Pg. 99: Dana Lloyd's "Land Is Kin"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites by Dana Lloyd.

About the book, from the publisher:

Responding to Vine Deloria, Jr.’s call for all people to “become involved” in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd’s Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites, and a rethinking of even land itself. Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle has failed Indigenous peoples for decades. Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights—one party’s religious freedom and another party’s property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win.

Through an analysis of the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which she interprets as a case about sovereignty and the meaning of land, Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play. Rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion versus secular property, Lloyd uses the legal dispute over the High Country—an area of the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations—to show that there are at least five different, but not equally valid, ways to understand land in the Lyng case: home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin. To protect the High Country, the Yurok filed a religious freedom lawsuit but then proceeded to describe the land as their home in court. They lobbied for protecting the High Country through a wilderness designation even as they continued to argue that they had been managing it for centuries. They have purchased large parcels of ancestral land and also declare the land their kin, a relationship that ostensibly excludes the possibility of ownership.

Land Is Kin demonstrates the complexity of land in contemporary religious, political, and legal discourse. By drawing on Indigenous perspectives on the land as kin, Lloyd points toward a framework that shifts sovereignty away from binary oppositions—between property and sacred site, between the federal government and Native nations—towards seeing the land itself as sovereign.

Learn more about Land Is Kin at the University Press of Kansas website.

The Page 99 Test: Land Is Kin.

--Marshal Zeringue

The fifty best mysteries of all time

Gabino Iglesias is the author of the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker award-winning novel, The Devil Takes you Home, as well as author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novels Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, TX and a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and the National Book Critics Circle.

For Esquire Iglesias tagged the fifty best mysteries of all time. On the list at #16:

In the Woods, by Tana French

In the summer of 1984, three children went out to play in the woods near Dublin and never came back. Two of them vanished. The third was found with blood in his shoes and no recollection of what he went through. Years later, the third child is a detective with the Dublin murder squad; to solve a murder, he now has to return to the same woods where he once went missing. A mystery that juggles a creepy atmosphere with childhood trauma, In the Woods is a gripping novel that makes the “go back home” trope feel new and exciting.

Read about the other entries on the list.

In the Woods is among Kate Robards's five thrillers unfolding in wooded seclusion, Paula Hawkins's five novels with criminal acts at their heart, Alafair Burke's top ten books about amnesia, Caz Frear's five top open-ended novels, Gabriel Bergmoser's top ten horror novels, Kate White's favorite thrillers with a main character who can’t remember what matters most, Kathleen Donohoe's ten top titles about missing persons, Jessica Knoll's ten top thrillers, Tara Sonin's twenty-five unhappy books for Valentine’s Day, Krysten Ritter's six favorite mysteries, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Emma Straub's ten top books that mimic the feeling of a summer vacation, the Barnes & Noble Review's five top books from Ireland's newer voices, and Judy Berman's ten fantastic novels with disappointing endings.

The Page 69 Test: In the Woods.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books on booze

Henry Jeffreys is a journalist who writes about wine and other drinks in the Guardian, Spectator and Food & Wine. He is the author of Empire of Booze.

One of the writer's top ten books on booze, as shared at the Guardian:

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

No apologies for including such an obvious choice. So useful have the Bond novels been to drink writers and the drinks industry that there should be statues of James Bond (preferably as Roger Moore in a safari suit) outside Diageo HQ and Bollinger. I’ve picked Casino Royale as it has given us a cocktail, the Vesper martini: made with “three measures of Gordon’s gin, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice cold.” It is especially good made with a decent Polish potato vodka.

Read about another entry on the list.

Casino Royale also made Patrick Worrall's list of ten spy novels to read before you die, Jeff Somers's list of eight books or series that make great party themes, Alan Judd's list of five favorite spy novels, Maddie Crum's top ten fictional characters who just might be psychopaths, Lee Child's list of six favorite debut novels, Danny Wallace's six best books list, Mary Horlock's list of the five best psychos in fiction, John Mullan's list of ten of the best floggings in fiction, Meg Rosoff's top ten list of adult books for teenagers, and Peter Millar's critic's chart of top spy books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Tanya Ann Kennedy's "Reclaiming Time"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Reclaiming Time: The Transformative Politics of Feminist Temporalities by Tanya Ann Kennedy.

About the book, from the publisher:

The post-2016 election era in the United States is commonly presumed to be an era of crisis. Reclaiming Time argues that the narratives used to make this crisis a meaningful national story (e.g., Hillbilly Elegy, Strangers in Their Own Land) are not only gendered and racialized but also give a thin account of time, one so superficial as to make the future unimaginable. Examining the work of feminist theorists, performance artists, writers, and activists—from Octavia Butler and Jesmyn Ward to the Combahee River Collective and Congresswoman Maxine Waters—Tanya Ann Kennedy shows how their work disturbs dominant temporal frames; rearticulates the relations between past, present, and future; and offers models for "doing" the future as reparation. Reclaiming Time thus builds on while also critiquing feminist literary critical practices of reparative reading. Kennedy further aligns the method of reparative reading with the theories and aims of reparative justice, making the case for more fully engaging with social movement activism.

Learn more about Reclaiming Time at the State University of New York Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Reclaiming Time.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books set on New Year's Eve & Day

The Times of India tagged six remarkable books set on New Year's eve and day, including:

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney

The novel takes place on New Year’s Eve in 1984 and draws upon the nostalgia of times past that can be associated with the holiday. Eighty-five-year-old Lillian Boxfish is on her way to a party. She’s a woman who worked her way up in 1930s New York to become the highest-paid advertising woman in the country. As she walks around Manhattan, she meets everyone from bartenders to bodega clerks, security guards, and even criminals. And she reminisces the highs and lows of her life.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Raymond Beauchemin reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Raymond Beauchemin, author of The Emptiest Quarter: Novellas.

His entry begins:

Like a lot of readers, I have several books or magazines or newspaper article going on at the same time. Weekly, there’s the New Yorker, for the articles and, let’s not kid ourselves, the cartoons; and the New York Times Book Review, so I have an idea of what’s going on in the book world even if I don’t get around to most of the reviewed books.

Among the highlights of my reading this year were two books from Boston-area writers, Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies, with a kick-ass protagonist named Mary Pat, who goes up against a Whitey Bulger-like Irish mobster in Southie while confronting her own biases during the busing crisis in Boston in 1974; and Such Kindness, by Andre Dubus III, featuring a recovering addict attempting to make connections with the people around him, or reconnections with the people he lost during his blackout phase, but most importantly get in touch with...[read on]

About The Emptiest Quarter, from the publisher:

The three novellas in The Emptiest Quarter find their inspiration in the sands and streets of Abu Dhabi, where author Raymond Beauchemin lived for four years, a time that overlapped with the building of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums and the opening of Sorbonne and NYU campuses, the convulsions of the Arab Spring and the eruption of civil war in Syria. The characters who populate The Emptiest Quarter live at both the centre and the fringes of the conflict between preservation and progress, including sheikhs, western oil-and-gas men, burned-out journalists, pearl divers, and Filipina caregivers, all striving to find themselves, to find love, to find balance in ever-shifting sands.

Visit Raymond Beauchemin's website and view the trailer for The Emptiest Quarter.

The Page 69 Test: The Emptiest Quarter.

Writers Read: Raymond Beauchemin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mathew Creighton's "Hidden Hate"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Hidden Hate: The Resilience of Xenophobia by Mathew Creighton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Opposition to immigration has fueled a spate of populist movements in the United States and Europe. The potency of xenophobic politics is often explained in terms of factors such as economic insecurity, material competition, group identity, cultural conflicts, and social changes. These explanations have proven to be inadequate, particularly in often affluent and pluralistic contexts with relatively low levels of unemployment and poverty. How can these seemingly tolerant societies harbor intense antipathy toward migrants?

Mathew Creighton develops a new model for understanding xenophobia by shining a light on the layers of intolerance concealed beneath the surface. Drawing on rich empirical evidence from innovative survey experiments conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, and the Netherlands, he argues that prejudice is often present but intentionally and strategically hidden. What can change, however, are the norms that govern the social acceptability of xenophobia. When the public expression of previously impermissible beliefs is pursued by politicians and society more broadly, the stigma of open intolerance lifts to reveal the true face of this once-masked xenophobia. Creighton challenges the assumption that overt anti-immigrant sentiment is mostly attributable to economic or social crises, showing that this narrative overlooks a substantial and largely stable reservoir of intolerance.

Deeply researched, comparative, and generative, Hidden Hate provides timely and vital insight into the persistence of xenophobia.

Learn more about Hidden Hate at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Hidden Hate.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books to help explain the way we live now

Benjamin Selwyn is Professor of International Relations and International Development at the University of Sussex. At the Guardian he tagged eight books to help explain economic development, including:

Sylvia Federici: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)

The World Bank estimates that closing the gender gap so women could start and expand new businesses at the same ratio as men, would generate global economic gains of about $5-6tn (£4-4.75tn).

But why are women so heavily excluded from business activity in richer and poorer countries alike? And what could a book about medieval witch-hunts in Europe explain?

Federici, an Italian-American academic, feminist and founder of the international Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, provides a radical answer.

First published in 2004, her book explains how European witch-hunts were a way of excluding women from public life, while contributing to the rise of the modern wage-based economy.

Federici shows how primitive accumulation had different impacts on men and women. Previously, peasants worked the land as family units, exploited by local lords – handing him some of their produce or sometimes working for nothing. But they could pass on land tenure through the generations. Medical care – including contraception and abortion – was provided within and between households, often by older women.

Federici shows how alongside peasant dispossession and the evolution of the labour market, the modern economic order was built on the destruction of solidarity among peasant households. Lords and early modern states started this process by unleashing a wave of misogyny against peasant women.

Women who administered medical care to others – especially of birth-control – were branded witches and tortured to death. Women were increasingly confined to domestic, unpaid duties, and their labour devalued.

Federici documents how European colonialists branded women cannibals and witches to justify land grabs, enslavement and extermination. They enforced notions of women’s work being in the home.

The gruesome pre-history of the modern economic system was, Federici shows, heavily gendered and is part of the reason why divisions of labour exist today and are so disadvantageous to women.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Angela Brown's "Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time: A Novel by Angela Brown.

About the book, from the publisher:

A woman has no choice left but to enjoy the adventure of life—and its surprises—in a funny and emotionally moving comedy of errors about the gifts of growing older.

Olivia Strauss is turning thirty-nine. No major milestone. She still considers herself young. At least young enough to assume she has decades (emphasis on the plural) to check the unchecked boxes of her life’s to-do list.

Ballerina? Too late. But not too late for poet. Or for reigniting the romantic spark in her marriage, spending more quality time with her son, switching careers, learning to cook, or even dyeing her hair a bright bohemian pink. She’ll get to that one. There’s time—until Olivia’s best friend, Marian, gives her a birthday present she could have lived without.

It’s a visit to a trendy wellness clinic with a state-of-the-art genetic test that can predict the exact date of one’s death. It’s just what Olivia’s always wanted: an expiration date. As for her aspirations, who knew they were limited-time offers? One thing’s for sure. Olivia’s got a lot of living to do. At this point, what could go wrong?

Visit Angela Brown's website.

The Page 69 Test: Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas Pert's "The Palatine Family and the Thirty Years' War"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Palatine Family and the Thirty Years' War: Experiences of Exile in Early Modern Europe, 1632-1648 by Thomas Pert.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Palatine Family and the Thirty Years' War examines the experience of exiled royal and noble dynasties during the early modern period through a study of the rulers of the Electorate of the Palatinate during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). By drawing on a wide range of archival source materials, ranging from financial records, printed manifestos, and considerable quantities of diplomatic and personal correspondence, it investigates the resources available to the exiled 'Palatine Family' as well as their attempts to recover the lands and titles lost by Elector Frederick V—the son-in-law of King James VI and I of England and Scotland—in the opening stages of the Thirty Years' War.

This work focuses on the years between Frederick's death in 1632 and the partial restoration of his son Charles Louis under the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Although the 'Palatine Question' remained one of the most divisive and important issues throughout the entire Thirty Years' War, the years 1632-1648 have been greatly overlooked in previous examinations of the Palatine Family's exile. By considering the experiences of exiled elites in early modern Europe—such as the relationship between the Palatine Family and the Stuart Dynasty—this work will reveal the influence of dynastic and familial obligations on the high politics of the period, as well as the importance of conspicuous display and diplomatic recognition for exiled regimes in seventeenth-century Europe. It will demonstrate that that dispossessed rulers and houses were not automatically rendered politically insignificant after losing their lands and titles, and could actually remain an important player on the geo-political stage of early modern Europe.

Learn more about The Palatine Family and the Thirty Years' War at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Palatine Family and the Thirty Years' War.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 31 best horror books of 2023

Neil McRobert is a writer, researcher and podcaster, with a specialism in horror and other darkly speculative topics; he is the host and producer of the Talking Scared podcast.

For Esquire he tagged thirty-one of the best horror books of 2023, including:

What Kind of Mother, by Clay McLeod Chapman

Clay McLeod Chapman made our best horror list in 2022 with Ghost Eaters, and now he’s back again with an even more insane premise than that book’s haunted mushrooms. In What Kind of Mother, Chapman revisits the Chesapeake inlets of his youth for a story that marries esoteric haunting with down-home Southern Gothic. The world of crab fisherman and parking lot palm readers may be ever-so Americana, but when a grieving father returns to town in a desperate search for his vanished son, the Bruce Springsteen song dissolves into screaming psychedelia. I’m making a point of not spoiling anything to do with the plot here, because that would be a crime, but I will say two things: What Kind of Mother contains the single most upsetting paragraph I’ve read this year, and I will never look at a crab the same way again. Am I being opaque? Sure. You’ll thank me.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: What Kind of Mother.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Amy Crider

From my Q&A with Amy Crider, author of Kells: A novel of the eighth century:

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

I struggled with the title of my novel Kells: a novel of the eighth century. The novel is about the creation of the Book of Kells, but it was not known as the Book of Kells at that time. The monks weren’t living at Kells then, they moved there later. I wanted to keep Kells in the title to make clear this is the Book of Kells, and I tried some variations such as Kells: the Gospel of Columba, as well as The Pen of God. I rejected those because it made my novel sound more religious than it is. My editor decided the title we used worked well enough.

What's in a name?

I read 50 books to research this novel. The very first book I read, Fury of the Northmen, mentioned...[read on]

Visit Amy Crider's website.

Q&A with Amy Crider.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Robert Zatorre's "From Perception to Pleasure"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: From Perception to Pleasure: The Neuroscience of Music and Why We Love It by Robert Zatorre.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why do we love music? What enables us to create it, perceive it, and enjoy it? In From Perception to Pleasure, Robert Zatorre provides answers to these questions from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, explaining how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses. The book is organized around a central thesis: that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable processing of sound patterns, and subcortical circuits responsible for reward and valuation. This model integrates knowledge derived from basic neuroscience of the auditory system and of reward mechanisms with the concept that perception and pleasure depend on mechanisms of prediction, anticipation, and valuation.

The first part of the book describes the pathways to and from the auditory cortex that generate internal representations of musical structure at different levels of abstraction, which then interact with memory, sensory-motor, and other cognitive mechanisms that are essential to perceive and produce music. The second part of the book focuses on the functional anatomy of the dopaminergic reward system; its involvement in musical pleasure; the links between prediction, surprise, and complexity; and what happens when the system is disrupted.

The book is richly illustrated to help the reader follow the scientific findings. Most of all, From Perception to Pleasure provides an integrative model for a large body of scientific knowledge that explains how patterns of abstract sounds can generate profoundly moving hedonic experiences.

Learn more about From Perception to Pleasure at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: From Perception to Pleasure.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best SFF books set in the American South

Renée Ahdieh is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her spare time, she likes to dance salsa and collect shoes. She is passionate about all kinds of curry, rescue dogs, and college basketball. The first few years of her life were spent in a high-rise in South Korea; consequently, Ahdieh enjoys having her head in the clouds. She and her family live in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author of the Wrath and the Dawn series, the Flame in the Mist series, and The Beautiful quartet.

At Tor.com Ahdieh tagged "five of my most beloved SFF books set in the American South," including:

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

There had to be at least one vampire book among the five. The longer I am privileged to work as a writer, the more I admire the gifted ones who can marry the gothic with just the right dash of humor. Charlaine Harris is the queen of making a reader laugh out loud in the middle of a gruesome murder scene. Her Sookie Stackhouse series, immortalized by True Blood on HBO, is the perfect blend of cheeky, sexy, and scary. Dead Until Dark goes beyond the laughs to create a world and a space with one foot planted firmly in the familiar and the other in the darkly absurd. That world lingers with you long after you’ve turned the last page because, at its core, the book is relatable, and the characters worm their way into your heart. Sookie is much more than a sassy damsel in distress, and I still envy people who get to meet her for the first time.

Read about another entry on the list.

Dead Until Dark is among McKenzie Jean-Philippe's thirty-three best vampire books, Meghan Ball's top eight books or series for Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, Sarah Fine's top five books in which special powers have unfortunate side effects, and Rebecca Jane Stokes's top ten books about women in peril…who fought back.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Edward M. Lerner reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Edward M. Lerner, author of Life and Death on Mars.

His entry begins:

I write science fiction for a living. It’ll surprise no one that I read a lot of science and SF: for enjoyment, as research, and to stay current on trends in my genre.

I also enjoy reading that has nothing to do with science, fictional or otherwise. Consider this (anyway, I do) a mental palate cleanser. Two such books from my recent reading particularly stand out.

I’ll begin with The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America, by Walter R. Borneman. Having lived for almost thirty years on the East Coast, I can’t help but be interested in events that shaped this region—and so, the continent. More than informative, this history is grippingly well written. Well aware how the war turned out (how many of us in North America don’t speak French?), I still often found the book difficult to put down. If you ever wondered what qualified George Washington to...[read on]

About Life and Death on Mars, from the publisher:

As though landing people safely on Mars weren't daunting enough ...

The Space Race of the Sixties, at the height of the Cold War, had been nail-biting—until the Soviet Union forfeited.

In the thirties—amid a second Cold War—China is not about to lose the race to Mars. Nor is the United States. Nor, quite the wildcard, is a secretive cabal drawn from among the world's multi-billionaires. All of them scrambling to launch deep-space missions on a schedule to make the Sixties contest appear lackadaisical.

Competition that could only continue on the Red Planet.

More treacherous still? The rivalries, resentments, and distrust that simmer just beneath the surface within each expedition.

More difficult yet? Survival on that arid, radiation-drenched, all-but-airless, planet.

These challenges have somehow fallen into the lap of NASA engineer—and reluctant astronaut—Xander Hopkins.

But the thorniest problem of all? The existential quandary for which neither training nor experience has in any way prepared Xander? Making sense of the seemingly unstoppable plague that has already killed. The plague that seems poised to devastate all life on Mars and another world.

Earth.

Learn more about the author and his work at his website.

The Page 99 Test: Small Miracles.

The Page 69 Test: Fools’ Experiments.

The Page 69 Test: InterstellarNet: Origins.

My Book, The Movie: InterstellarNet: Origins.

My Book, The Movie: Déjà Doomed.

The Page 69 Test: Déjà Doomed.

Q&A with Edward M. Lerner.

My Book, The Movie: Life and Death on Mars.

The Page 69 Test: Life and Death on Mars.

Writers Read: Edward M. Lerner.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Aimee Loiselle's "Beyond Norma Rae"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class by Aimee Loiselle.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources—union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories—Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism.

While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.

Visit Aimee Loiselle's website.

The Page 99 Test: Beyond Norma Rae.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twenty-six of the best nonfiction books of 2023

One title on Publishers Weekly's list of the best nonfiction books of 2023:

America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy by Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar

In an artfully told and richly detailed narrative, Ogbar complicates African American history by highlighting Atlanta’s early emergence as a powerhouse of Black economic and political life despite its location in the heart of a neo-Confederate stronghold. Subject to relentless persecution, Black Atlantans developed a philosophy of self-reliance that, Ogbar shows, interacted in dynamic ways with later civil rights activism.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 99 Test: America's Black Capital.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas W. Simpson's "Trust: A Philosophical Study"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Trust: A Philosophical Study by Thomas W. Simpson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Trust and trustworthiness are core social phenomena, at the heart of most everyday interactions. Yet they are also puzzling: while it matters to us that we place trust well, trusting people who will not let us down, both also seem to involve morally driven attitudes and behaviours. Confronted by whether I should trust another, this tension creates very practical dilemmas.

In Trust, Thomas Simpson addresses the foundational question, why should I trust? Philosophical treatments of trust have tended to focus on trying to identify what the attitude of trust consists in. Simpson argues that this approach is misguided, giving rise to merely linguistic debates about how the term 'trust' is used. Instead, he focuses attention on the ways that trust is valuable. The answer defended comprises two claims, which at first seem to be in tension. One is a form of evidentialism about trust: normally, your trust should be based on the evidence you have for someone's trustworthiness. But, second, someone's word is normally enough to settle for you whether you should trust them. Social norms of trustworthiness explain why both are normal.

Methodologically innovative, Trust also applies the account, addressing how cultures of trust can be sustained, and the implications of trust in God. While it is a philosophical essay, the book is written in a way that presumes no prior knowledge of philosophy, to be accessible to the scholars from the many disciplines also attracted and puzzled by trust.

Learn more about Trust: A Philosophical Study at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Trust: A Philosophical Study.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten best noir fiction titles of 2023

The editors at CrimeReads tagged their ten best noir fiction titles of 2023, including:

Eli Cranor, Ozark Dogs

Cranor’s sophomore novel is an absolutely relentless, hair-raising thriller that manages to be just as full of emotion as it is adrenaline. In a small-town in Arkansas, a young woman is kidnapped the night of the homecoming game, launching her grandfather into a mad search for the one good thing in his life and maybe the possibility of some redemption. But this is a dark, tough story and nobody gets out unscathed. Cranor has staked himself a claim as one of the premier noir writers coming up today, but with Ozark Dogs, it’s the family feeling—that ache of love, obligation, and lineage—that really draws us into the story and drives us toward the fateful end. This is Southern Noir at its finest, and Cranor is an author on a rapid rise.

Read about another entry on the list.

Q&A with Eli Cranor.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jonathan H. Ebel's "From Dust They Came"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California by Jonathan H. Ebel.

About the book, from the publisher:

The untold story of the federal government’s Depression-era effort to redeem Dust Bowl refugees in rural California through religion

In the midst of the Great Depression, punished by crippling drought and deepening poverty, hundreds of thousands of families left the Great Plains and the Southwest to look for work in California’s rich agricultural valleys. In response to the scene of destitute white families living in filthy shelters built of cardboard, twigs, and refuse, reform-minded New Deal officials built a series of camps to provide them with shelter and community.

Using the extensive archives of the federal migratory camp system, From Dust They Came tells the story of the religious dynamics in and around migratory farm labor camps in agricultural California established and operated by the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration. Jonathan H. Ebel makes the case that the camps served as mission sites for the conversion of migrants to more modern ways of living and believing. Though the ideas of virtuous citizenship put forward by the camp administrators were framed as secular, they rested on a foundation of Protestantism. At the same time, many of the migrants were themselves conservative or charismatic Protestants who had other ideas for how their religion intended them to be.

By looking at the camps as missionary spaces, Ebel shows that this New Deal program was animated both by humanitarian concern and by the belief that these poor, white migrants and their religious practices were unfit for life in a modernized, secular world. Innovative and compelling, From Dust They Came is the first book to reveal the braiding of secularism, religion, and modernity through and around the lives of Dust Bowl migrants and New Deal reformers.

Learn more about From Dust They Came at the NYU Press website.

Writers Read: Jonathan H. Ebel (December 2015).

The Page 99 Test: From Dust They Came.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine novels featuring parasocial relationships

Lisa Zhuang is an intern at Electric Literature. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Emory University and currently resides in mid-Missouri.

At Electric Lit Zhuang tagged nine novels featuring characters who are in love with people who don't know they even exist. One title on the list:

Misery by Stephen King

As perhaps expected of a Stephen King novel, Misery delves into the more violent, deluded potentials of parasocial relationships. Starring Paul Sheldon, a best-selling romance novelist, Misery kicks off with Paul crashing his car while drunk driving to LA. He is saved by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who is also Paul’s biggest fan. Rather than take him to the hospital, Annie takes Paul back to her home, where she holds him hostage and demands to read his unreleased work. In the ensuing months, Paul writes to satisfy Annie’s whims and is punished when he fails to appease her.

Read about another entry on the list.

Miseryis among Clare Whitfield's seven literary murderers hiding behind masks, Max Seeck's six most haunting settings in crime fiction, Rula Lenska's six favorite books, Jake Kerridge's top ten Stephen King books, John Niven's ten best writers in novels, Emerald Fennell's top ten villainesses in literature, and Lesley Glaister’s top ten books about incarceration.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Clea Simon's "To Conjure a Killer"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: To Conjure a Killer: A Witch Cats of Cambridge Mystery by Clea Simon.

About the book, from the publisher:

It’s kitten season in Cambridge, and the results can be murder.

Becca Colwin is coming home from her job at Charm and Cherish when she sees a tortoiseshell kitten run down an alley - leading to a dead body.

As a connection between Becca and that corpse is confirmed, Becca comes under suspicion — and is dragged into a cyberware scandal, thanks to her cheating ex, Jeff. The unfaithful computer geek and his high-power investor were working on stealth software designed to record and transmit personal data – a new form of spyware that would be of interest to everyone from the police and security agencies to cybercriminals. And when Jeff’s former friends and colleagues approach her, Becca finds the police aren’t the only ones watching her.

Meanwhile, Becca is sheltering the little tortie, who seems to have some powers of her own, much to the dismay of her three resident cats. These powers may help Becca discern friend from foe, solve the murder, and clear her name - with the help of her mystical feline friends.

Visit Clea Simon's website.

The Page 69 Test: To Conjure a Killer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Syed Ali & Margaret M. Chin's "The Peer Effect"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become by Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the power of peers and peer culture shapes individual behavior and future success

For decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as parents well know, have a tremendous impact on who their kids are and what they will become. And even while they insist otherwise, parents know that they’re largely powerless to change this. But the effect of peers is not just a story about kids; peers can also affect adult behavior―they affect what we do and who we are well into old age. Noted sociologists Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin call this “the peer effect.” In their book, they take readers on a tour of how our peers, and the peer cultures they create, shape our behavior in schools and the workplace. Ali and Chin begin their look at the peer effect at the high school from which they both graduated: New York City’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School, arguably the best public high school in the nation. Through a fascinating and often humorous narrative, they show how peers can influence each other―in this case, how highly motivated students can create a culture of influence to achieve success in learning and in admission to elite colleges. They also show the many other ways that peers can influence one another beyond school performance, from hookup culture to school bullying and youth suicide.

Ali and Chin are also interested in the extent to which the peer effect can last. Through interviews with adult graduates of Stuyvesant, they investigate the long-lasting effects of high school peer culture. They also examine the peer effect in post–high school settings, notably around workplace misconduct, including the steroid culture in baseball and the use of excessive force by the police. The Peer Effect ultimately offers ways to understand the power of peer influence and apply this understanding to resolving issues regarding schools, college graduation rates, workplace culture, and police violence. In the tradition of big idea books like The Tipping Point, The Peer Effect will forever change the way we look at the world of human behavior.

Learn more about The Peer Effect at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Peer Effect.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best speculative crime fiction titles of 2023

Molly Odintz is the managing editor for CrimeReads and the editor of Austin Noir, forthcoming from Akashic Books. She grew up in Austin and worked as a bookseller at BookPeople, and recently returned to Central Texas after five years in NYC. She likes cats, crime novels, and coffee.

At CrimeReads Odintz tagged ten of the best scifi and fantasy crime fiction titles of 2023. One title on the list:

Chris McKinney, Sunset, Water City

Chris McKinney’s Water City trilogy comes to a thrilling finale in Sunset, Water City, set in McKinney’s underwater Hawaiian citadel in a post-climate change future. Read this trilogy if you’ve ever wondered what a Philip K. Dick novel would feel like underwater—that sounds like a joke, but this is impeccable scifi noir and a stirring series for our times.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Sunset, Water City.

Q&A with Chris McKinney.

My Book, The Movie: Sunset, Water City.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Michael O'Donnell reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Michael O'Donnell, author of Above the Fire.

His entry begins:

I have been re-reading Hilary Mantel's monumental Wolf Hall novels about the court of Henry VIII. Just now I'm halfway through the second volume, Bring Up the Bodies. I first devoured these books as they came out beginning in 2009. This second time through, I am really savoring them. Partly this is due to the reading experience. I treated myself to the Folio Society editions, which are beautifully bound in cloth and richly illustrated. But mainly it is due to the brilliance of the prose.

Just the other day I laughed aloud at a passage about the Duke of Norfolk, one of Mantel's most outrageous characters. He often tries to be the alpha male even in the same room as the King of England, yet he emerges as a blustering windbag. Mantel writes that "he looks like a piece of rope chewed by a dog, or a piece of gristle left on the side of a trencher." A wonderful detail is that, for all his puffing, Norfolk is afraid of...[read on]

About Above the Fire, from the publisher:

O'Donnell's debut, Above the Fire, is a novel which finds hope and resilience in the timelessness of nature and the connection between parent and child. Perfect for fans of Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Laboring under a shared loss, a father and son set out on a late-season backpacking trip through the mountains of New Hampshire. They find beauty and solidarity in the outdoors, making friends along the way and falling into the rhythms of an expedition. But when war breaks out during their hike, they are forced to withdraw even further into the backcountry.

Surviving an alpine winter by themselves, father and son must endure the elements, the solitude, and the ever-present danger of outsiders. As their isolation intensifies, their bond with each other grows more fierce. From their mountain refuge they must confront the perils of a changed world until they are forced to decide whether--and how--to rejoin society.

Visit Michael O'Donnell's website.

Q&A with Michael O'Donnell.

The Page 69 Test: Above the Fire.

Writers Read: Michael O'Donnell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kim Tolley's "Vaccine Wars"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Vaccine Wars: The Two-Hundred-Year Fight for School Vaccinations by Kim Tolley.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first comprehensive history of efforts to vaccinate children from contagious disease in US schools.

As protests over vaccine mandates increase in the twenty-first century, many people have raised concerns about a growing opposition to school vaccination requirements. What triggered anti-vaccine activism in the past, and why does it continue today? Americans have struggled with questions like this since the passage of the first school vaccination laws in 1827.

In Vaccine Wars, Kim Tolley lays out the first comprehensive history of the nearly two-hundred-year struggle to protect schoolchildren from infectious diseases. Drawing from extensive archival sources—including state and federal reports, court records, congressional hearings, oral interviews, correspondence, journals, school textbooks, and newspapers—Tolley analyzes resistance to vaccines in the context of evolving views about immunization among doctors, families, anti-vaccination groups, and school authorities. The resulting story reveals the historic nature of the ongoing struggle to reach a national consensus about the importance of vaccination, from the smallpox era to the COVID-19 pandemic. This well-researched and engaging book illustrates how the history of vaccination is deeply intertwined with the history of education. As stopping the spread of communicable diseases in classrooms became key to protection, vaccination became mandatory at the time of admission to school, and the decision to vaccinate was no longer a private, personal decision without consequence to others.

Tolley's focus on schools reveals longstanding challenges and tensions in implementing vaccination policies. Vaccine Wars underscores recurring themes that have long roiled political debates over vaccination, including the proper reach of state power; the intersection of science, politics, and public policy; and the nature of individual liberty in a modern democracy.

Learn more about Vaccine Wars at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Vaccine Wars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books to make you feel better about your dysfunctional family

Marissa Higgins is a lesbian writer. Her fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, X-Ray Literature, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Best American Food Writing 2018, Glamour, NPR, Slate, and others.

Higgins's debut novel, A Good Happy Girl, is coming out with Catapult in 2024.

At the Chicago Review of Books she tagged "ten books likely to distract you from your hyper-specific family dramas and/or destroy you and your sense of self completely." One title on the list:

Poor Deer (out January 2024) by Claire Oshetsky

Poor Deer is an adult literary novel for weirdos. When is a childhood tragedy just a tragedy? When does it become someone’s fault, especially if the someone is a child? This book doesn’t ask if children are capable of harm; Oshetsky knows they are, rather if adults can love children who might just be monsters. Or—to the mothers in the narrative, just as possible—the child might be entirely innocent. The brunt of all this anguish might be a sort of victim, too. Or they’re entirely to blame. Oshetsky’s world is smart, thoughtful, sharp, and altogether disturbing—can you love a child you might just be afraid of? And can children love adults who insist on innocence in spite of reality? If you found the horror/family movies Mother! or Hereditary meaningful, you’ll love this one.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Edward M. Lerner's "Life and Death on Mars"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Life and Death on Mars by Edward M. Lerner.

About the book, from the publisher:

As though landing people safely on Mars weren't daunting enough ...

The Space Race of the Sixties, at the height of the Cold War, had been nail-biting—until the Soviet Union forfeited.

In the thirties—amid a second Cold War—China is not about to lose the race to Mars. Nor is the United States. Nor, quite the wildcard, is a secretive cabal drawn from among the world's multi-billionaires. All of them scrambling to launch deep-space missions on a schedule to make the Sixties contest appear lackadaisical.

Competition that could only continue on the Red Planet.

More treacherous still? The rivalries, resentments, and distrust that simmer just beneath the surface within each expedition.

More difficult yet? Survival on that arid, radiation-drenched, all-but-airless, planet.

These challenges have somehow fallen into the lap of NASA engineer—and reluctant astronaut—Xander Hopkins.

But the thorniest problem of all? The existential quandary for which neither training nor experience has in any way prepared Xander? Making sense of the seemingly unstoppable plague that has already killed. The plague that seems poised to devastate all life on Mars and another world.

Earth.

Learn more about the author and his work at his website.

The Page 99 Test: Small Miracles.

The Page 69 Test: Fools’ Experiments.

The Page 69 Test: InterstellarNet: Origins.

My Book, The Movie: InterstellarNet: Origins.

My Book, The Movie: Déjà Doomed.

The Page 69 Test: Déjà Doomed.

Q&A with Edward M. Lerner.

My Book, The Movie: Life and Death on Mars.

The Page 69 Test: Life and Death on Mars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Sterling Brown's "Shakespeare's White Others"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Shakespeare's White Others by David Sterling Brown.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examining the racially white 'others' whom Shakespeare creates in characters like Richard III, Hamlet and Tamora – figures who are never quite 'white enough' – this bold and compelling work emphasises how such classification perpetuates anti-Blackness and re-affirms white supremacy. David Sterling Brown offers nothing less here than a wholesale deconstruction of whiteness in Shakespeare's plays, arguing that the 'white other' was a racialized category already in formation during the Elizabethan era – and also one to which Shakespeare was himself a crucial contributor. In exploring Shakespeare's determinative role and strategic investment in identity politics (while drawing powerfully on his own life experiences, including adolescence), the author argues that even as Shakespearean theatrical texts functioned as engines of white identity formation, they expose the illusion of white racial solidarity. This essential contribution to Shakespeare studies, critical whiteness studies and critical race studies is an authoritative, urgent dismantling of dramatized racial profiling.

Visit David Sterling Brown's website, and check out the virtual-reality art gallery exhibition that offers visitors an immersive, interactive experience that allows them to see the book’s key concepts in action through art.

The Page 99 Test: Shakespeare's White Others.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve top mysteries & thrillers of 2023

One title on Publishers Weekly's list of the best mysteries and thrillers of 2023:

Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper

L.A. noir gets a startling facelift from Harper, who follows crisis PR manager Mae Pruett as she joins forces with her ex, a disgraced cop turned fixer, to investigate her boss’s murder. As the pair plunge deep into Tinseltown’s dark heart, Harper transports the hardboiled ethos of Raymond Chandler to today’s era of alternative facts and celebrity obsession. This razor-sharp thriller brilliantly captures the zeitgeist.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Chris McKinney reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Chris McKinney, author of Sunset, Water City.

His entry begins:

I just finished reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang and loved it. It’s the perfect example of how important original story concept is. Imagine pitching this: Two young writers, one, Asian, a superstar, the other, white, floundering, are friends from college. When a drunk Athena Liu dies while eating pancakes, June Hayward steals her manuscript and successfully sells it as her own. Only, the book is about Chinese laborers in Europe during WWI, and fanatical social media sleuths are discovering holes. This satirical novel searingly targets publishing, fandom, racial appropriation, cancel culture, and the toxicity of the internet. What a great story idea. It’s one of those...[read on]

About Sunset, Water City, from the publisher:

In the powerful conclusion to the sci-fi noir Water City trilogy, faith, power, and tech clash when our nameless protagonist passes the responsibility of saving the world to his teenage daughter. For fans of Phillip K. Dick and The Last of Us.

Year 2160: It’s been ten years since the cataclysmic events of Eventide, Water City, where 99.97 percent of the human population was possessed or obliterated by Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and Earth’s former savior.

Our nameless antihero, a synesthete and former detective, and his daughter, Ascalon, navigate through a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by barbaric Zeroes—the permanent residents of the continent’s biggest landfill, The Great Leachate—who cling to the ways of the old world. They live in opposition to Akira’s godlike domination of the planet—she has taken control of the population that viewed her as a god and converted them into her Gardeners, zombie-like humans who plod along to build her vision of a new world.

What that world exactly entails, Ascalon is not entirely sure, but intends to find out. Now nineteen, she, a synesthete herself, takes over this story while her father succumbs to grief and decades of Akira’s manipulation. Tasked with the impossible, Ascalon must find a way to free what’s left of the human race.

Visit Chris McKinney's website.

The Page 69 Test: Sunset, Water City.

Q&A with Chris McKinney.

My Book, The Movie: Sunset, Water City.

Writers Read: Chris McKinney.

--Marshal Zeringue