Nicholas George's "A Lethal Walk in Lakeland," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland by Nicholas George.

The entry begins:

Of course, as an author, I dream of my Walk Through England mystery series becoming a movie or TV series. The series is set mostly outdoors, so it is very visual.

My main character, Rick "Chase" Chasen, is an older (70+) man, heavy-set, with a full beard. The celebrity I envision when I think of him is James Galway, the flutist, but not an actor. Perhaps John Goodman might be a good actor choice, but he'd need to grow a beard!

Chase's close friend is Billie, also in that age range. While writing, I envisioned...[read on]

Visit Nicholas George's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Lethal Walk in Lakeland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Bethany Hughes's "Redface"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity by Bethany Hughes.

About the book, from the publisher:

Considers the character of the “Stage Indian” in American theater and its racial and political impact

Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity.

Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.

Learn more about Redface at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Redface.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top wintery horror novels

Claudia Guthrie is a writer covering culture, entertainment, and lifestyle content. Her work has appeared in ELLE, The Muse, Food52, and more. Originally from Kansas City, she now resides in Denver, where you can find her reading the newest thriller or knitting sweaters for her cats.

At Electric Lit Guthrie tagged ten wintery horror novels that will chill you to the bone, including:

The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon

The Winter People is told in two entwined stories. The first of Sara, a grieving mother in 1908 who would do anything to see her dead daughter again. The second of Ruthie, a present-day teenager whose mom mysteriously vanishes one January night.

As Ruthie searches for her mother, she unearths long-buried secrets and begins wondering if there’s any truth to the rumors that the dead haunt the woods around their small town.

Read about another entry on the list.

Winter People is among Melissa Albert's five dark thrillers to soothe your Valentine’s Day hangover.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Thomas Perry's "Pro Bono"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Pro Bono: A Novel by Thomas Perry.

About the book, from the publisher:

A tenacious attorney grapples with a dangerous group of thieves in this new thriller from the author of The Old Man.

Charles Warren, Los Angeles attorney, has dedicated his career to aiding people in financial straits. He is particularly skilled at the art of recovering assets that have been embezzled or hidden. In his newest case, helping a beautiful young widow find the money missing from her late husband’s investment accounts, Charlie recognizes a familiar scheme―one that echoes the con job that targeted his own widowed mother many years before, and that led him, as a teenager, to commit a crime of retribution that still weighs on his conscience.

Charlie can’t get the present case out of his mind, but within hours of starting his investigation, he is followed, shot at, and has his briefcase stolen. It’s clear that someone doesn’t want him following the trail of the missing money but, as Charlie continues to pursue answers, he quickly becomes too entangled in the web of fraud, betrayal, and career criminals surrounding the theft to escape its deadly snare.

A nail-biting tale of conspiracy and pursuit from Thomas Perry, “a dominating force in the world of contemporary suspense thrillers” (Publishers Weekly), Pro Bono will have readers looking over their shoulders as constantly as they keep turning pages.

Visit Thomas Perry's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Silence.

The Page 99 Test: Nightlife.

The Page 69/99 Test: Fidelity.

The Page 69/99 Test: Runner.

The Page 69 Test: Strip.

The Page 69 Test: The Informant.

The Page 69 Test: The Boyfriend.

The Page 69 Test: A String of Beads.

The Page 69 Test: Forty Thieves.

The Page 69 Test: The Old Man.

The Page 69 Test: The Bomb Maker.

The Page 69 Test: The Burglar.

The Page 69 Test: A Small Town.

Writers Read: Thomas Perry (December 2019).

Q&A with Thomas Perry.

The Page 69 Test: Eddie's Boy.

The Page 69 Test: The Left-Handed Twin.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Book.

The Page 69 Test: Hero.

The Page 69 Test: Pro Bono.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas M. Jamison's "The Pacific's New Navies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Pacific's New Navies: An Ocean, its Wars, and the Making of US Sea Power by Thomas M. Jamison.

About the book, from the publisher:

The initial creation of the United States' ocean-going battlefleet – otherwise known as the 'New Navy' – was a result of the naval wars and arms races around the Pacific during the late-nineteenth century. Using a transnational methodology, Thomas Jamison spotlights how US Civil War-era innovations catalyzed naval development in the Pacific World, creating a sense that the US Navy was falling behind regional competitors. As the industrializing 'newly-made navies' of Chile, Peru, Japan, and China raced against each other, Pacific dynamism motivated investments in the US 'New Navy as a matter of security and civilizational prestige. In this provocative exploration into the making of modern US navalism, Jamison provides an analysis of competitive naval build-ups in the Pacific, of the interactions between peoples, ideas, and practices within it, and ultimately the emergence of the US as a major power.

Learn more about The Pacific's New Navies at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Pacific's New Navies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books where bad things happen in beautiful places

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television writer and producer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. Most recently, she served as writer and co–executive producer on the Golden Globe–nominated ABC series Alaska Daily, created by Oscar-winning writer Tom McCarthy and starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Chwialkowska holds a BA in literature from Yale.

The Ends of Things is her first novel.

At The Nerd Daily Chwialkowska tagged "five delicious mysteries and thrillers to feed our obsession with bad things happening in beautiful places." One title on the list:

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

When someone is found dead at an elementary school fundraiser in the scenic Northern Beaches of Sydney, Australia, suspects and motives abound. A thrilling mystery told in multiple perspectives that centers on three mothers – Celeste, Jane, and Madeline – and their families and friends, in the leadup to the night of the murder.

Read about another entry on the list.

Big Little Lies is among Jamie Day's seven crime books featuring special events going off the rails, Ashley Audrain’s six great thrillers featuring manipulative mom-friends, Nicole Hackett's six top mysteries about motherhood & crime, Janice Hallett's five notable gripping mysteries set in small towns, Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman's six riveting titles of ultra-competitive parents, Pamela Crane's five novels featuring parenting gone wild, Michelle Frances's eight top workplace thrillers, and Jeff Somers's ten novels that teach you something about marriage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Samrat Upadhyay

From my Q&A with Samrat Upadhyay, author of Darkmotherland:

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

I settled on the title Darkmotherland fairly early in the process, and the title didn’t change even though the novel went through numerous drafts.

This is not my standard writing process. Normally, I have a working title that changes later when I have a firmer sense of what the novel is about. But in Darkmotherland, the name of this dystopia came to me early on, and it felt very right. It’s a combination of Darkmother, a prophetic figure in the novel, and Motherland, which evokes old-timey patriotism and nationalism.

Darkmotherland is not only a place but also a character, a mythical reverse-Shangrila. It holds the major characters in a grip they cannot escape.

What's in a name?

Character names are important to me either in their symbolism or...[read on]

Visit Samrat Upadhyay's website.

Writers Read: Samrat Upadhyay (August 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Buddha’s Orphans.

The Page 69 Test: Darkmotherland.

Q&A with Samrat Upadhyay.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lucian Staiano-Daniels's "The War People"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War by Lucian Staiano-Daniels.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book uses the transnational story of a single regiment to examine how ordinary soldiers, military women, and officers negotiated their lives within the chaos and uncertainty of the seventeenth century. Raised in Saxony by Wolf von Mansfeld in spring 1625 in the service of the King of Spain, the Mansfeld Regiment fought for one and a half years in northern Italy before collapsing, leaving behind a trail of dead civilians, murder, internal lawsuits…and copious amounts of paperwork. Their story reveals the intricate social world of seventeenth-century mercenaries and how this influenced how they lived and fought. Through this rich microhistorical case study, Lucian Staiano-Daniels sheds new light on key seventeenth-century developments like the military revolution and the fiscal-military state, which is supported by statistical analysis drawn from hundreds of records from the Thirty Years War. This pathbreaking book unifies the study of war and conflict with social history.

Learn more about The War People at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The War People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books to make you rethink AI

Erika Swyler is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed novels Light From Other Stars and The Book of Speculation.

Her new novel is We Lived on the Horizon.

Swyler lives on Long Island, N.Y. with her husband and a mischievous house rabbit.

At People magazine the author tagged ten favorite books examining the impact of artificial intelligence on our lives and humanity. One title on the list;

The Unseen World by Liz Moore

Ada is the daughter of David Sebelius, a computer scientist working on an early chatbot, ELIXIR, loosely modeled on MIT’s Eliza. Through Ada and David’s relationship, and Ada’s with ELIXIR, Moore teases out the ways that all tech, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, is the sum of those who make it. It’s an extraordinary stunner about time, family, aging and memory, as tender as it is fascinating, and builds to an ending that still brings me to tears.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Samrat Upadhyay's "Darkmotherland"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay.

About the book, from the publisher:

An epic tale of love and political violence set in earthquake-ravaged Darkmotherland, a dystopian reimagining of Nepal, from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu

In Darkmotherland, Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay has created a novel of infinite embrace—filled with lovers and widows, dictators and dissidents, paupers, fundamentalists, and a genderqueer power player with her eyes on the throne—in an earthquake-ravaged dystopian reimagining of Nepal.

At its heart are two intertwining narratives: one of Kranti, a revolutionary’s daughter who marries into a plutocratic dynasty and becomes ensnared in the family’s politics. And then there is the tale of Darkmotherland’s new dictator and his mistress, Rozy, who undergoes radical body changes and grows into a figure of immense power.

Darkmotherland is a romp through the vast space of a globalized universe where personal ambitions are inextricably tied to political fortunes, where individual identities are shaped by family pressures and social reins, and where the East connects to and collides with the West in brilliant and unsettling ways.

Visit Samrat Upadhyay's website.

Writers Read: Samrat Upadhyay (August 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Buddha’s Orphans.

The Page 69 Test: Darkmotherland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Julie Stone Peters's "Law as Performance"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe by Julie Stone Peters.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, —as it still does today.

Learn more about Law as Performance at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Law as Performance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five compelling mystery romances

Lynn Slaughter is addicted to the arts, chocolate, and her husband’s cooking. Following a long career as a professional dancer and dance educator, she earned her MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. She’s the author of four young adult novels: Leisha's Song, an Agatha Nominee for Best Mystery Novel in the MG/YA category, a Moonbeam Children's Book Awards' Bronze Medalist, and a recipient of the Silver Falchion Award and the Imadjinn Award for best young adult novel; It Should Have Been You, a Silver Falchion Finalist; While I Danced an EPIC finalist; and Deadly Setup, recipient of the NYC Big Book Award, the Maincrest Media Book Award, the Book Excellence Award, as well as a Moonbeam Silver Medalist and a finalist for the M&M Chanticleer International Book Awards, the Silver Falchion, and Imadjinn Awards. Her first adult mystery, Missed Cue, received the Independent Press Award for Distinguished Favorite in the mystery category.

Slaughter's latest novel is Missing Mom.

At CrimeReads she tagged five favorite mystery romances, including:

Bright Objects by Ruby Todd

It’s been more than two years since Sylvia Knight lost her husband in a horrific hit-and-run car accident, and she remains determined to identify his killer and bring him to justice. Still lost in a haze of grief, she meets the enigmatic Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet that’s about to become visible to the public. The attraction between the two is immediate, but Sylvia feels horribly guilty that she is betraying her dead husband by embracing a new love, and Theo’s reticence about his past puzzles her.

Meantime, Sylvia’s concerned about her mother-in-law who seems dangerously caught up in the cult-like following of a local meditation teacher, Joseph Evans. The charismatic Evans turns out to be even more dangerous than Sylvia could have imagined.

The shocking twist at the end of this tale speaks to the power of forgiveness and the healing renewal of love. If your reading tastes run more toward the literary, you’ll be swept up into Ruby Todd’s exquisite prose in her debut novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Sam Wiebe reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Sam Wiebe, author of Ocean Drive: A Novel.

His entry begins:

My last read of 2024 was Nicholas Nickleby, the novel Dickens started in the middle of writing Oliver Twist. It’s better (and less antisemitic) than Twist, but not as compelling as his latter masterpieces. What’s remarkable is that two years after Nickleby came out, the corrupt and brutal ‘Yorkshire schools’ the book takes aim against were nearly all out of business. Amazing to think...[read on]

About Ocean Drive, from the publisher:

A paroled killer and a small-town cop find themselves on a collision course when the murder-by-arson of a college student sparks off gang violence along the forty-ninth parallel.

His first day out of prison, paroled killer Cameron Shaw meets with a mysterious lawyer who offers him a small fortune to infiltrate the League of Nations crime syndicate. Shaw turns her down, intending to go straight. But with no job, no family and no prospects, he’s soon compelled to take her offer.

In the small Pacific Northwest town of White Rock, a body is pulled from a burning house. Staff Sgt. Meghan Quick identifies the victim as grad student Alexa Reed. Alexa’s behavior during her last few days strikes Quick as bizarre. Why did she remove the for-sale sign from her parents’ house, and why was she trying to meet with the League of Nations?

As Quick tries to solve Alexa’s homicide, Shaw moves deeper into the League’s cross-border drug trade.

With the threat of a gang war looming, and long-buried secrets coming to light, Quick must find Alexa’s killer, while rescuing Shaw from the brutal gang violence that threatens the future of White Rock.

Visit Sam Wiebe's website.

My Book, The Movie: Invisible Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Invisible Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Cut You Down.

Q&A with Sam Wiebe.

The Page 69 Test: Hell and Gone.

Writers Read: Sam Wiebe (March 2022).

My Book, The Movie: Hell and Gone.

My Book, The Movie: Sunset and Jericho.

Writers Read: Sam Wiebe (April 2023).

The Page 69 Test: Sunset and Jericho.

The Page 69 Test: Ocean Drive.

My Book, The Movie: Ocean Drive.

Writers Read: Sam Wiebe.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Todd McGowan's "Pure Excess"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity by Todd McGowan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Todd McGowan forges a new theory of capitalism as a system based on the production of more than what we need: pure excess. He argues that the promise of more―more wealth, more enjoyment, more opportunity, without requiring any sacrifice―is the essence of capitalism. Previous socioeconomic systems set up some form of the social good as their focus. Capitalism, however, represents a revolutionary turn away from the good and the useful toward excessive growth, which now threatens the habitability of the planet.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, McGowan shows how the production of commodities explains the role of excess in the workings of capitalism. Capitalism and the commodity ensnare us with the image of the constant fulfillment of our desires―the seductive but unattainable promise of satisfying a longing that has no end. To challenge this system, McGowan turns to art, arguing that it can expose the psychological mechanisms that perpetuate capitalist society and reveal the need for limits. Featuring lively writing and engaging examples from film, literature, and popular culture, Pure Excess uncovers the hidden logic of capitalism―and helps us envision a noncapitalist life in a noncapitalist society.

Learn more about Pure Excess at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Capitalism and Desire.

The Page 99 Test: Pure Excess.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best classic retellings

At Fully Booked Meaghan Mains tagged ten top classic retellings, including:

Ten by Gretchen McNeil

Inspired by: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Do you have a love of classic retellings as well as murder mysteries? Does an Agatha Christie classic tickle your fancy? Then this fresh take of her masterpiece And Then There Were None is for you. When friends Meg & Minnie are invited to an extremely exclusive house party on the secluded Henry Island, they think they’re in for the time of their lives.

They have no idea that it’ll actually be the fight for their lives. With a storm raging and the guests being picked off one by one, they’ll need to unmask the killer, before they fall prey to the same fate as the other partygoers. If this sounds at all familiar, Lifetime made a loosely based film adaptation of the novel back in 2017.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Megan Collins's "Cross My Heart"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Cross My Heart: A Novel by Megan Collins.

About the book, from the publisher:

She has his wife’s heart; the one she wants is his. The author of The Family Plot brings her signature “taut, emotionally charged, and propulsive” (Jeneva Rose, New York Times bestselling author) prose to a twisty novel about a heart transplant patient who becomes romantically obsessed with her donor’s husband.

Rosie Lachlan wants nothing more than to find The One.

A year after she was dumped in her wedding dress, she’s working at her parents’ bridal salon, anxious for a happy ending that can’t come soon enough. After receiving a life-saving heart transplant, Rosie knows her health is precious and precarious. She suspects her heart donor is Daphne Thorne, the wife of local celebrity author Morgan Thorne, who she begins messaging via an anonymous service called DonorConnect, ostensibly to learn more about Daphne. But Rosie has a secret: She’s convinced that now that she has his wife’s heart, she and Morgan are meant to be together.

As she and Morgan correspond, the pretense of avoiding personal details soon disappears, even if Rosie’s keeping some cards close to her chest. But as she digs deeper into Morgan’s previous marriage, she discovers disturbing rumors about the man she’s falling for. Could Morgan have had something to do with his late wife’s death? And can Rosie’s heart sustain another break—or is she next?

Visit Megan Collins's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Family Plot.

The Page 69 Test: Thicker Than Water.

The Page 69 Test: Cross My Heart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mark Povich's "Rules to Infinity"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Rules to Infinity: The Normative Role of Mathematics in Scientific Explanation by Mark Povich.

About the book, from the publisher:

One of the central aims of science is to provide explanations of natural phenomena. What role does mathematics play in achieving this aim? How does mathematics contribute to the explanatory power of science? Rules to Infinity defends the thesis that mathematics contributes to the explanatory power of science by expressing conceptual rules that allow for the transformation of empirical descriptions. It claims that mathematics should not be thought of as describing, in any substantive sense, an abstract realm of eternal mathematical objects, as traditional Platonists have thought.

This view, which Mark Povich calls "mathematical normativism," is updated with contemporary philosophical tools, which are used to form the argument that normativism is compatible with mainstream semantic theory. This allows the normativist to accept that there are mathematical truths, while resisting the Platonistic idea that there exist abstract mathematical objects that explain such truths. There is a distinction between scientific explanations that are in some sense distinctively mathematical--those that explain natural phenomena in some uniquely mathematical way--and those that are only standardly mathematical, and Povich defends a particular account of this distinction.

Rules to Infinity compares normativism to other prominent views in the philosophy of mathematics, such as neo-Fregeanism, fictionalism, conventionalism, and structuralism, and offers an entry point into debates at the forefront of philosophy of science and mathematics as it defends its novel positions.

Visit Mark Povich's website. Rules to Infinity is an open access title: read it here.

The Page 99 Test: Rules to Infinity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top literary adaptations coming to TV & film in 2025

Jalen Giovanni Jones is a Black and Filipino writer from Los Angeles, and is an editorial intern at Electric Literature. His work has been supported by the Tin House Workshop, the Lambda Literary Retreat, and ART PAPERS. Jalen’s work has won the David Madden MFA Award, and has been published by The Offing. He is the Assistant Editor of the New Delta Review, an MFA candidate in Louisiana State University’s Creative Writing Program, and is working on a collection of short stories and a novel.

At Electric Lit Jones tagged ten of the most anticipated literary adaptations coming to TV and film in 2025. One title on the list:

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

In Edward Ashton’s Mickey7, space colonist Mickey Barnes is an Expendable—meaning he is a disposable employee, sent on fatal missions that will likely end in death. But each time he dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. While on a mission to colonize Niflheim, misplaced assumptions lead to the accidental creation of two Mickeys at once. The novel’s film adaptation, Mickey17, is scheduled for a theatrical release by Warner Bros. Pictures on April 18. The science fiction black comedy was produced, written, and directed by Parasite-director Bong Joon-ho, and stars Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Mickey7.

The Page 69 Test: Antimatter Blues.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Heather O'Neill

From my Q&A with Heather O'Neill, author of The Capital of Dreams: A Novel:

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

My novel is about a fictional country that gets its borders after World War 1. They invest in the arts, and hold it above everything else. They believe they don’t need to invest in an army. They will be protected by the West should they be attacked. And then at the height of their golden era, the Enemy comes to wipe them off the face of the earth.

The Capital of the country is so important in the novel. Sofia, a fourteen-year-old girl, is entrusted with getting her mother’s manuscript out of the country, so the culture can be saved.

I liked the idea of having a sophisticated girl from the cultural elite, having to make her way through the war-torn countryside. I wanted to see how the philosophy of The Capital made sense to her once she was out of it. Can a clarinet tune stop a war? Can a poem save a people? I have always believed in the power of art.

I wanted to show why artists and children are targeted by genocidal invaders. And how they are...[read on]

Follow Heather O’Neill on Instagram.

Q&A with Heather O'Neill.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Gitanjali Surendran's "Democracy's Dhamma"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Democracy's Dhamma: Buddhism in the Making of Modern India, c. 1890–1956 by Gitanjali Surendran.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1956, B. R. Ambedkar publicly converted to Buddhism raising questions about his turn from constitutionalism to religion. The answer lies in Buddhism itself. In the late colonial era, the struggle to produce an appropriate Buddhism for a nation-in-the-making reveals a secret history foundational to modern India. Thinkers, activists, reformers, pilgrims, and monks from around South, Southeast and East Asia discussed universalism, nationalism, modernity, democracy, and caste radicalism and advocated an Indian return to Buddhism and the Buddha. This book traces this genealogy through the Buddhist itineraries and political projects of figures like Anagarika Dharmapala, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vinayak D. Savarkar, Rahul Sankrityayan and Ambedkar, to reveal how Buddhism emerged as democracy's dhamma, the religion of democracy.

Learn more about Democracy's Dhamma at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Democracy's Dhamma.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books that tell complex, hopeful stories about migration

An award-winning teacher, scholar, and documentary film producer, Stanton E.F. Wortham is Charles Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College. A linguistic anthropologist and educational ethnographer with a particular expertise in how identities develop in human interactions, Wortham has conducted research spanning education, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. He is the author or editor of ten books and more than 100 articles and chapters that cover a range of topics including linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, learning identity, and education in the new Latino diaspora.

Wortham's newest book is Migration Narratives: Diverging Stories in Schools, Churches, and Civic Institutions.

At Shepherd the author tagged five of the best books that tell complex, hopeful stories about migration. One title on the list:

Children of the Revolution by Laura J. Enríquez

I love the multigenerational stories that this book tells, tracing the children and grandchildren of the protagonists across generations.

I appreciate how the author does not flinch from describing challenges while also attending to the hope and persistence of the migrant women from Nicaragua. I also love how the story moves toward the possibilities that are open for future generations.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue