Q&A with Callie Rowland

From my Q&A with Callie Rowland, author of Fields of Asphodel:

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

My favorite thing about the title Fields of Asphodel is its double meaning: Asphodel is the name of the protagonist, and the Fields of Asphodel – where the souls of unremarkable mortals reside in the Ancient Greek underworld – plays a major role in the story. The title suits its genre's convention (think of books like The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and Ariadne by Jennifer Saint), but my publisher initially wanted to swap it for something more pronounceable, which I completely understand. I've met many people who don't know how to pronounce "Asphodel," and I secretly didn't either until I looked it up. We toyed with a few options, but in the end, nothing better prepared readers for a book about the daughter of Hades and Persephone, who, upon being forcibly engaged to the god of death, attempts to escape her mother's fate by kidnapping her husband-to-be – thus...[read on]

Visit Callie Rowland's website.

Q&A with Callie Rowland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top missing-persons novels

Ellis Blake is the pseudonym of Ben Sanders, award-winning author of American Blood and other books in the Marshall Grade series. He lives in New Zealand.

His new novel is No Prisoners.

At CrimeReads the author tagged his top five "missing-persons novels that I’ve read in the past twenty years—thrillers and mysteries that in different ways were both a treat, and a lesson in how to write." One entry on the list:

Tana French’s THE SEARCHER centers on Cal Hooper, formerly of the Chicago PD, now living in rural Ireland in the wake of a marriage separation. He’s an instantly likeable character, bruised but resilient, passing his time with the hard labor of renovating his cottage. But with twenty-five years’ experience as a police detective and a moral compass that does not wobble, he’s well placed to help local kid Trey find his missing brother.

The story has a masterly, unrushed confidence about it. French takes her time filling in Cal’s backstory, showing us the rural Irish landscape and its people: wary, streetwise Trey; Cal’s droll, eccentric neighbor Mart; the local pub and its patrons. But behind the atmosphere of geniality and cheer is a darker quality that French draws inexorably into focus as Cal works his witnesses and his clues. The Searcher is a deliberately slow, stunning burn from one of the very best crime and mystery writers in the world.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Searcher is among Laura Griffin's six suspense novels and twisty thrillers set in small towns.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Rachel Peterson reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Rachel Peterson, author of Killing Sadie.

Her entry begins:

I love to vary my reading between commercial and literary fiction, as well as a healthy dose of historical nonfiction. My only rule as a thriller author is that I avoid reading the genre while in the middle of writing one! During writing breaks, I jump right into the massive thriller stack that has no doubt been accumulating. A few of my latest reads (and yes, these brilliant non-thrillers were read while working on a new manuscript … more on that soon!) include:

Kin by Tayari Jones: This story truly swept me away, and the deep female friendship at the heart of it felt as real and urgent today as it did within the mid-century setting of the novel. I love being transported by historical fiction, and this novel delivered in spades! I finished it when I was halfway through a flight from New York and I spent the last half of the flight just staring out the window thinking about it. It’s such a joy when a book can...[read on]

About Killing Sadie, from the publisher:

Perfect for fans of How to Survive Your Murder and Dead Girls Can’t Tell Secrets, this young adult thriller unspools the truth behind a tragic murder through multiple unreliable narrators who all have secrets to keep.

Here’s what we do know: there was another infamous barn party at the McClain family farm last night, and things went horribly wrong. By the end of the night, there were two dead bodies in the old barn: seventeen-year-old Sadie Cooper and her killer, Mason Vreeland. The murder was heartbreakingly witnessed by Sadie’s twin sister, Jayne, and Sadie died in her arms. Mason was killed by Sadie’s boyfriend, Ben, in an attempt to save Sadie.

Aside from figuring out Mason’s motive, it should be an open and shut case.

But it’s not.

The story unfolds just after the murders, and Jayne, Ben, and Sadie’s best friend, Liz, are telling the cops what transpired at the party and the events leading up to it. But little details don’t match. And those little details start to add up to big discrepancies. But who’s lying, and why?

The shocking truth is revealed in the third act, when the POV shifts to victim Sadie herself, in the days leading up to the party. Witness exactly what happened—and see if you can piece it all together. Because poor Sadie totally missed what was right in front of her.

Visit Rachel Peterson's website.

My Book, The Movie: Killing Sadie.

Writers Read: Rachel Peterson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels that get at the truth of true crime

Claire Fuller is the author most recently of the novel Hunger and Thirst. Her previous novels include Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction; and The Memory of Animals.

[The Page 69 Test: Our Endless Numbered Days]

At Oprah Daily the author tagged five novels "that weave in real crimes and real questions about literature’s most controversial genre." One title on the list:

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

This ambitious literary thriller covers power, privilege, and the #MeToo movement. Bodie Kane is nearly 40 when she takes a short-term job teaching a podcasting course at the New Hampshire boarding school she once attended. Returning brings back memories of the murder of her roommate, Thalia, when they were both 17. Two of Bodie’s students take on Thalia’s murder as a subject for their own podcast, looking at whether the school’s sports technician was wrongfully convicted. Bodie can’t help but fall down her own rabbit hole, re-examining everything she had once accepted about the murder.

Just as with the title, I Have Some Questions for You is addressed throughout to “you,” an alternative perpetrator, but it could of course, also be us, the readers. In doing so, Makkai manages to make us queasily complicit as she examines some of the tropes of true crime, including objectifying the victim, the role of amateur detectives, and an imperfect justice system.

Read about another entry on the list.

I Have Some Questions For You is among Melissa D’Agnese's seven best dark academia books, Allie Tagle-Dokus's eight titles that reckon with the impacts of cancel culture, Jo Firestone's five top laugh-out-loud mysteries, Jacqueline Faber's seven top thrillers about the role of the witness, Kat Davis's top ten feminist crime novels subverting the Dead Girl trope, Elise Juska’s eight best campus novels ever written, Nicole Hackett's six top mysteries about motherhood and crime, Brittany Bunzey's ten books that take you inside their characters’ heads, Anne Burt's four top recent titles with social justice themes, and Heather Darwent's nine best campus thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joy Dixon's "Sexual Heresies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Modern Britain by Joy Dixon.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the new sexual sciences―from anthropological accounts of religion as rooted in ancient fertility cults to psychoanalytic theories that explained religious experience in terms of psychosexual development―characterized religion as closely connected to the sexual. The outcome, as Joy Dixon argues, was a new sense that religion itself could be sexually suspect. One result was an increasing concern to police "sexual heresies" to produce a supposedly normal (healthy, monogamous, and heterosexual) religiosity. The overall effect was a narrowing of the sexual possibilities inside "orthodox" religion and the association of alternative forms of religion with dissident sexualities that continues to shape both religion and secularism today. Drawing on a wide range of materials from diverse elements of British society, this book emphasizes the dynamic relationships between the histories of religion and of sexuality and the historical contingency of the categories we use to understand the relationship between the two.

Learn more about Sexual Heresies at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Sexual Heresies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Arvind Ethan David's "The Great Game"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Arvind Ethan David's The Great Game: A Thriller.

About The Great Game, from the publisher:

An outsider in London investigates a series of brutal murders targeting English aristocrats in a timely and provocative historical novel brimming with intrigue, wit, and rage.

London, 1905: Law student and military veteran Balvinder dev Singh has found an extralegal way to fund his studies. As friend and accomplice to the infamous gentleman thief AJ Raffles, he rubs shoulders with the upper crust―and steals their valuables. That is, until their next mark, an imperialist general, is grotesquely murdered in the library of his Mayfair mansion. Bal and Raffles find themselves implicated in a series of killings that soon attracts the attention of Scotland Yard―and the aging Sherlock Holmes himself.

As Bal works to clear his name, he must hide his checkered past from a new acquaintance, the beautiful Irish violinist Maud Adler. Her fiery views lead Bal to question his own place in the world. But when he comes face-to-face with a plot to strike at the very heart of the British government, he must decide how much he’s willing to risk for his adopted city.

Visit Arvind Ethan David's website.

Q&A with Arvind Ethan David.

Writers Read: Arvind Ethan David.

The Page 69 Test: The Great Game.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the most polarizing mystery & crime books

Jeffrey Davies is a professional introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose work spans the worlds of pop culture, books, music, feminism, and mental health. His work has appeared on HuffPost, CBC Arts, Collider, Slant Magazine, PopMatters, and other places.

At Book Riot Davis tagged six of the most polarizing mystery and crime books ever written. One title on the list:

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Here’s a perfect example of a polarizing mystery book, in that it generated controversy among readers and governments alike. Without spoiling anything, Gone Girl is known for its one big, supposedly mind-blowing plot twist that continues to divide readers (a plot twist that resulted in me declaring my hatred against this book for life and rating it one star on Goodreads circa 2014). And when you tell your friends a book has a mind-blowing plot twist, they’re all going to want to read it. Gone Girl was also adapted into a feature film starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, for which Pike was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Outside the literary community, this book was also banned in at least two U.S. states. Objections included sexually explicit material, LGBTQ references, suicide, drugs, violence, and profanity, to name only a few. Reminder: book bans are bad, and the censorship news cycle takes no days off.

Read about another entry on the list.

Gone Girl made Taylor Hutton's list of five novels with tantalizing anti-heroes, Nadia Khomami's list of five top psychological thrillers by women, Kaley Rohlinger's list of fifteen of the best books with unreliable narrators, Katherine A. Olson's list of five books with righteous female rage, Azma Dar's list of five dark novels that explore the sinister side of marriage, Jonas Jonasson's top ten list of books about revenge, Suzanne Redfearn's list of six novels about women trying to outrun their past, Max Manning's top ten list of psychopathic crime & thriller characters, Steven L. Kent and Nicholas Kaufmann's list of six favorite literary human monsters, Elizabeth Macneal's list of five sympathetic fictional psychopaths, Jo Jakeman's top ten list of revenge novels, Amanda Craig's list of favorite books about modern married life, Sarah Pinborough's top ten list of unreliable narrators, C.A. Higgins's top five list of books with plot twists that flip your perception, Ruth Ware's top ten list of psychological thrillers, Jane Alexander's top ten list of treasure hunts in fiction, Fanny Blake's list of five top books about revenge, Monique Alice's list of six great fictional evil geniuses, Jeff Somers's lists of the top five best worst couples in literature, six books that’ll make you glad you’re single and five books with an outstanding standalone scene that can be read on its own, Lucie Whitehouse's ten top list of psychological suspense novels with marriages at their heart and Kathryn Williams's list of eight of fiction’s craziest unreliable narrators.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Libby Adler's "Governing the Terrain Called Beauty"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Governing the Terrain Called Beauty: The Queerness of Political Economy in Cuba and the United States by Libby Adler.

About the book, from the publisher:

Revolutionary Cuba does not recognize the liberal rights on which LGBTQ advocates in the United States rely. How then, has legal progress occurred for LGTBQ people in Cuba? This book traces the history of LGBTQ identity and law in Cuba and the US from the turn of the twentieth century through the legalization of same-sex marriage. It investigates material and discursive conditions during and after the Cold War and the under-recognized importance of legal consciousness. Applying comparative legal analysis, genealogy, critical social theories, and interviewing, the book produces an encounter between Cuba and the US that directs attention to the millions of constitutive run-ins that occur daily between the global and the local. Rich and insightful, it reveals how law and identity evolve under imperialism, anxious nationalisms, racial stratification, and economic hardship.

Learn more about Governing the Terrain Called Beauty at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Governing the Terrain Called Beauty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Anthony Peckham

From my Q&A with Anthony Peckham, author of The Law of Solitude:

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

I love titles; they’re random attractors and can do a lot of work for you, especially if you’re not a household name. Finding a title that “clicks” is a wonderful feeling. After all, they’re the name of the book and names penetrate deep into the subconscious. When I browse in a bookstore, titles and cover art definitely influence what I reach for.

There should be a clear and dynamic relationship between title and book; in my opinion, you should never reach the end of a book and ask “Why was it called that?”

For my trilogy, I started with a simple descriptive title, Children of the Black Glass, then an evocative title, Winter’s Fire, then, hopefully, a slightly mysterious and alluring title in The Law of Solitude. Each introduces its book and each book justifies its title upon reading.

What's in a name?

A name is your first and best chance to give a character color and...[read on]

Visit Anthony Peckham's website.

Q&A with Anthony Peckham.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five mysteries set in the cut-throat world of literary gatherings

Carol Goodman’s rich and prolific career includes novels such as The Widow’s House and The Night Visitor, winners of the 2018 and 2020 Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in the Hudson Valley, NY.

Goodman’s new novel is Our Marriage Is Murder.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five mysteries set at literary events, conferences, and retreats. One title on the list:

Laura Zigman, The Author Weekend

Frenemies play a prominent role in Laura Zigman’s The Author Weekend, envy apparently being the besetting sin of writers in many of these books. Bestselling mystery writer Faye Wader is inspired to throw her own Author Weekend to compete with her nemesis Abby Schuss. Zigman captures that special rivalry that exists when two writers debut together and continue to chart their successes against each another.

Faye’s assistant Jade, an aspiring writer herself, stirs the pot (and the plot) by suggesting they also invite Abby to the weekend. Complications ensue when Faye’s Number One Fan discovers a discrepancy in Faye’s origin backstory and things go precipitously downhill from there. The meta-commentary on the publishing world is at times brutal. “Nobody loves anyone in this business!” Faye’s agent exclaims. “This is publishing!”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Patrick Sullivan's "Stay Tuned"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Stay Tuned: Listening to the Network Era by Patrick Sullivan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the 1950s, television flooded the American soundscape with not just pictures but sounds, a constant aural stream infiltrating domestic life. In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound not as background noise or auxiliary signal but as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He theorizes how television’s sonic forms―asynchronous audiovisuals, noises, affective rhythms, what he collectively terms “network aurality”―trouble traditional aesthetic theory. Stay Tuned takes up critiques of television sound and repurposes them as evidence of a deeper philosophical discomfort: Namely, that television sound does something to aesthetic categories that they weren’t built to handle. From the laugh track to the cartoon “boinks,” from noises to the jingle, Sullivan reads television sounds not as cultural detritus but as formal interventions―forcing a redefinition of what aesthetics means when form is mass-produced, commercial, and built for syndication. What emerges is not just a new theory and history of television sound but a reimagined account of aesthetic experience itself―expanded, recalibrated, and a little wacky.

Learn more about Stay Tuned at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Stay Tuned.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Peterson's "Killing Sadie," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Killing Sadie by Rachel Peterson.

The entry begins:

As a Midwestern kid who spent her early days dreaming of becoming an actor or author, my mind is constantly buzzing with who would play my characters!

We have quite a few characters to cover for Killing Sadie, so let’s focus on our twins, Sadie and Jayne Cooper. Sadie is our Midwestern golden girl with the personality to match, while Jayne is far edgier. But like most twins, they share an unspoken bond and are two sides of the same coin.

My mind jumps instantly to Isabel Gravitt (Tori Cooper in Your Friends and Neighbors), or Sadie Sink to play our twins! These two actresses have range for days, and can flip from polite to sinister in a second. And who are we kidding, every character in Killing Sadie needs to have this attribute! For their parents,...[read on]

Visit Rachel Peterson's website.

My Book, The Movie: Killing Sadie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jon St. Denis's "Killer Art"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Killer Art: A Novel by Jon St. Denis.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A pair of newbie academics find themselves reluctant sleuths and even more reluctant targets when a fellow professor turns up dead.

When art professor Vika Chen discovers the strangled body of Professor McGuire in a campus art studio, she becomes the prime suspect in a murder connected to an exhibition exposing AI-generated art.

Since local law enforcement fails to find any optional leads, Vika and her partner, journalism professor Sam Worthing, take the investigation into their own hands. Vika, who until recently worked as a curator at MoMA, and Sam, a former crime reporter for the New York Times, find themselves uniquely suited for the job.

Much to the chagrin of the police chief, the pair’s investigation pinpoints multiple suspects who might have felt threatened by the exhibition. But the stakes become deadly when someone tries to run Vika off the road.

As more bodies pile up, Vika and Sam uncover a collage of secrets that someone would kill to keep buried.

Visit Jon St. Denis's website.

The Page 69 Test: Killer Art.

--Marshal Zeringue

Three must-read titles about colonialism

Edna Bonhomme is a critic, journalist, and historian of science. She is the author of A History of the World in Six Plagues (shortlisted for Best Science Book in Austria) and co-editor of After Sex. Her latest book is Tending To Our Wounds: A Diasporic Memoir. Bonhomme is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and more. Most recently, she was a 2026 finalist for the 2026 Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Scientific American, and elsewhere. She has been based in Berlin since 2017.

At Book Riot Bonhomme tagged three books on colonialism that "are not only case studies of the psychological cost of colonialism but also testaments that the colonized are not passive victims." One title on the list:

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

Fanon’s text is a revolutionary pamphlet and a psychiatrist’s diagnosis of French colonialism in Algeria, and it also makes a firm case that colonialism can psychologically impair the minds of colonizers. Wretched of the Earth has inspired anti-colonial movements, largely for its thorough analysis of imperial violence and for the ways that class is produced in the colonial context. This is a polemical text precisely because of imperialism’s attempts to degrade and discredit the colonized. Nevertheless, Fanon shows that freedom is possible when people resist through collective struggle and socialism.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Arvind Ethan David reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Arvind Ethan David, author of The Great Game: A Thriller.

His entry begins:

I tend to read three or four things at once, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and consume some as audiobooks and others as print.

At the moment, like everybody else, I’m reading The Odyssey, but I’m simultaneously inhaling two different translations. I’m reading the print edition of Emily Wilson’s version whilst listening to Daniel Mendelsohn’s. The combination is so instructive. Wilson’s iambic pentameter is urgent, terse, resonant, modern, powerful, and really drives the story forward. Mendelsohn’s more prosaic rendition lacks music (unusually for him, as he is a usually graceful writer), but he makes up for it with enormous precision and detail that gives you the full context and meaning of every line. The fact that I’m reading both means...[read on]

About The Great Game, from the publisher:

An outsider in London investigates a series of brutal murders targeting English aristocrats in a timely and provocative historical novel brimming with intrigue, wit, and rage.

London, 1905: Law student and military veteran Balvinder dev Singh has found an extralegal way to fund his studies. As friend and accomplice to the infamous gentleman thief AJ Raffles, he rubs shoulders with the upper crust―and steals their valuables. That is, until their next mark, an imperialist general, is grotesquely murdered in the library of his Mayfair mansion. Bal and Raffles find themselves implicated in a series of killings that soon attracts the attention of Scotland Yard―and the aging Sherlock Holmes himself.

As Bal works to clear his name, he must hide his checkered past from a new acquaintance, the beautiful Irish violinist Maud Adler. Her fiery views lead Bal to question his own place in the world. But when he comes face-to-face with a plot to strike at the very heart of the British government, he must decide how much he’s willing to risk for his adopted city.

Visit Arvind Ethan David's website.

Q&A with Arvind Ethan David.

Writers Read: Arvind Ethan David.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Emma Taylor's "An Elite Education"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: An Elite Education: How Privilege Is Produced in a Private School by Emma Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of the making of privilege at one of Britain’s top boys’ schools

Alumni of Britain’s elite schools are consistently overrepresented in positions of power and influence. It is no surprise, then, that elite schools play a pivotal role in reproducing inequality. In An Elite Education, Emma Taylor draws on years of immersive ethnographic research and teaching experience at one of Britain’s leading private boys’ schools to highlight how these institutions cultivate the dispositions that propel students into elite universities and professions.

Taylor finds that elite schools provide a forgiving, flexible and exclusive training ground, enabling students to push boundaries, bend rules and negotiate with those in authority. She argues that this ability to navigate elite spaces with confidence—which she conceptualises as “audacity”—is a carefully cultivated form of privilege that is frequently mistaken for merit. Behind the formal façade of architecture, traditions and rituals lies a messy web of everyday interactions through which students learn to assert themselves without fear of consequence.

An Elite Education ultimately calls for a deeper interrogation of the taken-for-granted dispositions that continue to shape access to opportunity in Britain.

Visit Emma Taylor's website.

The Page 99 Test: An Elite Education.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the best books for "Black Mirror" fans

One title on Tertulia's list of fifteen books "for every Black Mirror fan to satisfy their techno-dystopian cravings:"

Infomocracy: Book One of the Centenal Cycle by Malka Older

In a world where an influential search engine monopoly has pushed humanity to transition away from large warring states to a global network of micro-democracies, an upcoming election sparks a battle for power and exposes the dark underbelly of this alluring new system.

Read about another entry on the list.

Infomocracy is among Book Riot's best science fiction books of the century (so far), Rob Hart's five top books about humans making a mess of things, Jeff Somers's eighteen SFF novels that get serious about economics and fifty science fiction essentials written by women, Emily Wenstrom's eight science fiction novels that explore the human dilemma, Joel Cunningham's twelve science fiction & fantasy books for the post-truth era, and Sam Reader's six most intriguing political systems in fantasy and science fiction.

The Page 69 Test: Infomocracy.

Also see Addison Rizer's six top thrillers for fans of Black Mirror.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Arvind Ethan David

From my Q&A with Arvind Ethan David, author of The Great Game: A Thriller:

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

Titles are hard, man, really hard. The title was literally the last thing that got done on this book, and it is not the title I started with. The book starts as a historical murder mystery. It escalates into a conspiracy thriller and then gradually evolves into a rather pointed examination of empire and imperialism.

Oh, and amongst its major characters are an aging Sherlock Holmes and a young Winston Churchill. It was a challenge to get all of that in a title.

Other contenders included The Dread and the Envy, which I thought he had a certain Imperial cadence, but was dismissed for being too niche. For a while, I was very keen on The Good Colonial, which felt reminiscent of Graham Greene and John le Carré, in whose tradition I would be delighted to sit. Ultimately, The Great Game won because it conjures a certain Sherlockian tone whilst also explicitly referencing the historical spy craft and statecraft between the great imperial powers in the 19th century (while also paying tribute to Rudyard Kipling and his book about another spy caught between two cultures, Kim).

Now that we have it, it feels like...[read on]

Visit Arvind Ethan David's website.

Q&A with Arvind Ethan David.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jason Baehr's "Inquiry and Agency"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Inquiry and Agency: A Theory of Intellectual Virtues and Vices by Jason Baehr.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Inquiry and Agency, Jason Baehr develops a systematic account of the nature, structure, and evaluative status of intellectual virtues and vices. Drawing on a theory of moral virtue by Robert Adams (2006), Baehr argues that intellectual virtues like curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual courage are ways of "excellently being for epistemic goods" that reflect favorably on who we are as persons, and that intellectual vices like dogmatism, narrow-mindedness, and intellectual arrogance are ways of falling short of this standard that contribute negatively to our personal worth. Inquiry and Agency is the most in-depth and systematic treatment of intellectual virtues and vices since Linda Zagzebski's pioneering work Virtues of the Mind (1996). While advancing several debates in virtue epistemology, it proposes a model of intellectual virtues and vices that will be accessible to non-experts and useful to researchers in other disciplines. Inquiry and Agency is the product of decades of reflection by a leading virtue epistemologist. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the characterological dimensions of the life of the mind.

Visit Jason Baehr's website.

The Page 99 Test: Inquiry and Agency.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books for fans of "The Odyssey"

At People magazine Janey Wetzel and Lizz Schumer tagged ten Greek mythology retellings and other books to read after seeing The Odyssey. One title on the list:

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Miller’s blockbuster Trojan War retelling is “a story that will stick with you even after you’ve put the book down.”

Read about another book on the list.

The Song of Achilles is among Book Riot's best historical fiction books of the century so far, Charley Burlock and Bethanne Patrick's 25 best historical fiction books of all time, Tobias Madden's seven top books that take you places, Costa B. Pappas's eleven books that are contemporary retellings of classic titles, Bethanne Patrick's twenty-five best historical fiction books of all time, Mark Skinner's nineteen top Greek myth retellings, Alexia Casale's top eight titles sparked by the authors' work life, Allison Epstein's eight queer historical fiction books set around the world, Phong Nguyen's seven titles that live halfway between history & myth, The Center for Fiction's 200 books that shaped two centuries of literature, Sara Stewart's six best books and Nicole Hill's fourteen characters who should have lived.

My Book, The Movie: The Song of Achilles.

Also see Tanaz Bhathena's nine feminist myth and fairytale retellings to read after watching Christopher Nolan’s big screen adaptation of The Odyssey, Paula Munier's eight top works informed by The Odyssey, and Andrew Welsh-Huggins's five novels drawing inspiration from the Odyssey.

--Marshal Zeringue