Derek Milman's "Scream All Night," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Scream All Night by Derek Milman.

The entry begins:

So this is actually something happening with Scream All Night, and I can't discuss specifics just yet, but I write without ever seeing faces or actors. And I'm grateful for that, so I can focus on their inner lives. That said, I did see a film called Hereditary with some friends, and everyone agreed the boy in that movie, played by Alex Wolff, would be a great Dario; he has the right intensity and the brooding dark looks, and the right edge to his humor and his speech. The same could be said of...[read on]

Visit Derek Milman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Scream All Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Alex White reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Alex White, author of A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe.

His entry begins:

At this moment, I'm re-reading Heather Kaczynski's Dare Mighty Things, the story of Cassandra Gupta, a young NASA intern that gets selected for humanity's first interstellar mission. They take her to a compound along with twenty-five other college-age kids and have them compete in a series of mysterious challenges. The administrators promptly begin playing mind games with the participants, eliminating them one by one, until only a few remain.

I enjoy this work for Kaczynski's lightning-quick prose and...[read on]

About A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, from the publisher:

Furious and fun, the first book in this bold, new science fiction adventure series follows a crew of outcasts as they try to find a legendary ship that just might be the key to saving themselves-and the universe.

Boots Elsworth was a famous treasure hunter in another life, but now she’s washed up. She makes her meager living faking salvage legends and selling them to the highest bidder, but this time she got something real–the story of the Harrow, a famous warship, capable of untold destruction.

Nilah Brio is the top driver in the Pan Galactic Racing Federation and the darling of the racing world–until she witnesses Mother murder a fellow racer. Framed for the murder and on the hunt to clear her name, Nilah has only one lead: the killer also hunts Boots.

On the wrong side of the law, the two women board a smuggler’s ship that will take them on a quest for fame, for riches, and for justice.

Visit Alex White's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe.

The Page 69 Test: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe.

Writers Read: Alex White.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Randi Hutter Epstein's "Aroused"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything by Randi Hutter Epstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

A guided tour through the strange science of hormones and the age-old quest to control them.

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of these potent chemicals from a basement filled with jarred nineteenth-century brains to a twenty-first-century hormone clinic in Los Angeles.

Brimming with fascinating anecdotes, illuminating new medical research, and humorous details, Aroused introduces the leading scientists who made life-changing discoveries about the hormone imbalances that ail us, as well as the charlatans who used those discoveries to peddle false remedies. Epstein exposes the humanity at the heart of hormone science with her rich cast of characters, including a 1920s doctor promoting vasectomies as a way to boost libido, a female medical student who discovered a pregnancy hormone in the 1940s, and a mother who collected pituitaries, a brain gland, from cadavers as a source of growth hormone to treat her son. Along the way, Epstein explores the functions of hormones such as leptin, oxytocin, estrogen, and testosterone, demystifying the science of endocrinology.

A fascinating look at the history and science of some of medicine’s most important discoveries, Aroused reveals the shocking history of hormones through the back rooms, basements, and labs where endocrinology began.

Visit Randi Hutter Epstein's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Randi Hutter Epstein, Ellie and Dexter.

The Page 99 Test: Aroused.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books based on true crimes

Megan Abbott's new novel is Give Me Your Hand. One of her six favorite books based on true crimes, as shared at The Week magazine:

Legs by William Kennedy

The master novelist of the demimonde takes on the violent death and gaudy life of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond in this dazzling tale. Particular attention is devoted to the wild and woolly love triangle involving Legs, his wife, and his showgirl mistress. "How boring it is," the narrator opines, "not to fire machine guns."

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Scott Reintgen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Scott Reintgen, author of Nyxia Unleashed.

His entry begins:

I've actually just returned from the beach and thankfully I got a lot of reading done. The first book I tackled was The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin. It's a breathtaking and brutal world that centers around the concept of fifth seasons-- or regular apocalyptic events that threaten to wipe out humanity. Jemisin's world building is transcendent. I'm...[read on]

About Nyxia Unleashed, from the publisher:

Emmett Atwater thought Babel’s game sounded easy. Get points. Get paid. Go home. But it didn’t take long for him to learn that Babel’s competition was full of broken promises, none darker or more damaging than the last one.

Now Emmett and the rest of the Genesis spaceship survivors must rally and forge their own path through a new world. Their mission from Babel is simple: extract nyxia, the most valuable material in the universe, and play nice with the indigenous Adamite population.

But Emmett and the others quickly realize they are caught between two powerful forces-Babel and the Adamites-with clashing desires. Will the Genesis team make it out alive before it’s too late?

Visit Scott Reintgen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Nyxia.

Writers Read: Scott Reintgen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Rob Hart's "Potter's Field"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Potter's Field by Rob Hart.

About the book, from the publisher:

The final book in Rob Hart's acclaimed Ash McKenna series shows that Ash can go home again...but it might cost him everything.

Amateur private investigator Ash McKenna is home. After more than a year on the road he's ready to face the demons he ran away from in New York City. And he’s decided what he wants to do with his life: Become a private investigator, for real. Licensed and everything. No more working as a thug for hire. But within moments of stepping off the plane, Ginny Tonic, the drag queen crime lord who once employed him―and then tried to have him killed―asks to see him.

One of her newest drag queen soldiers has gone missing, and Ginny suspects she’s been ensnared by the burgeoning heroin scene on Staten Island. Ginny wants Ash to find her. Because he’s the best, and because he knows Staten Island, his home borough. Ash is hesitant―but Ginny’s offer of $10,000 is enough to get him on his feet. And the thought of a lost kid and a bereft family is too much for him to bear.

He accepts, and quickly learns there’s something much bigger at play. Some very dangerous people are vying for control of the heroin trade on Staten Island, which is recording the highest rate of overdose deaths in the city. As Ash navigates deadly terrain, he find his most dangerous adversary might be his own past. Because those demons he ran away from have been waiting for him to come back.

Visit Rob Hart's website.

My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: Potter's Field.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten fantasy novels starring books, readers, & amazing libraries

At Unbound Worlds Matt Staggs tagged ten "fantasy novels that bibliophiles will love," including:

The Lost Plot
Genevieve Cogman

Scattered across the multiverse are infinite editions of every book you’ve ever read, each subtly different from the other. Finding them is the job of the daring librarians of the Invisible Library. In The Lost Plot, Librarian Irene and her assistant Kai are dispatched to Prohibition-era New York where they’re caught in the crossfire of warring mobsters, dragons, and Fair Folk.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: John M. Coggeshall's "Liberia, South Carolina"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community by John M. Coggeshall.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Owens family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows members of a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community’s 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.

Learn more about Liberia, South Carolina at The University of North Carolina Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Liberia, South Carolina.

The Page 99 Test: Liberia, South Carolina.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sibel Hodge's "Into the Darkness," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Into the Darkness by Sibel Hodge.

The entry begins:

When I'm writing a novel I see the scene playing out in my head exactly like a movie so I always have a visual of my characters. Of course, I'd love every book of mine to star the fantastic Tom Hardy if they were ever made into films, and for Into the Darkness, I think he would play an amazing Mitchell, ex-SAS operative who is searching for his missing goddaughter. He may be a little young for the role, though, so as a second I'd choose Ray Winston. It's a gritty British thriller so they would both be perfect.

For Mitchell's opposite, Detective Sergeant Carter, who is a maverick and someone very disillusioned with the police force, I'd choose...[read on]

Visit Sibel Hodge's website.

My Book, The Movie: Untouchable.

My Book, The Movie: Into the Darkness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top alt-history World War II novels

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and the Ustari Cycle from Pocket/Gallery, including We Are Not Good People. At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog he tagged ten "of the most ambitious, imaginative, and flat-out cool speculative takes on a World War II that never actually happened," including:

V-S Day, by Allen Steele

Steele’s big idea is elegant in its simplicity—and plausibility. This novel is set in the same universe as the author’s The Tranquility Alternative, in which the space race began in the 1940s between Germany and the U.S. instead of the 1960s between the U.S. and Russia. In 1941, Hitler issues a historic order: work on the V2 Rocket is to cease, and work on an orbital spacecraft capable of attacking the United States directly is to begin. When spy networks get word of this new plan to President Roosevelt, he sees just one reasonable response: begin work on his own spacecraft to counteract the Nazi plan. The desperate race to dominate space has a profound effect on the future of humanity in general, but in the meantime, Steele delivers a tense and exciting alternate history that really could have happened.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: V-S Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Gail Carriger reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Gail Carriger, author of Competence.

Her entry begins:

I recently finished two books, pretty different from each other, and here they are.

Truth in the Dark by Amy Lane

This is a charming twisted retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and a real tear-jerker. It's as if Lane took Robin McKinley's Beauty and combined it with The Song of Achilles. There's an element of the Hunchback of Notre Dame thrown in there for good measure. If you're a fan of alternate fairy stories, true love at all costs, and the ultimate melodrama of self-sacrifice then...[read on]

About Competence, from the publisher:

From New York Times bestselling author Gail Carriger comes the delightful sequel to Imprudence.

Accidentally abandoned!

All alone in Singapore, proper Miss Primrose Tunstell must steal helium to save her airship, the Spotted Custard, in a scheme involving a lovesick werecat and a fake fish tail.

When she uncovers rumors of a new kind of vampire, Prim and the Custard crew embark on a mission to Peru. There, they encounter airship pirates and strange atmospheric phenomena, and are mistaken for representatives of the Spanish Inquisition. Forced into extreme subterfuge (and some rather ridiculous outfits) Prim must also answer three of life’s most challenging questions:

Can the perfect book club give a man back his soul?

Will her brother ever stop wearing his idiotic velvet fez?

And can the amount of lard in Christmas pudding save an entire species?

Learn more about the book and author at Gail Carriger's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Soulless.

The Page 69 Test: Changeless.

The Page 69 Test: Waistcoats & Weaponry.

The Page 69 Test: Prudence.

My Book, The Movie: Prudence.

The Page 69 Test: Manners & Mutiny.

Writers Read: Gail Carriger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Alex White's "A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White.

About the book, from the publisher:

Furious and fun, the first book in this bold, new science fiction adventure series follows a crew of outcasts as they try to find a legendary ship that just might be the key to saving themselves-and the universe.

Boots Elsworth was a famous treasure hunter in another life, but now she’s washed up. She makes her meager living faking salvage legends and selling them to the highest bidder, but this time she got something real–the story of the Harrow, a famous warship, capable of untold destruction.

Nilah Brio is the top driver in the Pan Galactic Racing Federation and the darling of the racing world–until she witnesses Mother murder a fellow racer. Framed for the murder and on the hunt to clear her name, Nilah has only one lead: the killer also hunts Boots.

On the wrong side of the law, the two women board a smuggler’s ship that will take them on a quest for fame, for riches, and for justice.

Visit Alex White's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe.

The Page 69 Test: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top novels dealing with time travel

Prentis Rollins has over twenty years of experience working as a writer and artist in the comics industry. The Furnace is his debut full-length graphic novel.

One of his five top novels dealing with time travel, as shared at Tor.com:

11/22/63

11/22/63 by Stephen King is a more recent (2011) time travel story, one of the strongest in decades. In it, Jake Epping, an English teacher, uses a time portal to travel back to 1958 (the only year the portal opens onto), in an attempt to prevent the assassination of John Kennedy. The time portal is a naturally-occurring phenomenon (likened at one point to a bubble floating in ginger ale)—there’s no question of the user having to do anything but step into it; this tale is very much in the brute force camp. King’s initial description of Epping’s experience of 1958 is one of the most evocative pieces of writing I know of—you are transported, via King’s prose, as surely as Epping is. But King’s ultimate slap-down of the “everything would be fine if only JFK had lived” school of thought is what makes the book significant, and deeply haunting.

Read about another entry on the list.

11/22/63 is among Peter May's six best books and Molly Driscoll's top six novels that explore a slightly alternate version of very familiar events.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Loka Ashwood's "For-Profit Democracy"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America by Loka Ashwood.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating sociological assessment of the damaging effects of the for-profit partnership between government and corporation on rural Americans

Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States? This book offers a simple explanation: corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property. Based on four years of fieldwork, this eye-opening assessment by sociologist Loka Ashwood plays out in a mixed-race Georgia community that hosted the first nuclear power reactors sanctioned by the government in three decades. This work serves as an explanatory mirror of prominent trends in current American politics. Churches become havens for redemption, poaching a means of retribution, guns a tool of self-defense, and nuclear power a faltering solution to global warming as governance strays from democratic principles. In the absence of hope or trust in rulers, rural racial tensions fester and divide. The book tells of the rebellion that unfolds as the rights of corporations supersede the rights of humans.

Visit Loka Ashwood's website.

Writers Read: Loka Ashwood.

The Page 99 Test: For-Profit Democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sheena Kamal's "It All Falls Down," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: It All Falls Down: A Novel by Sheena Kamal.

The entry begins:

I don't write to actors, but sometimes it's fun to let my mind wander in that direction. Every now and then I get asked who I would cast as my main character, Nora Watts. The truth is, I don't know who could play Nora. I would absolutely love for an intrepid producer to take a chance on an indigenous actor for this part--and there are a few names that kick around in my mind--but it can be tough when you write a character of mixed-heritage.

The other important characters are much easier. I'd love to see Nora's love interest, Jon Brazuca, played by Vancouver actor Ryan Reynolds. Deadpool fame aside, he was in a fantastic movie called Buried where it was just him in...[read on]

Visit Sheena Kamal's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Ones.

My Book, The Movie: It All Falls Down.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about self-reinvention

Liese O'Halloran Schwarz grew up in Washington, DC after an early childhood overseas. She attended Harvard University and then medical school at University of Virginia. While in medical school, she won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Prize and also published her first novel, Near Canaan.

The newly released The Possible World is her second novel.

One of the author's top ten books about self-reinvention, as shared at the Guardian:

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2014)

The riveting saga of Ursula Todd, who is born and dies in 1910 and is then reborn again and again into the same life, things going a little bit differently each time. She carries memories forward, and as the world marches through one war and then into another, the reader wonders if she will be able to budge the course of history. It is a masterpiece. I strongly recommend the audiobook; the narrator Fenella Woolgar’s performance is a tour de force of its own.

Read about another entry on the list.

Life After Life is among Caitlin Kleinschmidt tagged twelve moving novels of the Second World War, Jenny Shank's top five innovative novels that mess with chronology, Dell Villa's top twelve books from 2013 to give your mom, and Judith Mackrell's five best young fictional heroines in coming-of-age novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is James Brydon reading?

Featured at Writers Read: James Brydon, author of The Moment Before Drowning.

His entry begins:

Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry is without doubt the most striking, original and haunting book I’ve read recently. These interlinked yet fragmentary stories from the Soviet-Polish war present, as one of the narrators puts it, “a chronicle of […] humdrum evil doings” from a conflict steeped in violence: beheadings, slit throats, the numberless and nameless dead strewing the battlefields.

The book’s shifting narrators correspond to different sides of Babel’s character. There is the bespectacled, intellectual journalist horrified by the slaughter, but also a Bolshevik taking pleasure in the protracted killing of his master, who he tramples to death for over an hour. Babel unsettlingly interrogates the moral values we ascribe to acts of violence. When the journalist is incapable of shooting a soldier whose...[read on]

About The Moment Before Drowning, from the publisher:

December 1959: A furious anticolonial war rages in Algeria. Captain Jacques le Garrec, a former detective and French Resistance hero, returns to France in disgrace. Traumatized after two years of working in the army intelligence services, he’s now accused of a brutal crime.

As le Garrec awaits trial in the tiny Breton town where he grew up, he is asked to look into a disturbing and unsolved murder committed the previous winter. A local teenage girl was killed and her bizarrely mutilated body was left displayed on the heathland in a way that no one could understand.

Le Garrec’s investigations draw him into the dark past of the town, still haunted by memories of the German occupation. As he tries to reconstruct the events of the murder, the violence of this crime and his recollections of Algeria intertwine, threatening to submerge him.

Learn more about The Moment Before Drowning at the Akashic Books website.

The Page 69 Test: The Moment Before Drowning.

Writers Read: James Brydon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kimberly McCreight's "The Collide"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Collide by Kimberly McCreight.

About the book, from the publisher:

KEEP YOUR ENEMIES CLOSE.

Wylie is finally out of the detention center, but that doesn’t mean she’s safe. As much as she wants to forget everything that's happened and return to her normal life, Wylie knows that true freedom means discovering, once and for all, who is hunting the girls who are Outliers—and why.

Armed with only a few clues and a handful of trusted allies, Wylie sets out to separate fact from fiction. But soon she is unearthing long-buried secrets and finds herself entangled in a conspiracy that is much bigger and more dangerous than she ever could have imagined. Worse yet, the nearer Wylie gets to discovering the truth, the closer her enemies get to silencing her and the other girls. This time, maybe forever.

In the explosive conclusion to New York Times bestselling author Kimberly McCreight’s Outliers series, Wylie learns that when danger lurks in unexpected places, fighting for who and what you believe in can matter even more than you realized ... and that trusting yourself might be the one thing that saves you.

Visit Kimberly McCreight's website.

The Page 69 Test: Reconstructing Amelia.

The Page 69 Test: The Scattering.

The Page 69 Test: The Collide.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Danielle Banas & Cooper

Featured at Coffee with a Canine: Danielle Banas & Cooper.

The author, on Cooper's impact on her writing:

Cooper loves to snuggle. Cooper also loves to snuggle on my lap while I’m trying to write, so then I have to move my laptop onto the arm of the couch and turn awkwardly to type while he’s sleeping – then my back starts to hurt. So he definitely hinders more than helps, but I still gave him a shout-out on the acknowledgments page of my book. If nothing else, he’s...[read on]

About Danielle Banas's The Supervillain and Me, from the publisher:

Never trust a guy in spandex.

In Abby Hamilton’s world, superheroes do more than just stop crime and save cats stuck in trees—they also drink milk straight from the carton and hog the television remote. Abby’s older brother moonlights as the famous Red Comet, but without powers of her own, following in his footsteps has never crossed her mind.

That is, until the city’s newest vigilante comes bursting into her life.

After saving Abby from an attempted mugging, Morriston’s fledgling supervillain Iron Phantom convinces her that he’s not as evil as everyone says, and that their city is under a vicious new threat. As Abby follows him deeper into their city’s darkest secrets, she comes to learn that heroes can’t always be trusted, and sometimes it’s the good guys who wear black.

Chosen by readers like you for Macmillan's young adult imprint Swoon Reads, The Supervillain and Me is a hilarious, sweet, and action-packed novel by debut author Danielle Banas that proves no one is perfect, not even superheroes.

Visit Danielle Banas's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Danielle Banas & Cooper.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the most evil mothers in literature

At Entertainment Weekly Dana Schwartz tagged fifteen of the most evil moms in literature, including:

Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Did you forget that Daisy had a baby? Exactly.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Great Gatsby appears among Brian Boone's six "beloved classic novels whose authors nearly cursed with a terrible title," four books that changed C.K. Stead, Jeff Somers's seven most disastrous parties in fiction, four books that changed Jodi Picoult, Joseph Connolly's top ten novels about style, Nick Lake’s ten favorite fictional tricksters and tellers of untruths in books, the Independent's list of the fifteen best opening lines in literature, Molly Schoemann-McCann's list of five of the lamest girlfriends in fiction, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books, Elizabeth Wilhide's nine illustrious houses in fiction, Suzette Field's top ten literary party hosts, Robert McCrums's ten best closing lines in literature, Molly Driscoll's ten best literary lessons about love, Jim Lehrer's six favorite 20th century novels, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature and ten of the best misdirected messages, Tad Friend's seven best novels about WASPs, Kate Atkinson's top ten novels, Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition, Robert McCrum's top ten books for Obama officials, Jackie Collins' six best books, and John Krasinski's six best books, and is on the American Book Review's list of the 100 best last lines from novels. Gatsby's Jordan Baker is Josh Sorokach's biggest fictional literary crush.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jeff Love's "The Black Circle"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojeve by Jeff Love.

About the book, from the publisher:

Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) was an important and provocative thinker. Born in Russia, he spent most of his life in France. His interpretation of Hegel and his notorious declaration that history had come to an end exerted great influence on French thinkers and writers such as Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau. An unorthodox Marxist, he was a critic of Martin Heidegger and interlocutor of Leo Strauss who played a significant role in establishing the European Economic Community; a polyglot with many unusual interests, he wrote works, mostly unpublished in his lifetime, on quantum physics, the problem of the infinite, Buddhism, atheism, and Vassily Kandinsky’s paintings.

In The Black Circle, Jeff Love reinterprets Kojève’s works, showing him to be an essential thinker who challenged modern society and its valuation of individuality, self-interest, and freedom from death. Emphasizing Kojève’s neglected Russian roots, The Black Circle puts him in the context of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian debates over the proper ends of human life. Love explores notions of perfection, freedom, and finality in Kojève’s account of Hegel and his neglected later works, clarifying Kojève’s emancipatory thinking and the meaning of the oft-misinterpreted “end of history.” Combining intellectual history, close textual analysis, and philosophy, The Black Circle reveals Kojève’s thought as a profound critique of capitalist individualism and a timely meditation on human freedom.

Learn more about The Black Circle at the Columbia University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: The Black Circle.

The Page 99 Test: The Black Circle.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is J.D. Horn reading?

Featured at Writers Read: J.D. Horn, author of The Book of the Unwinding (Witches of New Orleans).

His entry begins:

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann

The unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor lies at the center of this epic recounting of the early days of Hollywood. I have a couple of ideas for stories involving the early and golden ages of Hollywood knocking around in my head, so for me this complex well-researched, and perfectly paced book lies between leisure reading and research. If you’re interested in true crime, this one is...[read on]

About The Book of the Unwinding, from the publisher:

With their magic diminishing, warring factions of New Orleans witches desperately search for the Book of the Unwinding—a legendary grimoire, hidden by spells, that holds the key to unimaginable powers. As a ruthless struggle erupts in a maelstrom of malevolent magic, psychic Nathalie Boudreau finds her destiny intertwined with that of an exiled witch.

Her name is Alice Marin, a vulnerable young woman trapped in a realm of illusion. Only Nathalie can free her, but first she must come to understand and master her own extraordinary abilities.

Now, in a world where betrayals have become the order of the day, it will fall to two women to restore rightful balance amid terrifying chaos.

Visit J.D. Horn's website.

Coffee with a Canine: J.D. Horn & Kirby.

Writers Read: J.D. Horn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Gale Massey's "The Girl from Blind River"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Girl From Blind River by Gale Massey.

About The Girl From Blind River, from the publisher:

Everyone says the Elders family are nothing but cheats, thieves, and convicts—a fact nineteen-year old Jamie Elders has been trying desperately to escape. She may have the natural talent of a poker savant, but her dreams of going pro and getting the hell out of the tiny town of Blind River, New York are going nowhere fast. Especially once she lands in a huge pile of debt to her uncle Loyal.

At Loyal’s beck and call until her debt is repaid, Jamie can’t easily walk away—not with her younger brother Toby left at his mercy. So when Loyal demands Jamie’s help cleaning up a mess late one night, she has no choice but to agree. But disposing of a dead man and covering up his connection to the town’s most powerful judge goes beyond family duty. When it comes out that the victim was a beloved athlete and Loyal pins the murder on Toby, only Jamie can save him. But with a dogged detective on her trail and her own future at stake, she’ll have to decide: embrace her inner criminal, or defy it—and face the consequences.

Visit Gale Massey's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Girl From Blind River.

Writers Read: Gale Massey.

The Page 69 Test: The Girl From Blind River.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top enduring American mysteries explored in novels

At Unbound Worlds Matt Staggs tagged "five of the nation’s weirdest mysteries and novels that reference them," including:

Journal of a UFO Investigator
David Halperin

In the summer of 1947, townsfolk in Roswell, New Mexico reported the discovery of what appeared to be the wreckage of some sort of space craft. The government response was confusing, to say the least. Military personnel released a statement to the local press indicating they had recovered a flying disc of some sort. Later, they claimed that what had crashed in Roswell was a perfectly ordinary weather balloon. Needless to say, people have been arguing about what really happened ever since.

David Halperin’s Journey of a UFO Investigator is the story of a troubled teenage boy who constructs an elaborate fantasy life around the UFO craze of the 1960s. As he becomes more strongly enmeshed in his world of Roswell, Men in Black, and Unidentified Flying Saucers, the lines between real and unreal begin to blur.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Journal of a UFO Investigator.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rob Hart's "Potter's Field," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field by Rob Hart.

The entry begins:

Swear to truth, I have never really considered who would play Ash. I’m going to say Adam Driver. He looks like he can hold his own in a brawl, and I think he’s a fantastic, interesting actor. He can find that balance between stoicism and heart and vulnerability that I think is important to Ash. He’s a little old for it—he’s in his mid-30s and Ash is in his mid-20s, but that’s not a deal breaker for me.

Or, if you want to make things interesting, race-flip it and cast...[read on]

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My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field by Rob Hart.

--Marshal Zeringue