Albertine Clarke's "The Body Builders," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Body Builders: A Novel by Albertine Clarke.

The entry begins:

The Body Builders follows an alienated young woman, Ada, who believes her body has been replaced with an identical synthetic copy. Her relationship with Atticus, an older, married man, and the breakdown of her relationship with her mother, are the triggers which send her spiralling out of reality and into a self-directed dream-space designed especially for her.

I watch a lot of movies, and I wrote the book with cinematography always in the back of my mind. Even before I started writing I knew who I would want to direct it: Yorgos Lanthimos, with his uncanny ability to walk the line between tragedy and farce. Yorgos, if you’re reading, I’m waiting for you.

So, if Yorgos is our director, who would play Ada? Emma Stone, Yorgos’s longtime collaborator, wouldn’t be quite right. Ada is cold and detached, tormented by her feelings of unreality, the lack of connection between her and the world around her. I imagine somebody somewhat stormy and ...[read on]

Follow Albertine Clarke on Instagram.

Q&A with Albertine Clarke.

My Book, The Movie: The Body Builders.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ava Morgyn reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Ava Morgyn, author of Only Spell Deep: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I’m very much a mood reader, which means I don’t like to keep a towering TBR and tend to jump around a lot between genres. Though I pretty consistently read books with darker themes—so horror, Gothic literature, dark fantasy, thrillers, and the like.

I just finished books by two of my favorite authors. I devoured Play Nice by Rachel Harrison, a contemporary horror about an influencer who inherits her late mother’s old haunted house and tries to remodel it for views. It was a dark, winding adventure through childhood trauma, unreliable memories, attempts to control the narrative, grief, and the phenomenon of women not...[read on]

About Only Spell Deep, from the publisher:

Rebecca meets The Craft in this dark, atmospheric novel of one witch rediscovering her power while on the run from another willing to kill her for it.

From the USA Today bestselling author of The Bane Witch!

Judeth Cole has always had certain uncanny abilities. But when she arrived at Solidago, her grandfather’s estate by the sea, she was forced to keep them secret. There she lived a harsh life under his rule and the haunting legacy of her late grandmother, Aurelia. Until the fateful day she ignited a fire with her magic. It was the last time she saw her family alive.

Seventeen years later, she’s living in Seattle as Jude Clark, and failing at life, when she makes a last detour through her favorite bookstore, selecting a book to read as she waits to die. But when she pulls it from the shelf, an invitation to her for a clandestine midnight meeting slips out.

Jude is quickly swept up into a world of secrets and magic, discovering a circle of powerful new companions led by the mysterious, enigmatic Arla. The source of their magic, Arla tells her, is an entity, trapped and bound, that they call The Fathom. But Jude swiftly realizes Arla wants this power all to herself, and that she’s willing to kill for it.

Terrified, Jude turns to Levi, the handsome bookseller who’s seen her at her worst. With his help, she begins a research journey that leads her all the way back to Solidago, the house she swore to never return to. Now, the Fathom threatening to break free and Arla on the hunt, Jude must finally face her past to save her future.

Ava Morgyn's Only Spell Deep is a novel that takes readers on a journey into a dark, glittering world of magic, a place where power should never be caged and misplaced trust can have deadly consequences.

Visit Ava Morgyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bane Witch.

Q&A with Ava Morgyn.

The Page 69 Test: Only Spell Deep.

Writers Read: Ava Morgyn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best celebrity/normal person romance novels

Haruka Iwasaki is a writer and bookseller living in Brooklyn, NY. She writes personal essays about her Japanese American identity, grief and growing up in NYC. One essay has appeared in print this year in Oh Reader magazine.

At Lit Hub she tagged five favorite celebrity/normal person romance novels, including:

Jasmine Guillory, While We Were Dating

Sixth in Guillory’s The Wedding Date series, this romance is a stand alone book that’s a perfect introduction to the trope. Ben, a talented ad executive, pitches a huge campaign featuring a bona fide movie star, Anna, and charms her so much that when his company eventually lands the campaign, Anna makes sure that he is the lead on the project. Their light flirtation leads to something more; Anna reveals her celebrity-induced anxiety while Ben shares he has a long lost sister who wants to get in touch. There is a lovely running theme on the importance of mental health and therapy (I love a man who is in therapy!) When Anna has to deal with a family emergency, they decide to fake-date to help her public image which only leads them to get closer. When will they realize they are meant to be?

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Albertine Clarke

From my Q&A with Albertine Clarke, author of The Body Builders: A Novel:

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

My title, The Body Builders, is possibly slightly misleading, in that it makes the novel sound like it’s about body building. While the father of the protagonist is a body builder, this is more in the background than one might expect. Really the title is a pun, because there are two other varieties of body builder – the mother, who has literally built Ada’s body with her own, and the mysterious beings that provide Ada with the synthetic body. I imagine readers might find their expectations subverted, possibly frustrated, which is what I wanted.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think my teenage self would...[read on]

Follow Albertine Clarke on Instagram.

Q&A with Albertine Clarke.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Frances Courtney Kneupper's "Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400: Outsiders, Women, and Reformers by Frances Courtney Kneupper.

About the book, from the publisher:

The end of the fourteenth century was a time of upheaval and contested authority among the traditional institutions of medieval Europe. In response to these conditions, a number of people began to claim their own authority, as prophets speaking the word of God. They came from outside of the clerical elite and were mostly women and reformers. This book examines the battle over authority which ensued. Prophetic women and other non-elites successfully used prophecy to exert influence and to enter the corridors of power, while educated male clerics insinuated that prophecy was the product of demonic influence and therefore a hazard to the public. Surprisingly, a third faction also emerged--an international network of clerical men who wrote in support of female prophecy. This volume traces the arguments made by these three groups, the clashes that erupted, and the long-term impacts of this battle on ideas of spiritual authority.

Learn more about Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400 at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top darkly surreal Irish books

Eoghan Walls is a Northern Irish poet from Derry. He has lived and worked in Ireland, Britain, Germany and Rwanda. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, and his poetry has been shortlisted for multiple international awards, including the Bridport Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize and the Piggott Prize. He has published the first major translation of Heidegger’s poetical works and currently teaches Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Walls's new novel, Field Notes from an Extinction, "deals with ecological disaster, weaponized starvation, and anti-immigrant sentiment."

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven favorite darkly surreal Irish books, including:

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

I wouldn’t be the first to say there is a deep vein of insistent surreal urgency that pumps through all Kevin Barry’s work. In Beatlebone, my favorite of his books, the protagonist is John Lennon—unassassinated, wonderfully free of the dirt of actual history, but trapped at an existential dip in his life and marriage, ready to escape the afterwake of his earth-quaking fame and the mundanity of marriage just to scream on an island, releasing his trauma. The Ireland he escapes to—1978, on the west coast, rainy and bizarre—is pitch perfect. The woes he runs from are common as rain. The whole book takes a brazen and bewildering fourth wall lurch right near the apex of tension. You begin the book knowing—maybe loving—John Lennon. You end the book hungover and vaguely bruised.

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Jauregui Eccles's "Sing the Night," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Sing the Night by Megan Jauregui Eccles.

The entry begins:

Since Sing the Night is a Phantom of the Opera inspired gothic fantasy, the obvious choice, the only choice is the great Guillermo del Toro. He is the king of atmosphere, of gothic symbolism, of nuance. I have been inspired by his use of color for metaphor and have integrated that into my own work. I also find his casting to be thoughtful and would defer to him on all of that, hoping that he would highlight lesser-known actors and actresses.

One aspect of Sing the Night that makes it interesting for adaptation is...[read on]

Visit Megan Jauregui Eccles's website.

My Book, The Movie: Sing the Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books for fans of the movie "Sinners"

Erica Ezeifedi is a writer, editor, and advocate currently serving as an Associate Editor at Book Riot. For the site she tagged six "books that each touch on the major themes and feelings in Sinners," including:

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

Tonally, this novella fits the overall feeling of Sinners the best of all the books in this list. It is a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s existential horror story The Horror at Red Hook, and is, in many ways, a reclaiming. Lovecraft was a raging racist (even for his time) who was influenced by Black people just as he despised us, and it’s kind of ironic (but also maybe just typical) that the same cosmic horror Lovecraft became known for explores exactly the same kind of all-encompassing existential dread that Black Americans have felt for hundreds of years in this land.

Read about another title on the list.

The Ballad of Black Tom is among Brittany K. Allen's ten top books for fans of Sinners, Chase Dearinger's seven horror titles where the setting is a monster, and Colleen Kinder's ten titles about chance encounters with strangers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ava Morgyn's "Only Spell Deep"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Only Spell Deep: A Novel by Ava Morgyn.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Rebecca meets The Craft in this dark, atmospheric novel of one witch rediscovering her power while on the run from another willing to kill her for it.

From the USA Today bestselling author of The Bane Witch!

Judeth Cole has always had certain uncanny abilities. But when she arrived at Solidago, her grandfather’s estate by the sea, she was forced to keep them secret. There she lived a harsh life under his rule and the haunting legacy of her late grandmother, Aurelia. Until the fateful day she ignited a fire with her magic. It was the last time she saw her family alive.

Seventeen years later, she’s living in Seattle as Jude Clark, and failing at life, when she makes a last detour through her favorite bookstore, selecting a book to read as she waits to die. But when she pulls it from the shelf, an invitation to her for a clandestine midnight meeting slips out.

Jude is quickly swept up into a world of secrets and magic, discovering a circle of powerful new companions led by the mysterious, enigmatic Arla. The source of their magic, Arla tells her, is an entity, trapped and bound, that they call The Fathom. But Jude swiftly realizes Arla wants this power all to herself, and that she’s willing to kill for it.

Terrified, Jude turns to Levi, the handsome bookseller who’s seen her at her worst. With his help, she begins a research journey that leads her all the way back to Solidago, the house she swore to never return to. Now, the Fathom threatening to break free and Arla on the hunt, Jude must finally face her past to save her future.

Ava Morgyn's Only Spell Deep is a novel that takes readers on a journey into a dark, glittering world of magic, a place where power should never be caged and misplaced trust can have deadly consequences.

Visit Ava Morgyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bane Witch.

Q&A with Ava Morgyn.

The Page 69 Test: Only Spell Deep.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Garrett Peck's "The Bright Edges of the World"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop by Garrett Peck.

About the book, from the publisher:

Author and historian Garrett Peck traces Willa Cather’s adventures in the Southwest and how they influenced her best book.

Six months before she died, Willa Cather called her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop her “best book.” The Atlantic magazine concurred, including Archbishop on its Great American Novels list in 2024. A perennial favorite for people who love New Mexico, the novel tells an unusual story of two French priests and best friends serving on the American frontier before the arrival of the railroad. This Western work of fiction is loosely based on two historical figures, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Bishop Joseph Machebeuf.

In The Bright Edges of the World, Garrett Peck explores how Cather’s travels to the Southwest inspired her writing. She visited the Southwest six times between 1912 and 1926, and from these journeys came three novels, the last of which was Death Comes for the Archbishop. Through Cather’s letters, postcards, articles, and interviews, Peck traces how integral travel was to Cather’s imagination while highlighting the vital contribution that Cather’s longtime partner, Edith Lewis, made to the story. The Bright Edges of the World is richly illustrated to highlight Cather and Lewis’s extensive Southwestern adventures.

Though Archbishop is a work of fiction, Peck explores how Cather wove some of the most legendary people in New Mexican history into her novel, such as Archbishop Lamy, Kit Carson, and Padre Antonio José Martínez, while subtly hinting toward the complexity of Pueblo Indian and Navajo (Diné) faith. Archbishop is a multicultural novel that reflects the diversity of New Mexico’s people.

Death Comes for the Archbishop remains a timeless book of friendship on the American frontier and an inspiration for people who, as Cather wrote, “have gone a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the Archbishop.”

Learn more about the book and author at Garrett Peck's website.

Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition.

Writers Read: Garrett Peck (January 2010).

The Page 99 Test: The Prohibition Hangover.

The Page 99 Test: Capital Beer.

The Page 99 Test: A Decade of Disruption.

The Page 99 Test: The Bright Edges of the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Dan Buzzetta

From my Q&A with Dan Buzzetta, author of The Winter Verdict:

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

If the title of my novel, The Winter Verdict, was a worker whose job is to describe the story I’ve written, he or she would best be described as someone who does half-the-job very well. Truth to tell, I had another title in mind, but my publisher and editor preferred The Winter Verdict. The title succeeds in season-setting; my legal thriller takes place at a ski resort in the dead of winter with snow-capped mountains and tall pines on summit ridges standing sentinel over a bucolic wintery village. But the word Verdict isn’t to be taken literally. There’s little court room drama, no recanting witness, and those looking for an edge-of-your-seat climax waiting for a jury to return a verdict would be better served reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Instead, the word Verdict refers to the decisive actions taken by the protagonist to prevent a shadowy international conglomerate from...[read on]

Visit Dan Buzzetta's website.

Q&A with Dan Buzzetta.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Lyla Lane reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Lyla Lane, author of The Best Little Motel in Texas: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I just finished Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack, and I can say with certainty that this is going to be one of my favorite reads of the year. It was an epistolary novel about a sex worker who assassinates a right-wing politician known as Meat Neck. With one story told three different ways, depending on who the unreliable narrator was trying to persuade, this absolutely unhinged book was a...[read on]

About The Best Little Motel in Texas, from the publisher:

A charming, edgy mystery about a young woman who unexpectedly inherits the best little motel in Texas – replete with a feisty set of golden working girls, a poisoned priest, and a sleepy hometown thrown into chaos.

After a childhood spent combing the dive bars of Sarsaparilla Falls to collect her fun-loving momma, Cordelia West now enjoys a simple, respectable life in Dallas. Then one phone call from the hometown she’s spent years trying to forget throws it into chaos.

Cordelia's great-aunt Penelope has passed away, naming Cordelia the sole heir to the Chickadee Motel. She has no memory of a great-aunt and no interest in hospitality, but the will stipulates that the motel can’t be sold until its residents leave or pass away – so she reluctantly heads back down to Sarsaparilla Falls to figure out who's living in the Chickadee, and how to get them out.

But upon her arrival, Cordelia discovers the Chickadee isn’t a motel—it’s a brothel, housing three women in their sixties known as the Chicks. For decades, Daisy, Arline, and Belinda Sue have entertained the men of Sarsaparilla Falls (with their wives’ blessings)—including the upright Pastor Reed-Smythe, who thunders against the town’s favorite sins when he’s not indulging. Cordelia doesn’t want to be a hotel manager or a madam, but she can’t just sell the only home the Chicks have known—especially not after the pastor is found poisoned in Daisy’s bed.

With the Chicks—and the town—on the verge of a breakdown, Cordelia steps up to mop up the mess. For a small town, there are plenty of suspects: could it be the obsessed nurse with access to arsenic? Developers eager to gobble up the land? The righteously angry town librarian? Things are heating up in Sarsaparilla Falls, and with the Pastor’s obnoxiously attractive son Archer—Cordelia’s childhood nemesis—investigating the Chicks and getting close, straightlaced Cordelia may just have to get a little dirty to make a killer come clean.

Visit Lyla Lane's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Best Little Motel in Texas.

Q&A with Lyla Lane.

The Page 69 Test: The Best Little Motel in Texas.

Writers Read: Lyla Lane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six thrillers that feature contagions & pandemics

Alice Martin is a writer, reader, and teacher from North Carolina. She holds a PhD in Literature from Rutgers University and works as an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where she teaches fiction writing and American literature. She lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, her son, and too many typewriters.

Westward Women is Martin's debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six novels that are

stories about societies on the edge in the face of contagions, stories made pulse-pounding not only because of the way they demonstrate contagion as a threat but also the way they reveal how contagion can be a catalyst for social change, a reminder of the potential reckless delights in being free of social constraint.

One title on Martin's list:

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Like [Stephen King's] The Stand, Emily St. John Mandel’s magnificent Station Eleven can be divided into the “before” and “after”: the collapse of society under the weight of a flu pandemic and the rise of something new and uncanny in its aftermath. In the “after,” a group of traveling performers try to find what pleasure there is in life beyond surviving while a terrifying extremist gains influence nearby.

But the opening to Station Eleven might be my favorite opening of any book. It begins with a production of King Lear that serves as a kind of super-spreader event. After witnessing a man die onstage, one man who was present, Jeevan, receives more advanced warning from a doctor friend, leading him to stock up on supplies for the end of the world. This sequence always catches my breath because of how real it feels.

For Jeevan, everything in the world—jobs, responsibilities, weeknight plans—all stop in a second. It is the embodiment of the most famous line from King Lear: “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bar, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come unbutton here.” Unbuttoning ourselves from the constraints of society may make us animals, but it is freeing, too.

Read about another entry on the list.

Station Eleven is among Rebecca Fallon's five top Shakespeare-inspired novels, Lauren Wilson's eight top books featuring cults, Barnaby Martin's seven titles featuring parents & children at the end of the world, Brittany K. Allen's ten books that get the theatre world right, Jeanette Horn's nine twisted novels about theatrical performers, Isabelle McConville's fifteen books for fans of the post-apocalyptic TV-drama Fallout, Joanna Quinn's six best books set in & around the theatrical world, Carolyn Quimby's 38 best dystopian novels, Tara Sonin's seven books for fans of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, Maggie Stiefvater's five fantasy books about artists & the magic of creativity, Mark Skinner's five top literary dystopias, Claudia Gray's five essential books about plagues and pandemics, K Chess's five top fictional books inside of real books, Rebecca Kauffman's ten top musical novels, Nathan Englander’s ten favorite books, M.L. Rio’s five top novels inspired by Shakespeare, Anne Corlett's five top books with different takes on the apocalypse, Christopher Priest’s five top sci-fi books that make use of music, and Anne Charnock's five favorite books with fictitious works of art.

--Marshal Zeringue

Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.'s "Tore All to Pieces," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Tore All to Pieces by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

The entry begins:

Tore All to Pieces is a fragmented novel set in the imaginary town of Mosely, Kentucky. It has no single main character. And I’ll be damned if the first name out of my mouth for the film adaptation isn’t a sophisticated French twink: Timothée Chalamet.

My first casting thought goes to Patrick, and it’s obvious to me I’d choose that Call Me by Your Name pretty boy. Patrick is young, queer, opening up, full of vibrato and hope. He thinks he’s beautiful, despite being conditioned to believe otherwise, and finally realizes he is worth something. Chalamet shows us passion for life in Call Me by Your Name, and he most recently proved to us all in Marty Supreme that he can get into the head of a character and find human DNA in conversational dialogue. I imagine him under a railroad bridge, pulse flying as trains shake the world like thunder. I can see his swaggering, drunken 3:00 a.m. calls for affirmation, swimming nude in a lake surrounded by hills and trees.

There are a lot of older women in Tore All to Pieces because I want to center people whose stories don’t get told. One of my favorites is a lunchroom cook named Wanda. She is no-nonsense, hard-working, and longs to be needed on her terms. Hollywood...[read on]

Visit Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.'s website.

Q&A with Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

My Book, The Movie: Tore All to Pieces.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five mystery novels set in the aftermath of WWII

Shaina Steinberg is the author of the Bishop & Gallagher Mysteries, as well as a film and television writer who’s worked on Malcolm in the Middle, Everwood, Cold Case, Bionic Woman, and Spartacus. Named to the Young and Hungry List in 2013 and the WriteHer List in 2017, she has developed pitches, pilots and features with companies such as Temple Hill, Endgame Entertainment, Fremantle, eOne, Blondie Girl, Josephson Entertainment and Alcon.

At The Strand Magazine she tagged five mystery books set in the aftermath of World War Two. One title on the list:

A German Requiem by Philip Kerr

Set in post-war Berlin and Vienna, Kerr does an incredible job of making this time period come alive, with all its inherent dangers and double-dealings. Bernie Gunther, the former police man last seen in 1938 in The Pale Criminal, has endured the war, stood up to the SS, gotten captured by the Russians and put into a POW camp. He is now home with his wife, who makes certain sacrifices to keep them fed, while he sews razor blades into his jacket to avoid casually being killed for his watch. The city is a grim, gritty place.

Bernie, feeling especially low, is hired to prove his former co-worker Emil Becker innocent of killing an American soldier. The offer includes a sizeable paycheck and a temporary escape to Vienna. Nothing is as it seems while the Americans and the Russians vie for supremacy in both Austria and the whole of Europe. People with competing agencies and various motives keep Bernie guessing as more and more people die.

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas's "When the Good Life Goes Bad"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: When the Good Life Goes Bad: The US and Its Seven Deadly Sins by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Seven Deadly Sins have become the seven markers of success in America. Lust, pride, greed, sloth, envy, gluttony, wrath―these once-condemned principles now guide people’s pursuit of the good life.

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas examines how the Seven Deadly Sins have shaped the moral strivings and sociopolitical condition of American society and culture in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a multidimensional approach, Floyd-Thomas uses race, gender, class, and other lenses to break down the moral crises that define the American Dream. Her critique exposes the harm done by individual and collective practices of sexual objectification, capitalist materialism, wealth inequality, and technological hubris before pivoting to the rise of right-wing populism, white Christian nationalism, and the politics of cruelty. But Floyd-Thomas also proposes an ethic that emphasizes truth-telling, community engagement, and values rooted in humility, justice, and mercy―a new path for the US to overcome systemic oppression and create a more just society.

Evocative and ambitious, When the Good Life Goes Bad takes readers on a wide-ranging journey through US life and culture to explain what corrupted the American dream.

Learn more about When the Good Life Goes Bad at the University of Illinois Press website.

The Page 99 Test: When the Good Life Goes Bad.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Lyla Lane's "The Best Little Motel in Texas"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Best Little Motel in Texas: A Novel by Lyla Lane.

About the book, from the publisher:

A charming, edgy mystery about a young woman who unexpectedly inherits the best little motel in Texas – replete with a feisty set of golden working girls, a poisoned priest, and a sleepy hometown thrown into chaos.

After a childhood spent combing the dive bars of Sarsaparilla Falls to collect her fun-loving momma, Cordelia West now enjoys a simple, respectable life in Dallas. Then one phone call from the hometown she’s spent years trying to forget throws it into chaos.

Cordelia's great-aunt Penelope has passed away, naming Cordelia the sole heir to the Chickadee Motel. She has no memory of a great-aunt and no interest in hospitality, but the will stipulates that the motel can’t be sold until its residents leave or pass away – so she reluctantly heads back down to Sarsaparilla Falls to figure out who's living in the Chickadee, and how to get them out.

But upon her arrival, Cordelia discovers the Chickadee isn’t a motel—it’s a brothel, housing three women in their sixties known as the Chicks. For decades, Daisy, Arline, and Belinda Sue have entertained the men of Sarsaparilla Falls (with their wives’ blessings)—including the upright Pastor Reed-Smythe, who thunders against the town’s favorite sins when he’s not indulging. Cordelia doesn’t want to be a hotel manager or a madam, but she can’t just sell the only home the Chicks have known—especially not after the pastor is found poisoned in Daisy’s bed.

With the Chicks—and the town—on the verge of a breakdown, Cordelia steps up to mop up the mess. For a small town, there are plenty of suspects: could it be the obsessed nurse with access to arsenic? Developers eager to gobble up the land? The righteously angry town librarian? Things are heating up in Sarsaparilla Falls, and with the Pastor’s obnoxiously attractive son Archer—Cordelia’s childhood nemesis—investigating the Chicks and getting close, straightlaced Cordelia may just have to get a little dirty to make a killer come clean.

Visit Lyla Lane's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Best Little Motel in Texas.

Q&A with Lyla Lane.

The Page 69 Test: The Best Little Motel in Texas.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

From my Q&A with Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr., author of Tore All to Pieces:

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

Tore All to Pieces was the first title I gave this novel. Then I worried it wasn’t à la mode, and for a brief moment I renamed it Held by Fire and Flood. That title felt more fashionable. But the original kept resurfacing symbolically in the text as the characters showed me who they were. Tore All to Pieces is a key. It tells the reader, over and over again, in recursive patterns, across many lives, in many time periods, what it means to be whole.

What's in a name?

Last names matter a great deal in eastern Kentucky. I populated...[read on]

Visit Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.'s website.

Q&A with Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Patricia Seed's "Sails and Shadows"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sails and Shadows: How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade by Patricia Seed.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the early Portuguese Empire facilitated the modern slave trade.

The Portuguese conquered the challenges of sailing the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean, extending their colonial empire along Africa's western shores. With their dedication to developing new sailing techniques and groundbreaking new knowledge of weather patterns and ocean currents, Portuguese mariners set the tone for the Age of Exploration. But their navigational achievements had horrific consequences for the people of western Africa: subjection to the slave trade.

Patricia Seed examines the historical and climatic odds that Portuguese seafarers overcame to be the first Europeans to tame the Atlantic. Using insights from fields ranging from oceanography to ethnography, she recounts how the Portuguese rapidly innovated and achieved profound new understandings of the ocean and sailing. At the same time, she foregrounds the reality that these innovations enabled them to inflict unimaginable cruelty as, against sometimes violent resistance, they forged what became their spoils of empire: the lucrative trade in human cargo that enslaved millions across Africa and beyond. Sails and Shadows is a history of incredible ingenuity outweighed and overshadowed by the horrors it wrought.

Learn more about Sails and Shadows at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Sails and Shadows.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about breaking up with your friend

Sarvat Hasin is a novelist and dramaturg from Pakistan. She has a masters in creative writing from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin Random House India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book, You Can’t Go Home Again, was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India's and The Hindu's best of the year lists. Her third novel, The Giant Dark, was a runaway critical success, won the Mo Siewcharran Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award. Strange Girls is her US debut. She lives in London.

At Lit Hub Hasin tagged "five novels [that] are a kind of canon for the friendship breakup," including:

Maeve Binchy, Circle of Friends

As the title might suggest, Binchy’s sprawling novel tells the story of a group. Drawn together on the first day of college when they witness an accident together, the young Dubliners begin a journey of being in and out of each other’s lives (and in and out of love). The big friendship break up occurs between Benny and Nan when it transpires that Nan has been sleeping with the former’s boyfriend. What Binchy does so well here is draw out each of these characters’ internal lives and motivations. There’s no heroes or villains in this story. There is skill also in her depiction of the collective: when something ruptures between two people can reverberate through a whole friendship group.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Kelsey Day reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Kelsey Day, author of The Spiral Key.

Their entry begins:

Right now I’m midway through a book called I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane. It’s a literary speculative novel in which wrongdoers are marked for their crimes with extra shadows. Every character’s interaction(s) with the “justice” system physically marks them with a new shadow, and each shadow further ostracizes them from the privileged class.

The book is about surveillance and the justice system, but even more it’s about grief and motherhood. The narrator’s wife died in childbirth, and their kid was born with two shadows. The reader follows the narrator through spirals of grief and rage, with the tense hum of dystopia in the background.

I love books like this, that place us in a speculative environment while focusing on...[read on]

About The Spiral Key, from the publisher:

For fans of Holly Jackson and Jessica Goodman, this high-stakes thriller is set in a virtual-reality paradise turned hellscape, from a celebrated writer making their YA debut.

At the start of each school year, Madison Pembroke, the most popular girl at Lincoln Academy, sends out invitations to her epic birthday party in the form of custom forged spiral keys. For that one night, a few lucky teens get to enter Ametrine, a virtual paradise that hosts the party of the year—a wild, unforgettable celebration that will secure their social status in the real world. As Madison’s hated ex-BFF, Bree Benson never receives a key.

Until now.

Despite warnings from her boyfriend, Bree sees the invite as an olive branch, the perfect opportunity to rekindle her once-amazing friendship with Madison. But as the party games begin to turn provocative and violent, Bree finds that Ametrine might not be the decadent wonderland she was promised. And that Madison may have let Bree enter Ametrine, but she has no intention of ever letting her leave...

Kelsey Day’s gripping debut shows that while best friends know each other the best, ex–best friends know how to hurt each other the worst.

Visit Kelsey Day's website.

Q&A with Kelsey Day.

Writers Read: Kelsey Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight historical fiction books about women fighting fascism

Susie Dumond is a queer writer originally from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the author of Queerly Beloved, Looking for a Sign, and Bed and Breakup, and she also talks about books as a senior contributor at Book Riot and a bookseller at her local indie bookstore. Dumond lives in Washington, D.C., with her spouse, Mickey, and her cat, Maple. When she’s not writing or reading, you can find her baking cupcakes or belting karaoke at the nearest gay bar.

At Book Riot Dumond tagged eight works of historical fiction about women fighting fascism. One title on the list:

My Name is Emilia Del Valle by Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende is one of today’s most prolific historical fiction writers, and many of her books draw on a tangled history of war, political turmoil, and fascism in her home country, Chile. Her latest book introduces a bold young journalist, Emilia Del Valle, who defies the gendered expectations placed upon her in 1890s San Francisco and demands her writing be taken seriously. When Emilia learns of a civil war breaking out in Chile, the country of her father’s birth, she fights for the chance to travel there and share the true story of the conflict with the world. Joining a long legacy of real journalists fighting fascism with truth, Emilia is a character you won’t forget.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Christopher Cosmos's "Island of Ghosts and Dreams"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Island of Ghosts and Dreams: A Novel by Christopher Cosmos.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A woman from a small Greek village finds herself swept up in the long and storied history of her island—and its far-reaching impact—in this unforgettable story of love, passion, and resistance.

Chania, Crete; 1941.

When mainland Greece falls to the Germans after incredible and heroic resistance, the Greek government flees south to Crete: an ancient island of Gods and Kings, and Myths and Minotaurs.

Maria is a villager whose husband has been away fighting with the Greek army, and after she finds a British soldier that washes up on a secluded beach near her home, and helps nurse him back to health, the Germans then turn south and invade Crete, too.

Occupation, tragedy, and betrayal follow. The lives of Maria and her family change in an instant and she finds herself in a role she never thought she'd have to play—and one that generations of Cretans have had to assume before her.

Steeped in history and filled with unforgettable characters, Island of Ghosts and Dreams is a profoundly moving and decades-spanning tale of passion, honor, family, the great and enduring sacrifices all generations must make for freedom, and our sacred and immortal obligation to follow the strength and power of our heart, no matter where it might lead us.

Visit Christopher Cosmos's website and follow him on Instagram.

The Page 69 Test: Once We Were Here.

Q&A with Christopher Cosmos.

The Page 69 Test: Young Conquerors.

The Page 69 Test: Island of Ghosts and Dreams.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: L. Archer Porter's "Homebodies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media by L. Archer Porter.

About the book, from the publisher:

Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media sheds light on a fascinating yet often overlooked phenomenon: how ordinary people transform their private lives into captivating performances for the digital stage. Focusing on home dance videos shared on Instagram from 2010 to 2020, the book explores the delicate art of "intimaesthetics"—the aestheticization of intimacy through the interplay of body, space, and media—and the paradox of the homebody. These seemingly spontaneous performances reveal how users craft images of closeness and authenticity, drawing audiences into a curated version of their domestic lives. Yet, Porter argues, these intimate portrayals exist within a larger system of platform control, algorithmic surveillance, and the commodification of personal expression.

Porter utilizes hand-drawn illustrations in place of screenshots, which reflects their commitment to critiquing the exploitative dynamics of digital visibility while respecting the personal nature of the media studied. By examining the intersection of personal agency, algorithmic control, and the commodification of authenticity, Homebodies provides a nuanced understanding of how technology redefines intimacy, identity, and creativity in the twenty-first century.

Visit Archer Porter's website.

The Page 99 Test: Homebodies.

--Marshal Zeringue