Q&A with Nancy Bilyeau

From my Q&A with Nancy Bilyeau, author of The Orchid Hour:

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

‘The Orchid Hour’ is meant to intrigue and entice readers—how can an orchid have an hour?—while carrying various meanings for the story. My main character, Zia De Luca, learns in an early chapter that her gambler cousin, Salvatore, is a part owner of a new illegal nightclub in New York City and its name is The Orchid Hour. Slowly she discovers why it was named that and why the host of the speakeasy, a silent-film actor, would have chosen it. Orchids were fragile and seductive flowers in the 1920s. They were imported, as it wasn’t yet possible to grow them from seeds. They were bought, nurtured, and cherished by the wealthiest people in America. This club had orchid plants on display as a statement about its status and desired clientele. Speakeasys opened late at night, so you could say that this was their hour. But also, the most valued orchid in the club is...[read on]

Visit Nancy Bilyeau's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Tapestry.

Q&A with Nancy Bilyeau.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew Bowman's "The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America by Matthew Bowman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gripping account of an alien abduction and its connections to the breakdown of American society in the 1960s

In the mid-1960s, Betty and Barney Hill became famous as the first Americans to claim that aliens had taken them aboard a spacecraft against their will. Their story—involving a lonely highway late at night, lost memories, and medical examinations by small gray creatures with large eyes—has become the template for nearly every encounter with aliens in American popular culture since.

Historian Matthew Bowman examines the Hills’ story not only as a foundational piece of UFO folklore but also as a microcosm of 1960s America. The Hills, an interracial couple who lived in New Hampshire, were civil rights activists, supporters of liberal politics, and Unitarians. But when their story of abduction was repeatedly ignored or discounted by authorities, they lost faith in the scientific establishment, the American government, and the success of the civil rights movement.

Bowman tells the fascinating story of the Hills as an account of the shifting winds in American politics and culture in the second half of the twentieth century. He exposes the promise and fallout of the idealistic reforms of the 1960s and how the myth of political consensus has given way to the cynicism and conspiratorialism and the paranoia and illusion of American life today.

Visit Matthew Bowman's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about solitary living

Daniel Schreiber is the author of Susan Sontag, the first complete biography of the intellectual icon, as well as the highly praised and bestselling German-language literary essays Nüchtern and Zuhause. He lives in Berlin.

Schreiber's newest book is Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living.

At the Guardian he tagged ten top titles about solitary living, including:

Assembly by Natasha Brown

There are different kinds of solitude and also different kinds of loneliness. One of them is what the philosopher Jill Stauffer calls “ethical loneliness”. It’s the feeling of being abandoned by the society we live in and being confronted with its unacknowledged injustices and cruelties. Brown’s minimalist novel quietly dissects what this kind of loneliness does to us. It unhurriedly evokes our long history of oppression and shows the effects it has on the assembling of our identities. It’s a haunting book that culminates in a decision you can’t get out of your head.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Rooney's "From Dust to Stardust," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: From Dust to Stardust: A Novel by Kathleen Rooney.

The entry begins:

What’s funny is that the real-life person (Colleen Moore) that the heroine (Doreen O’Dare) of my novel From Dust to Stardust is based on is herself the real-life inspiration of the oft remade Hollywood classic A Star Is Born.

During the silent era, Colleen was good friends with Hearst reporter and screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns who wrote the script for the 1932 pre-Code drama What Price Hollywood? directed by George Cukor and starring Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman. St. Johns based the story loosely on Colleen’s marriage to the alcoholic producer John McCormick who helped her become the star she always wanted to be but also made her life miserable through his addiction and erratic behavior.

St. Johns’ script inspired the original 1937 A Star Is Born starring Janet Gaynor, which has gone on to be remade three times, including in 1954 with Judy Garland, in 1976 with Barbra Streisand, and most recently in 2018 with Lady Gaga.

If From Dust to Stardust gets adapted into a movie, I’d cast...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Rooney's website.

The Page 99 Test: Live Nude Girl.

The Page 99 Test: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

My Book, The Movie: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

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

The Page 69 Test: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

My Book, The Movie: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney (July 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Where Are the Snows.

Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney (September 2022).

The Page 69 Test: From Dust to Stardust.

My Book, The Movie: From Dust to Stardust.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Ruby Blondell's "Helen of Troy in Hollywood"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Helen of Troy in Hollywood by Ruby Blondell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Helen of Troy in Hollywood examines the figure of the mythic Helen in film and television, showing how storytellers from different Hollywood eras have used Helen to grapple with the problems and dynamics of gender and idealized femininity. Paying careful attention to how the image of Helen is embodied by the actors who have portrayed her, Ruby Blondell provides close readings of such works as Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy and the Star Trek episode “Elaan of Troyius,” going beyond contextualization to lead the reader through a fundamental rethinking of how we understand and interpret the classic tradition.

A luminous work of scholarship by one of today’s leading classicists, Helen of Troy in Hollywood highlights the importance of ancient myths not as timeless stories frozen in the past but as lenses through which to view our own artistic, cultural, and political moment in a new light. This incisive book demonstrates how, whether as the hero of these screen adaptations or as a peripheral character in male-dominated adventures, the mythic Helen has become symbolic of the perceived dangers of superhuman beauty and transgressive erotic agency.

Learn more about Helen of Troy in Hollywood at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Helen of Troy in Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sung J. Woo's "Deep Roots"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Deep Roots by Sung J. Woo.

About the book, from the publisher:

After solving her first case, Siobhan O’Brien faces her biggest challenge yet – Thanksgiving! With her lawyer boyfriend Craig in tow, Siobhan travels to Minneapolis to endure small talk with the extended O’Brien clan and chow down on some seriously delicious turkey and dressing. Everything’s swell until her sister-in-law Gwen tells her about her brother Sven's frequent late-night meetings with his co-workers. Since Siobhan’s next case is just a ferry ride from their house in Washington state, she asks for Siobhan’s help.

Big sister is happy to oblige, though she’s got her hands full. Hired by Phillip Ahn, a Korean artificial intelligence genius with his own personal island in the Pacific Northwest, Siobhan enters the strange, sequestered world of the uber rich, where Ahn, his wife, his two ex-wives, and his five children all live under the same gilded roof.

Ahn brings Siobhan to his estate because he swears that Duke, his youngest child and only son, is an impostor. Is Ahn crazy, or is Duke really someone else? And could it be possible that Sven’s troubles are somehow linked to Ahn’s? As Siobhan digs into these dangerous mysteries, she learns that family secrets have some very Deep Roots.

Learn more about the book and author at Sung J. Woo's website.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Asian.

My Book, The Movie: Skin Deep.

Q&A with Sung J. Woo.

The Page 69 Test: Skin Deep.

My Book, The Movie: Deep Roots.

The Page 69 Test: Deep Roots.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top campus novels set in grad school

K.D. Walker is a Turkish and Creole writer born and raised in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Pomona College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Cultbytes, the Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. In 2023, she was selected as a Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar and a Periplus Collective Fellow.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight novels that "promise to immerse you in the esoteric bubble of graduate programs, the 'dark academia' mood, and that hazy, never-ending desire for 'purpose,'” including:

Chemistry by Weike Wang

In Chemistry, an unnamed, ambitious, quirky narrator pursuing a PhD in Chemistry at Boston University, faces a life-changing decision when her boyfriend, Eric, proposes to her. She answers ambivalently, to Eric’s confusion and disappointment, who then considers taking a job in Ohio. Throughout this state of limbo, the narrator’s seemingly perfect life begins to fall apart. Amidst a mental breakdown, she throws beakers, quits her PhD program, begins drinking, stays out at night, and reimagines her life. Tracing back to her youth, as the only child of Chinese immigrants, the narrator realizes her upbringing hadn’t trained her to accept love as much as it trained her to look at the world with the lens of the scientific method. And throughout the rest of Chemistry, the aimless narrator crawls back to stability and just maybe learns how to finally let love in, or at the very least, which path to pursue next.

Read about another entry on the list.

Chemistry is among Anne Heltzel's seven novels about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Deborah J Ledford

From my Q&A with Deborah J Ledford, author of Redemption (Eva "Lightning Dance" Duran series):

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

Quite a lot, actually. I love titles of one descriptive word. I tend to choose a word that could have several meanings. Best is one that concisely defines an aspect of my lead character, or an overall aspect of what their journey will be throughout the novel. For Redemption, my protagonist Eva and her best friend, Paloma, work to redeem their past behavior in order to regain approval from the people of their Taos Pueblo tribe.

What's in a name?

Most of the characters featured in Redemption are...[read on]

Visit Deborah J Ledford's website.

Q&A with Deborah J Ledford.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Elizabeth Blake's "Edible Arrangements"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Edible Arrangements: Modernism's Queer Forms by Elizabeth Blake.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Edible Arrangements, Elizabeth Blake explores the way modernist writing about eating delves into larger questions about bodily and literary pleasure. Drawing on insights from the field of food studies, she makes dual interventions into queer theory and modernist studies: first, locating an embrace of queerness within modernist depictions of the pleasure of eating, and second, showing how this queer consumption shapes modernist notions of literary form, expanding and reshaping conventional genres. Drawing from a promiscuous archive that cuts across boundaries of geography and canonicity, Blake demonstrates how modernist authors draw on this consuming queerness to restructure a range of literary forms. Each chapter constellates a set of seemingly disparate writers working in related modes—such as the satirical writings of Richard Bruce Nugent, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield—in order to demonstrate how writing about eating can both unsettle the norms of bodily pleasure and those of genre itself.

Learn more about Edible Arrangements at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Edible Arrangements.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sung J. Woo's "Deep Roots," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Deep Roots by Sung J. Woo.

The entry begins:

Deep Roots is the second in the Siobhan O'Brien mysteries, and back in 2020, I wrote up My Book, The Movie for the first volume, Skin Deep. Since it would be very gauche to recast the lead, I once again implore Awkwafina to take on Siobhan. Since 2020, Nora Lum (her real name) has starred in seven full-length features and a TV show, Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, which has already had three seasons, so there's no question my imaginary casting has had a very positive effect on her career. No need to thank me, Nora! The only other returning character I've previously fake cast is Seth Rogan for Craig, and even though his role is diminished in this outing, I'd love to continue to hear his instantly recognizable laughter.

Now there is another returning character, but because it was a small role, I hadn't bothered to hold a make-believe audition: Beaker. Here's a snippet of Beaker from Deep Roots, where he makes his initial entrance:

Except as soon as my phone touched the desk, somebody knocked on my door. Jesus Christ, it was going to be one of those days, wasn’t it?

“Come in,” I said.

After staring at the five-inch screen of my phone for more than an hour, if a little person had walked in, they would’ve seemed like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But the man that now stood in front of me was actually tall enough to be an NBA center, so it felt like I was craning my neck up at a skyscraper.

Now Beaker, Siobhan's soon-to-be-intern, is supposed to be a sophomore in college, but since we are in fantasy land, let's...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Sung J. Woo's website.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Asian.

My Book, The Movie: Skin Deep.

Q&A with Sung J. Woo.

The Page 69 Test: Skin Deep.

My Book, The Movie: Deep Roots.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten brilliant books to understand conspiracy thinking

Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction: Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy; The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained; Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places; Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith; and Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. He is also the co-editor (with Joanna Ebenstein) of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology.

At Publishers Weekly Dickey tagged ten of the best books to understand conspiracy thinking, including:

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s by Richard Beck

Beck’s survey of the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s is as riveting as it is disturbing. How did a country become convinced that Satanists were hiding in every daycare and suburban home, subjecting children to bizarre esoteric blood sacrifices? How were so many parents and childcare workers sentenced to dozens—in some cases, hundreds—of years in prison on the testimony of coerced children without any physical evidence? How did something that seems straight out of Puritan New England in the 17th century take place in an era many of us lived through—and how did it get almost immediately forgotten after it burned out?

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Wayne E. Lee's "The Cutting-Off Way"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 by Wayne E. Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Incorporating archeology, anthropology, cartography, and Indigenous studies into military history, Wayne E. Lee has argued throughout his distinguished career that wars and warfare cannot be understood by a focus that rests solely on logistics, strategy, and operations. Fighting forces bring their own cultural traditions and values onto the battlefield. In this volume, Lee employs his "cutting-off way of war" (COWW) paradigm to recast Indigenous warfare in a framework of the lived realities of Native people rather than with regard to European and settler military strategies and practices.

Indigenous people lacked deep reserves of population or systems of coercive military recruitment and as such were wary of heavy casualties. Instead, Indigenous warriors sought to surprise their targets, and the size of the target varied with the size of the attacking force. A small war party might "cut off" individuals found getting water, wood, or out hunting, while a larger party might attempt to attack a whole town. Once revealed by its attack, the invading war party would flee before the defenders' reinforcements from nearby towns could organize. Sieges or battles were rare and fought mainly to save face or reputation. After discussing the COWW paradigm, including a deep look at Native logistics and their associated strategic flexibility, Lee demonstrates how the system worked and evolved in five subsequent chapters that detail intra-tribal and Indigenous-colonial warfare from pre-contact through the American Revolution.

Learn more about The Cutting-Off Way at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Barbarians and Brothers.

The Page 99 Test: The Cutting-Off Way.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kathleen Rooney's "From Dust to Stardust"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: From Dust to Stardust: A Novel by Kathleen Rooney.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the bestselling author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk comes a novel about Hollywood, the cost of stardom, and selfless second acts, inspired by an extraordinary true story.

Chicago, 1916. Doreen O’Dare is fourteen years old when she hops a Hollywood-bound train with her beloved Irish grandmother. Within a decade, her trademark bob and insouciant charm make her the preeminent movie flapper of the Jazz Age. But her success story masks one of relentless ambition, tragedy, and the secrets of a dangerous marriage.

Her professional life in flux, Doreen trades one dream for another. She pours her wealth and creative energy into a singular achievement: the construction of a one-ton miniature Fairy Castle, the likes of which the world has never seen. So begins Doreen’s public tour to lift the nation’s spirits during the Great Depression―and a personal journey worth remembering.

A sweeping journey from the dawn of the motion picture era through turbulent twentieth-century America, From Dust to Stardust is a breathtaking novel about one determined woman navigating change, challenging the price of fame, and sharing the gift of real magic.

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Rooney's website.

The Page 99 Test: Live Nude Girl.

The Page 99 Test: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

My Book, The Movie: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

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

The Page 69 Test: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

My Book, The Movie: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney (July 2022).

The Page 69 Test: Where Are the Snows.

Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney (September 2022).

The Page 69 Test: From Dust to Stardust.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top crime novels featuring powerful female characters

Christopher Swann is a bestselling novelist and teacher. A graduate of Woodberry Forest School in Virginia, he earned his Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University. He has been a Townsend Prize finalist, longlisted for the Southern Book Prize, and a winner of the Georgia Author of the Year award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, where he is the English department chair at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School.

[ The Page 69 Test: Never Go Home; My Book, The Movie: Never Go Home; Q&A with Christopher Swann]

Swann's new novel is Never Back Down.

At CrimeReads Swann tagged four crime novels featuring powerful female characters, including:

Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown (2018)

If Raymond Price, Charles Frazier, and Cormac McCarthy had written a crime novel set in 1950s North Carolina, they might have written this. The protagonist, Rory Docherty, is a bootlegger dodging both federal agents and rival whiskey-runners while haunted by his service in the Korean War, which left him with a wooden leg. Rory is a compelling protagonist, but the standout character is his grandmother, Granny May, a former prostitute turned folk healer. In an atmospheric world of moonshiners, snake healers, and corrupt sheriffs, Granny May is a formidable presence, forging her own way in a violent world that is not bereft of hope. She also gets some of the best lines: “‘Christ’s father let him die on that cross,’ she said. ‘I understand why he done it.’ She leaned closer, whispering: ‘But Christ never had no granny like me.’”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Samuel Moyn's "Liberalism against Itself"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times by Samuel Moyn.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Cold War roots of liberalism’s present crisis

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time.

In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.

Visit Samuel Moyn's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

The Page 99 Test: Christian Human Rights.

The Page 99 Test: Humane.

The Page 99 Test: Liberalism against Itself.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Erin Flanagan

From my Q&A with Erin Flanagan, author of Come with Me:

About the book, from the publisher:

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

As with so many final titles, this wasn’t the one I used as I was writing, but it’s one I’ve grown to love. It feels ominous to me, and in combination with the wonderful cover with that weird green sky, it really fits the book. Podcaster David Temple of The Thriller Zone said it feels like “a beckoning and a reckoning” and I love that. I love too that the cover is the two women with their backs to each other, which also feels somewhat ominous to me.

What's in a name?

The protagonist’s name, Gwen, came to me...[read on]

Visit Erin Flanagan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Blackout.

My Book, The Movie: Blackout.

Coffee with a Canine: Erin Flanagan & Mavis and Lorna.

Q&A with Erin Flanagan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books on the rise and impact of hip-hop

Lindsay Powers is a book lover, writer (bylines include The New York Times and The Washington Post), and author of You Can’t F*ck Up Your Kids: A Judgment-Free Guide to Stress-Free Parenting. At the Amazon Book Review she tagged six great books with which to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. One title on the list:

Decoded by Jay-Z

Hip-hop is poetry, and its full lyrical wonder is on display in Jay-Z’s Decoded, another Amazon Editors’ Pick. Part biography, part photo essay, part dissection of his greatest hits and deeper cuts—Jay-Z’s 2010 opus is a must-read for any culture and music connoisseur. You’ll be whisked away to the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where a young Shawn Carter grew up in the Marcy Houses—mere miles, but an entire world, away from the glittering skyscrapers of Manhattan. “When I got a little older Marcy would show me its menace, but for a kid in the seventies, it was mostly an adventure,” Jay-Z writes. It’s the setting where he found his voice as an artist—and his swagger. “Even back then, I thought I was the best,” says Jay-Z, who would go on to win 24 Grammys (tied with Kanye West for the most of any rapper), sell more than 140 million records, and hold the record for the most No. 1 albums of any solo artist on the Billboard 200.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Drew A. Swanson's "A Man of Bad Reputation"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction by Drew A. Swanson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden’s impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In recounting Stephens's murder, the subsequent investigation and court proceedings, and the long-delayed confessions that revealed what actually happened at the courthouse in 1870, Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural North Carolina, Swanson argues, was an economic and ecological transformation. Arson, beating, and murder became tools to control people and landscapes, and the ramifications of this violence continued long afterward. The failure to prosecute anyone for decades after John Stephens's assassination left behind a vacuum, as each side shaped its own memory of Stephens and his murder.

The malleability of and contested storytelling around Stephens's legacy presents a window into the struggle to control the future of the South.

Learn more about A Man of Bad Reputation at the The University of North Carolina Press.

The Page 99 Test: A Man of Bad Reputation.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jerome Charyn reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jerome Charyn, author of Ravage & Son.

His entry begins:

I am currently reading a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk. I intend to write a story about Wittgenstein, who served as a porter at Guy’s Hospital during World War II. This was his war service. My narrator, a young American caught in London during the Blitz, befriends Wittgenstein and the story is about their curious friendship.

Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century. He was also a Jewish homosexual who converted to Catholicism. He came from the richest family in Vienna and...[read on]

About Ravage & Son, from the publisher:

A master storyteller’s novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century Manhattan

Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror.

Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish “Mr. Hyde,” a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.

A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.

Visit Jerome Charyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God.

My Book, The Movie: Big Red.

Q&A with Jerome Charyn.

The Page 69 Test: Ravage & Son.

Writers Read: Jerome Charyn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top comeback books

Mark Dent is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Vox, Wired, The Kansas City Star, and elsewhere. He is also a senior writer at The Hustle, a business and tech newsletter. His work has been cited as a notable mention in The Best American Sports Writing, and he has also been named Texas Sportswriter of the Year. Dent grew up in the Kansas City area and lives in Dallas.

Rustin Dodd is a senior writer at The Athletic. He previously worked as a sportswriter at The Kansas City Star from 2010 to 2017. His work has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Dodd grew up in the Kansas City area and lives in Brooklyn. He is a graduate of the University of Kansas.

Dent and Dodd are co-authors of Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin' Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback.

At Lit Hub they tagged seven of their favorite “comeback” books, including:

Kara Goucher and Mary Pilon, The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team

Athletes wow us all the time with comebacks on the court, field, and track. They face challenges outside of the games, too, which Goucher, writing with Pilon, openly shares in this memoir. Goucher turned a surprisingly successful college distance running career into an even more surprising and successful professional career, winning a silver medal in the 10,000 Meter Run at the 2007 World Outdoor Championships, the first time an American woman had medaled in that event.

Goucher, who trained with famed runner Alberto Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project, was on top of the world. But then she faced a tougher challenge shared by many women distance runners, who contend with a system riddled with abuse, body shaming, and cheating. Ultimately, Goucher achieves a greater comeback than anything she did in a race: triumphing over Salazar to hold him—and Nike—accountable.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joshua Ehrlich's "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge by Joshua Ehrlich.

About the book, from the publisher:

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.

Follow Joshua Ehrlich on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Robert Swartwood's "The Killing Room"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Killing Room by Robert Swartwood.

About the book, from the publisher:

From USA Today bestselling author Robert Swartwood comes another bone-chilling thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

While on vacation in Las Vegas, a businessman wakes up in a strange hotel room to find a dead woman in the bathtub.

Panicked, he runs. But before he can get far, a pair of detectives stop him.

Desperate, he tells them that he’s innocent. That there’s no way he killed the woman. That he’ll do anything not to go to prison.

That’s when they offer him a way out.

But there is no way out—as the detectives will soon learn.

Perfect for fans of Lee Child, Michael Sloan, and Robert Crais, The Killing Room races readers from one revelation to the next at breathtaking speed.

Visit Robert Swartwood's website.

Q&A with Robert Swartwood.

The Page 69 Test: The Killing Room.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five academic novels that won’t make you want to go back to school

Akemi C. Brodsky is the author of The Brill Pill. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a bachelor of science, then moved to the UK to do a master’s in engineering at Imperial College London. She currently lives in the Bay Area and spends most of her spare time traveling, cooking, seeing family and friends, and watching TV.

At Tor.com Brodsky tagged five academic novels that won’t make you want to return to school, including:

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

This is a controversial pick because I have heard some people say that they would love to attend the University. Personally, there are a few too many public floggings for me to voluntarily enroll. Kvothe, on the other hand, is desperate to be allowed in. Spurred by unspeakable tragedy and scrambling from a life of destitution, he is fueled by a need for knowledge, a thirst for vengeance, and his own extraordinary aptitude. School for Kvothe is fundamental but for others it is grueling. The unremitting pressure lands some few hundred students in an asylum known familiarly as the ‘Crockery.’ Though the ‘Crockery’ is fiction, the mental strain of college can be all too real, and for those of us not who are not ridiculously good at, well, everything, the idea of going back is less than appealing. That said, the story begins at some point in the future, where Kvothe is apparently no more than a humble innkeeper, laying low under a false name. A beautifully slow roll into a world of satisfyingly academic magic, The Name of the Wind is a fascinating character study that will leave you needing more (not least because the third part of the trilogy has yet to be released).

Read about another entry on the list.

The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles Series #1) is among Meghan Ball's eleven top fictional bands in sci-fi & fantasy and ten top fictional educational institutions from SFF books, and Arwen Elys Dayton's five top books about false identities.

My Book, The Movie: The Name of the Wind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ali Bryan's "The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships: A Novel by Ali Bryan.

About the book, from the publisher:

I'm a big fan of movies with ensemble casts, tight thematic cores and storylines that intersect, surprise and appease. Think Moonstruck, Little Miss Sunshine, The Royal Tenenbaums, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Barbie. Think The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships. The story takes place over the course of a single night, the hottest of the year, and the most important. The town is hosting a high stakes karaoke competition to commemorate the one year 'deathversary' of Crow Valley's local hero, Dale Jepson, who died after wildfires devastated the town. The prize? Big money and a chance to represent Crow Valley at the National Championships. But as the competition for vocal supremacy heats up, a prisoner (an arsonist and murderer no less) escapes from the local correctional facility and all of Crow Valley is thrown into chaos.

The story is told from five alternating POVs, each of whom share a connection to Dale. There's Roxanne, honorary karaoke judge, mid-life and Dale's widow. She works for the town and after a year, is still knee deep in grief. She carries his ashes around in a Thermos, talks to him through an empty Tic Tac container and wears a headlamp (the equivalent of leaving a porch light on) in case he comes back. She's unhinged, sarcastic and common. She's Melissa McCarthy.

There's Brett, Dale's best friend. They played ball together and...[read on]

Visit Ali Bryan's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Emily Hauser's "How Women Became Poets"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature by Emily Hauser.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the idea of the author was born in the battleground of gender

When Sappho sang her songs, the only word that existed to describe a poet was a male one—aoidos, or “singer-man.” The most famous woman poet of ancient Greece, whose craft was one of words, had no words with which to talk about who she was and what she did. In How Women Became Poets, Emily Hauser rewrites the story of Greek literature as one of gender, arguing that the ways the Greeks talked about their identity as poets constructed, played with, and broke down gender expectations that literature was for men alone. Bringing together recent studies in ancient authorship, gender, and performativity, Hauser offers a new history of classical literature that redefines the canon as a constant struggle to be heard through, and sometimes despite, gender.

Women, as Virginia Woolf recognized, need rooms of their own in order to write. So, too, have women writers through history needed a name to describe what it is they do. Hauser traces the invention of that name in ancient Greece, exploring the archaeology of the gendering of the poet. She follows ancient Greek poets, philosophers, and historians as they developed and debated the vocabulary for authorship on the battleground of gender—building up and reinforcing the word for male poet, then in response creating a language with which to describe women who write. Crucially, Hauser reinserts women into the traditionally all-male canon of Greek literature, arguing for the centrality of their role in shaping ideas around authorship and literary production.

Visit Emily Hauser's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Women Became Poets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Robert Swartwood

From my Q&A with Robert Swartwood, author of The Killing Room:

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

The book starts with a businessman waking up in a Las Vegas hotel room that isn't his to find a dead woman in the bathtub. That's literally the first few pages. So the title, The Killing Room, gives the reader a good sense of what they're getting into when they pick up the book.

At the same time, I've always loved books that lead you in one direction and then suddenly go in an entirely different direction. Many times with thrillers, you know where the story is going after the first few chapters. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing! I’ve certainly written books like...[read on]

Visit Robert Swartwood's website.

Q&A with Robert Swartwood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten female spies in fiction

Kim Sherwood is an author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she lives in the city. Her first novel, Testament (2018), won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing (2022), is the first in a trilogy commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond. Her latest novel, A Wild & True Relation (2023), was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”

At the Guardian Sherwood tagged her top ten female spies in fiction, including:

Moonraker, Ian Fleming (1955)

When Fleming sat down to write Casino Royale in 1952, he intended to “write the spy story to end all spy stories”. He did, reinventing the genre and creating an icon. Fleming is less known for his female characters, perhaps overshadowed by their cinematic incarnations and the trope of the “Bond girl.” It’s a shame, because Fleming invests them with rich back stories and motivations. Best of all is cool-headed and capable Gala Brand, a special branch agent embedded with suspicious rocket-engineer Drax. It’s Brand’s mission that Bond joins, and her first impression is damning: “He could probably shoot all right and talk foreign languages and do a lot of tricks that might be useful abroad. But what good could he do down here without any beautiful spies to make love to.” The tender relationship that emerges delivers the most poignant ending to any Bond novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mariana Alessandri's "Night Vision"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods by Mariana Alessandri.

About the book, from the publisher:

A philosopher’s personal meditation on how painful emotions can reveal truths about what it means to be truly human

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about feeling bad.

In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Søren Kierkegaard sat in their anger, sadness, and anxiety until their eyes adjusted to the dark. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate “night vision” and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity.

Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods―and ourselves―as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human.

Visit Mariana Alessandri's website, and learn more about Night Vision at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Night Vision.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight unforgettable books about missing persons

Una Mannion’s debut novel is A Crooked Tree.

Her new novel, Tell Me What I Am, is due out in the US in August 2023.

At CrimeReads Mannion tagged eight great books about missing persons. One title on the list:

Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan

In the summer of 2005, 18-year-old Kim Larsen vanishes on her way to work. Her Chevette is found several days later in a nearby town. O’Nan resists generic expectations, side-lining the true-crime thriller elements to offer a compassionate portrait of a family afraid to give up in the face of tragedy. Narrated alternately by Kim’s mother, father and fifteen-year-old sister, O’Nan shows us a different kind of procedural: endless waiting, spending nights with the ‘missing’ on websites as her sister does, or taking pills to fall into unconsciousness like her mother. Perhaps the most devastating character is the father, desperately driving up and down highways distributing flyers, trying to keep his daughter in the public consciousness.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Songs for the Missing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Genevieve Plunkett's "In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel: A Novel by Genevieve Plunkett.

About the book, from the publisher:

A young mother finds herself caught between a love affair and the wrath of her husband, who will do anything to put an end to it—even use his wife’s bipolar diagnosis against her

When faced with newfound feelings for Theo, the drummer of her band, married young mother Portia must decide whether to follow her heart or question her sanity. Going off her medication feels like waking up for the first time. But could this clarity be harmless daydreaming, or a symptom of something more serious?

Portia’s husband, a well-respected prosecutor in their small Vermont town, is convinced of the latter. He retaliates, initiating an intervention, claiming that Portia’s behavior is proof of her bipolar disorder. With lawyer-like cunning, he uses elements from her past to break her resolve until she agrees to being committed to a psychiatric hospital. In the hospital, Portia’s sense of reality is tested, and hard truths about her marriage, her love for Theo, and her most vulnerable hopes and desires are revealed.

In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is a potent and at times devastating story of stark tenderness. Written like a dream, this novel brings us toward new understandings of the flawed, yearning, multifaceted self.

Visit Genevieve Plunkett's website.

Q&A with Genevieve Plunkett.

The Page 69 Test: In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Liz Przybylski's "Sonic Sovereignty"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams by Liz Przybylski.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does sovereignty sound like?

Sonic Sovereignty explores how contemporary Indigenous musicians champion self-determination through musical expression in Canada and the United States. The framework of “sonic sovereignty” connects self-definition, collective determination, and Indigenous land rematriation to the immediate and long-lasting effects of expressive culture. Przybylski covers online and offline media spaces, following musicians and producers as they, and their music, circulate across broadcast and online networks.

Przybylski documents and reflects on shifts in both the music industry and political landscape in the last fifteen years: just as the ways in which people listen to, consume, and interact with popular music have radically changed, large public conversations have flourished around contemporary Indigenous culture, settler responsibility, Indigenous leadership, and decolonial futures.

Sonic Sovereignty encourages us to experiment with the temporal possibilities of listening by detailing moments when a sample, lyric, or musical reference moves a listener out of time. Przybylski maintains that hip hop and many North American Indigenous practices, all drawn from storytelling, welcome nonlinear listening. The musical readings presented in this book thus explore how musicians use tools to help listeners embrace rupture, and how out-of-time listening creates decolonial possibilities.

Visit Liz Przybylski's website. Listen to the playlist for Sonic Sovereignty. The cover art of Sonic Sovereignty is a piece by visual artist Marc Kuegle, and the featured musician on the cover is Sly Skeeta.

The Page 99 Test: Sonic Sovereignty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about life after the collapse of the Soviet Union

Irina Zhorov was born in Uzbekistan, in the Soviet Union, and moved to Philadelphia on the eve of its dissolution. After failing to make use of a geology degree she received an MFA from the University of Wyoming. She’s worked as a journalist for more than a decade, reporting primarily on environmental issues.

Her new novel is Lost Believers.

At Electric Lit Zhorov tagged eight books that reckon with the complicated legacy of the USSR, including:

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich

If ‘post-Soviet stuff’ is a genre you’re interested in exploring, I suggest starting with this nonfiction book. It’s a compilation of interviews that Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich weaves into a narrative about the dissolution of the USSR and what those who lived through it make of the rubble. Each voice—from doctors, soldiers, writers and everyone in between—tells a personal story but as a chorus they intone a hopelessness, some nostalgia and the singular ordeal of having lived under the Soviet flag.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue