another entry on the list.

Inside Out is among Daniel D’Addario's nine books that take you inside the entertainment industry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Denise Z. Davidson's "Surviving Revolution"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters by Denise Z. Davidson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Surviving Revolution explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement.

Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters.

By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.

Learn more about Surviving Revolution at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Surviving Revolution.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heather Aimee O’Neill's "The Irish Goodbye," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Irish Goodbye: A Novel by Heather Aimee O'Neill.

Her entry begins:

While I didn’t have these actors in mind while writing—I wouldn’t have dared dream that far ahead—as soon as the book was acquired, people started asking me who I’d cast if the story were adapted for the screen. The Ryans aren’t based on my family, but my mother looks like Meryl Streep, so I’d cast her in the role of Nora.

Recently, while my wife and I were fantasizing about casting the rest of the Ryan family, we looked up Streep’s daughters and were gobsmacked to discover that...[read on]

Visit Heather Aimee O'Neill's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Irish Goodbye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirteen books for "House of Guinness" fans

Emily Burack is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site.

At Town & Country she tagged thirteen of the best books for fans of the Netflix period drama House of Guinness, including:

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer

Meanwhile, those who are drawn to the Edward and Adelaide (Ann Skelly) storyline, check out A Civil Contract. Georgette Heyer’s romance follows Adam Deveril, the new Viscount Lynton, who is madly in love with a woman named Julia but has to marry a woman named Jenny Chawleigh. “Can the wrong bride become the perfect wife?” asks the description for this novel.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Decoteau J. Irby and Ann M. Ishimaru's (eds.) "Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change by Decoteau J. Irby and Ann M. Ishimaru, editors.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book reveals the complex and crucial work of sustaining justice-focused educational systems change in the face of subtle resistance and outright attacks.

Scholars and practitioners, who have worked together in various capacities across different school systems, examine systemic equity leadership in U.S. public schools over the course of nearly a decade and across a time of profound racial and historical change.

This volume weaves together real-world insights, research-based strategies, and practical tools for transforming P–12 education systems into more equitable and just learning spaces. Contributors explore the early days of district equity leadership sparked by the Obama administration's focus on civil rights in education; Black Lives Matter (beginning with the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice); the proliferation of formal equity director roles, policies, and priorities; and the recent politically driven anti-DEI backlash.

This book is important reading for school leaders, district personnel, policymakers, and everyone who cares about a public education that works for all students.

Visit Decoteau J. Irby's website and Ann M. Ishimaru's website.

The Page 99 Test: Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Jennifer Fawcett

From my Q&A with Jennifer Fawcett, author of Keep This for Me: A Novel:

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

A good title is doing several things at once: it’s catching a reader’s attention, it’s helping a reader (and bookseller or librarian) place a book in context with others, i.e., what genre, sub-genre, and which other writers might be similar to, and finally it is a connection into the story, one that should go deeper as the reader dives in so that by the end, its meaning is layered.

Keep This for Me is an evocative title. It doesn’t explain itself immediately. “Keep what for me?” a reader might understandably ask. Without knowing what specifically is being kept, the title should make the reader think about holding on to something (or someone), about memory, and about objects that...[read on]

Visit Jennifer Fawcett's website.

Q&A with Jennifer Fawcett.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Margaret Mizushima's "Dying Cry"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Dying Cry: A Timber Creek K-9 Mystery by Margaret Mizushima.

About the book, from the publisher:

A killer lurks in Colorado’s snowy high country in Dying Cry, the tenth thrilling installment of award-winning author Margaret Mizushima’s Timber Creek K-9 mystery series.

Newlyweds Mattie and Cole Walker are teaching Cole’s daughters how to snowshoe in a remote canyon when a shattering scream pierces the air. They know that somewhere ahead, someone has been injured or worse. Cole takes the girls while Mattie and Robo go deeper into the canyon to search for the source of the scream.

From a distance, Mattie and Robo see a shadowy figure at the base of a cliff, but a rockslide buries the person under layers of stone and shale before they can provide help. Desperate to uncover the individual in case they’re still alive under the rock, their efforts are in vain. The victim is already dead. When they investigate the canyon rim from which the person fell, they discover evidence that indicates the fall was no accident. To make matters worse, the victim was one of Cole’s friends.

The Timber Creek County investigative team springs into action, uncovering a trail of greed that leads to a killer who threatens Mattie’s cherished new family and tests her with the most difficult task she’s faced in her duty as a K-9 handler.

Visit Margaret Mizushima's website and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Coffee with a Canine: Margaret Mizushima & Hannah, Bertie, Lily and Tess.

Coffee with a Canine: Margaret Mizushima & Hannah.

My Book, The Movie: Burning Ridge.

The Page 69 Test: Burning Ridge.

The Page 69 Test: Tracking Game.

My Book, The Movie: Hanging Falls.

The Page 69 Test: Hanging Falls.

Q&A with Margaret Mizushima.

The Page 69 Test: Striking Range.

The Page 69 Test: Standing Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Gathering Mist.

Writers Read: Margaret Mizushima (October 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Dying Cry.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 100 best horror books of all time

One title from Reedsy's list of the one hundred best (and scariest) horror books of all time:

The Hunger by Alma Katsu (2018)

The Hunger will have you on the very edge of your seat with its story of a group of travelers who are slowly unraveling. Not only do they face obstacle after obstacle of basic bad luck — low food rations, freezing weather, and a general predilection to take every wrong turn — but there also seems to be something darker, even more menacing, lurking in the mountains. And is it their imaginations, or does it all seem to be linked to beautiful, mysterious Tamsen Donner? You may have heard of the Donner Party before, but not like this: Katsu’s historical horror novel will cast both the people and the situation in a whole new, terrifying light.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Hunger is among Steph Auteri's ten modern horror classics keeping the genre alive, Sharon Virts's twenty scary books for Halloween, C. J. Tudor's five top winter thrillers, Brittany Bunzey's twenty-five "must-read, truly bone-chilling" horror books, Deborah E. Kennedy's seven hot mysteries set in the Midwestern winter, Meagan Navarro top ten scary good horror novels, Jac Jemc's top ten haunting ghost stories and Mallory O'Meara's top thirteen spine-chilling books written by female authors.

My Book, The Movie: The Hunger.

The Page 69 Test: The Hunger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Helen Morgan Parmett's "Stadium City"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Stadium City: Sports and Media Infrastructure in the United States by Helen Morgan Parmett.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new sports stadium has an outsized impact on a city’s landscape and image of itself. Each stadium also plays a central role in media institutions, technologies, and culture as a catalyst for urban change and flashy neighborhood anchor, cornerstone of regional identity and purveyor of multimedia experiences. Helen Morgan Parmett analyzes sports stadiums in Atlanta, Seattle, and Minneapolis to demonstrate the role that media institutions, technologies, and culture play in sports and examine their impact on the urban landscape. These interconnected factors impact struggles over city space, identity, and urban governing. As Morgan Parmett shows, stadiums exist as more than just buildings and sporting places—they are central nodes in the city that connect, disconnect, and distribute resources, people, information, and, ultimately, power. Morgan Parmett demonstrates how the “sportification” of place is influenced by the specific histories, geography, and sporting cultures of a city while explaining their relationship to broader forces at work in media, sport, and urbanism. Original and incisive, Stadium City offers a beyond-the-playing-field analysis of sports stadiums and their impact on our cities and our lives.

Learn more about Stadium City at the University of Illinois Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Stadium City.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Kathleen S. Allen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Kathleen S. Allen, author of The Resurrectionist: A Tale of Gothic Horror.

Her entry begins:

I am currently reading Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. I’ve read all her books so she’s an automatic buy for me. I started with Babel and was intrigued by the history she wove into her story. I then read the three books in The Poppy War series, again the history intrigued me....[read on]

About The Resurrectionist, from the publisher:

A young Victorian woman unwittingly unleashes a monster into being in this gothic tale of medical mystery and sinister suspense, perfect for fans of DON'T LET THE FOREST IN and BELLADONNA.

Death is just the beginning.

When seventeen-year-old Dilly Rothbart finds her recently deceased father's hidden journal, her entire world is upended—for what she finds within are the steps to bring a dead soul back to life.

Intent on finishing her father's work and establishing herself as the greatest scientist in history, Dilly plunges into a medical underworld of corpse-stealing, grave-robbing, and even murder. And when her twin sister steps in the way of her studies, she'll do whatever is necessary to secure the recognition she deserves.

This twisty, atmospheric, Frankensteinian tale is about a group of ambitious young scientists who descend into corruption when a breakthrough discovery grants them the power of gods.

Visit Kathleen S. Allen's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Resurrectionist.

My Book, The Movie: The Resurrectionist.

Writers Read: Kathleen S. Allen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top books about ballet

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Molly Schoemann-McCann tagged nine books about ballet, including:

I Dreamed I Was a Ballerina, by Anna Pavlova

This story of Anna Pavlova’s early life, drawn from her memoir, includes a detailed account of her first trip to the ballet, when she first decided that her dream was to become a dancer. This enchanting book is illustrated with drawings, paintings, and pastels by artist Edgar Degas, for a pitch-perfect blend of beautiful imagery and prose.

Read about another title on the list.

Also see Nina Laurin's eight books that feature the world of ballet; Lucy Ashe's eight books about growing up through ballet; Tammy Greenwood's four books that juxtapose the beauty and ugliness of ballet; Charley Burlock's five books to awaken your inner ballerina; Martha Anne Toll's eleven top fiction books & memoirs about ballet; and Erin Kelly's top ten books about ballet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Daniel Wilson's "Hole in the Sky"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Hole in the Sky: A Novel by Daniel H. Wilson.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Native American first contact story and gripping thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse

On the Great Plains of Oklahoma, in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, a strange atmospheric disturbance is noticed by Jim Hardgray, a down-on-his-luck single father trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter, Tawny. At NASA’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, astrophysicist Dr. Mikayla Johnson observes an interaction with the Voyager 1 spacecraft on the far side of the solar system, and she concludes that something enormous and unidentified is heading directly for Earth. And in an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the United States, an American threat forecaster known only as the Man Downstairs intercepts a cryptic communication and sends a message directly to the president and highest-ranking military brass: “First contact imminent.”

Daniel H. Wilson’s Hole in the Sky is a riveting thriller in the most creative tradition of extraterrestrial fiction. Drawing on Wilson’s unique background as both a threat forecaster for the United States Air Force and a Cherokee Nation citizen, this propulsive novel asks probing questions about nonhuman intelligence, the Western mindset, and humans’ understanding of reality.

Learn more about the book and author at Daniel Wilson's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Boy and His Bot.

The Page 69 Test: Robopocalypse.

My Book, The Movie: Amped.

The Page 69 Test: Robogenesis.

My Book, The Movie: Robogenesis.

Writers Read: Daniel H. Wilson (June 2014).

The Page 69 Test: Hole in the Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Randee Dawn's "Leave No Trace," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Leave No Trace by Randee Dawn.

Her entry begins:

Leave No Trace began as a movie. Well, it began from a movie. I was pretty young when I saw the New Zealand film Smash Palace, which is largely about an ugly divorce. But there was one scene where the father, who's gone off the deep end a bit, kidnaps his young daughter and decides they'll live off the grid, in the New Zealand bush. It's lush and tropical there, and this kind of thing actually happens in real life from time to time. The kidnapping is short-lived – the daughter gets a cold, and they're both rounded up when dad goes to get medicine at a local pharmacy – but that idea stuck with me: What if they'd never left?

That was the birth of Leave No Trace, so I would have to ask Roger Donaldson, who is both from Down Under and the director of Smash Palace (as well as classic other films like Sleeping Dogs, The Bounty, and Cocktail) to take on the job. He knows the territory and he knows the concept already. Kind of. But at 79, he might not be up for the gig, which means I'd turn to fellow New Zealander Taika Waititi, who aside from being a handsome genius who could definitely play Tony, is known for...[read on]

Visit Randee Dawn's website.

The Page 69 Test: Tune in Tomorrow.

Q&A with Randee Dawn.

My Book, The Movie: Tune in Tomorrow.

Writers Read: Randee Dawn.

My Book, The Movie: Leave No Trace.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew Lindauer's "The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts by Matthew Lindauer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Can philosophical concepts do real work in improving our world? Should we, when evaluating competing understandings of concepts like 'justice' and 'solidarity,' take into account whether these different understandings can actually help us to fight injustice and promote solidarity between people? The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts is the first book-length attempt to argue that the answer to both of these questions is an emphatic “yes.” In doing so, it provides a bold new defense of a tight relationship between theory and practice. Drawing on cutting-edge scientific research, the book also demonstrates that we now have the tools to evaluate the practical value of normative concepts.

Moral and political philosophers should be and have often been, explicitly or implicitly, interested in a number of dimensions of fruitfulness that Matthew Lindauer delineates, and it is an empirical question whether a given concept is fruitful in these ways. These dimensions of fruitfulness include the extent to which moral and political concepts (i) motivate the right kinds of behavior when internalized (Motivational Fruitfulness), (ii) prevent the wrong kinds of behavior (Prevention Fruitfulness), (iii) help us fight back against problematic social phenomena such as bias and discrimination (Resilience Fruitfulness), (iv) are capable of achieving consensus to a sufficient extent among people committed to cooperation and peaceful coexistence (Consensus Fruitfulness), and (v) can serve as useful guides in solving practical problems that we need to solve (Guidance Fruitfulness). Lindauer's research establishes that, rather than merely clearing the way for philosophical work to be done, empirical research is an important part of the philosophical enterprise, is continuous with traditional a priori research methods, and will be required to resolve at least some important debates in moral and political philosophy.

Visit Matthew Lindauer's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top queer vampire titles

Hal Schrieve is the author of books about teens, queer community, monsters and aliens. Hir first book Out of Salem (2019), was selected for the National Book Award Long List for Young People’s Literature in 2019. It was followed by How To Get Over the End of the World (2023).

Schrieve’s new novel is Fawn’s Blood.

At Electric Lit the author tagged eight "queer vampire novels that approach the idea of 'inhumanity' in creative, queer ways." One title on the list:

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

Thirst is a contemporary novel that follows a monstrous sapphic vampire unleashed on 19th century Buenos Aires. After a self-enforced hibernation of over a century, she falls in love with Alma, who is grieving her dying mother in the present day. Our nameless vampire was never human since she was gifted as food to a male vampire, fed on in childhood, turned, and taught her only feral hunger. After her vampire sisters are killed by slayers, she becomes a solitary woman of the world— an inverted Gothic heroine who murders the innocent rather than fight for her own virtue. Vampirism in this book is about distance from humanity, the hypocrisy of “civilization,” and the disconcerting proximity between intimacy and the ability to do harm. Each time our vampire comes close to the women she desires, she can only watch as they die at her hands or destroy themselves to avoid her; as she risks pursuit of Alma, the woman who opened her tomb, she wonders if love means death. One could also ask—does feminism or lesbianism mean abandoning the family?

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with John A. McDermott

From my Q&A with John A. McDermott, author of The Last Spirits of Manhattan:

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

The Last Spirits of Manhattan is pretty direct in two respects: the novel has ghosts at a cocktail party (hence two kinds of spirits) and it’s set in Manhattan. “Last” is the tricky word; are these the final spirits or the latest spirits? I’d like to leave that to the reader. The title wasn’t always so directly informative; for a long time, it was called The Direction of Rented Spirits. Direction was a play on both film directors, since the party is hosted by Alfred Hitchcock, and the life-changing choices confronting the characters. What direction are they heading? Rented played on the idea that the house where the party happened was an old rowhouse rented for the evening by Hitchcock—and rented in the sense of torn. There are lots of emotional scars on these ghosts. The published title is more informative, though I was sad to see the play on rented and direction go, but last gives it...[read on]

Visit John A. McDermott's website.

Q&A with John A. McDermott.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Skyla Arndt's "House of Hearts"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: House of Hearts by Skyla Arndt.

About the book, from the publisher:

Solving her best friend's murder means infiltrating a secret society, resisting a forbidden love, and running from a vengeful ghost in this sophomore novel by the author of Together We Rot.

Violet Harper knows her best friend was murdered. Even if everyone else has labeled her death a “freak accident,” Vi is sure she’d been trying to tell her something right before she died. Cryptic messages about her friend’s elite boarding school, her whirlwind romance, and the mysterious secret society she was entangled in all point to a more sinister fate.

So, Violet does what no one else seems willing to do: She transfers to the same fancy school to dig into the society’s murky history and find out what really happened to her friend. She knows the truth might not be pretty, but what she doesn’t bargain for is the handsome boy at the center of it all—Calvin Lockwell, the brother of her prime suspect and descendant of the school’s founder. He’s obnoxious and privileged, and Violet can’t deny their haunting attraction. It soon becomes clear his family is hiding a dark secret that may not be of this world, and suddenly Violet’s following her friend’s doomed footsteps down the rabbit hole. Even as details emerge of a deadly curse plaguing the school, she can’t escape her true feelings for Calvin. But loving him may be the last thing she ever does.

Visit Skyla Arndt's website.

Writers Read: Skyla Arndt.

Q&A with Skyla Arndt.

My Book, The Movie: House of Hearts.

The Page 69 Test: House of Hearts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books for fans of Tudor drama, history, fashion and style

Philippa Gregory is a historian and novelist renowned for combining rich research with powerful storytelling. Her novels have sold millions of copies worldwide and been adapted for stage, television and film.

Her new novel is Boleyn Traitor.

At People magazine Gregory tagged eight favorite Tudor books, including:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

When I first read this fantastic book, I sent a fan letter to Hilary Mantel via her agent. Wolf Hall is the first — and my favorite — of the masterly trilogy which follows the rise of Thomas Crowell, advisor to Henry VIII. Cromwell’s advice to Henry and his perspective is such an interesting part of the Tudor story and it makes for an extraordinary novel.

I went on to work with the late Dame Hilary on a number of occasions and each time we talked unstoppably about our approach to history and to fiction, the overlaps of the two disciplines. Her contribution to the literary world was outstanding.

Read about another title on Gregory's list.

Wolf Hall made Martha Jean Johnson's list of seven top books about the wives of Henry VIII, Tom Lamont's top five list of books featuring unconventional families, the Amazon Book Review editors' list of twelve of their favorite long books, Mark Skinner's top ten list of books featuring English and British monarchs, Emily Mitchell's list of five of the best historical novels to remind you how strange the past really was, Jody Hadlock's list of nine historical novels featuring real people as main characters, Benjamin Myers's top ten list of mentors in fiction, Jessie Burton's list of eleven of the best books about/with cats, Pete Buttigieg’s ten favorite books list, Ruby Bentall's six best books list, Rula Lenska's six favorite books list, Deborah Cadbury's top ten list of books about royal families, Peter Stanford's top ten list of Protestants in fiction, Melissa Harrsion's ten top depictions of British rain, the Telegraph's list of the 21 greatest television adaptations of novels, BBC Culture's list of the 21st century’s twelve greatest novels, Ester Bloom's ten list of books for fans of the television series House of Cards, Rachel Cantor's list of the ten worst jobs in books, Kathryn Williams's reading list on pride, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of books on baby-watching in Great Britain, Julie Buntin's top ten list of literary kids with deadbeat and/or absent dads, Hermione Norris's 6 best books list, John Mullan's list of ten of the best cardinals in literature, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on dangerous minds and Lev Grossman's list of the top ten fiction books of 2009, and is one of Geraldine Brooks's favorite works of historical fiction; Matt Beynon Rees called it "[s]imply the best historical novel for many, many years."

--Marshal Zeringue