Pg. 69: Amy Shearn's "Dear Edna Sloane"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dear Edna Sloane is a funny, fast-paced epistolary novel about fame, writers, ambition, and the ups and downs of a creative life.

Edna Sloane was a promising author at the top of her game. Her debut novel was an instant classic and commercial success, vaulting her into the heady echelons of the 1980s New York City lit scene. Then she disappeared and was largely forgotten. Decades later, Seth Edwards is an aspiring writer and editor who feels he’s done all the right things to achieve literary success, but despairs that his dream will be forever out of reach. He becomes obsessed with the idea that if he can rediscover Sloane, it will make his career. His search for her leads to unexpected places and connections, and the epistolary correspondence that ensues makes up this book, a novel infused with insights and meditations about what our cultural obsession with the "next big thing" does to literature, and what it means to be a creative person in the world.

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Brian M. Ingrassia's "Speed Capital"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America by Brian M. Ingrassia.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a speedway became a legendary sports site and sparked America’s car culture

The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America’s love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space.

Brian M. Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary oval’s early decades. This story revolves around Speedway cofounder and visionary businessman Carl Graham Fisher, whose leadership in the building of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway and the iconic Dixie Highway had an enormous impact on American mobility. Ingrassia looks at the Speedway’s history as a testing ground for cars and airplanes, its multiple close brushes with demolition, and the process by which racing became an essential part of the Golden Age of Sports. At the same time, he explores how the track’s past reveals the potent links between sports capitalism and the selling of nostalgia, tradition, and racing legends.

Learn more about Speed Capital at the University of Illinois Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Speed Capital.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top too-good-to-be-true tech stories

James Folta is a writer and the managing editor of Points in Case. He co-writes the weekly Newsletter of Humorous Writing.

At Lit Hub he tagged seven titles that "feature technology that’s not ready for primetime." One entry on the list:

Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

Like so much tech these days, Crichton’s next big vacation destination turns out to be an utter disaster. When I first read this as a kid, it was boggling to me that no one imagined how it might be difficult to contain creatures that are famous for being huge. But having lived through a number of highly lauded tech innovations that have blazed ahead only to bump up against obvious pitfalls, Jurassic Park makes more sense now.

Hard to look back on Crichton’s stuff as predictive, though, knowing that he spent much of his later public life claiming that climate change wasn’t humans’ fault.

Read about another title on the list.

Jurassic Park is among Ezekiel Boone's five top thrillers about when technology betrays us, Shawn Pryor's five top books with giant monsters, Nicole Hill's five weird science stories in which nothing could possibly go wrong, Kat Rosenfield's ten worst traitors in fiction, Chuck Wendig's five books that prove mankind shouldn’t play with technology, Jeff Somers's top seven books that explore what might happen when technology betrays us, Damian Dibben's top ten time travel books, and Becky Ferreira's eleven best books about dinosaurs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Ava January

From my Q&A with Ava January, author of The Mayfair Dagger: A Novel:

About the book, from the publisher:

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

The title of The Mayfair Dagger was the starting point for the entire story. I loved the idea of a woman in hiding, not just physically but from herself emotionally as well. Albertine Honeycombe is sweet and soft but has decided she will reinvent herself as Countess Von Dagga, a woman who needs no one and nothing (except money, one rather needs money regardless of their feelings about it). While she might fancy herself a crack detective referred to as The Mayfair Dagger, Albertine learns that changing who you are is never as easy as a mere name change. The reader begins with an idea of who Albertine might be, but that is challenged as they get to know her further.

What's in a name?

My main character is a woman who is pretending to be a married countess who also acts as a detective. Due to laws of the time she was unable to work, hold her own bank account or arrange her own accommodation so she communicates as her ‘husband’ in writing. I wanted to give her a name that...[read on]

Visit Ava January's website.

Q&A with Ava January.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top literary novels masquerading as crime novels

Ash Clifton grew up in Gainesville, Florida, home of the University of Florida, where his father was a deputy sheriff and, later, the Chief of Police. He graduated from U.F. with a degree in English, then got an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. He lives in Gainesville with his wife and son. He writes mystery, thriller, and science fiction novels.

Clifton's new novel is Twice The Trouble.

At Shepherd he tagged five titles that feel "like a genre novel (that is, it has a great plot) but also has the depth and vividness of a literary novel." One title on the list:

What Meets The Eye by Alex Kenna

One thing I really like about this mystery novel is the way it is told from multiple points of view, which is a very unusual technique in mystery fiction. That’s one reason that it felt, to me, so much like a literary novel.

The first character is a brilliant, tortured artist named Margot, who is already dead at the start of the novel. The second character is Kate, an ex-cop turned P.I. who is hired to find Margot’s killer.

Both women are compelling, interesting characters, but I especially liked the way Kenna renders the hero, Kate. She’s a single mom in recovery from a drug addiction. Her ex is a creep, and most of her old (male) cop colleagues are, too. Her struggle in solving the case felt completely real and human to me. And that’s the signature quality of literary fiction.

Read about another entry on the list.

Q&A with Alex Kenna.

My Book, The Movie: What Meets the Eye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Rosamund Johnston's "Red Tape"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 by Rosamund Johnston.

About the book, from the publisher:

In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment. Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia—one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest—by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.

Visit Rosamund Johnston's website.

The Page 99 Test: Red Tape.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Shearn's "Dear Edna Sloane," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn.

The entry begins:

I hadn’t thought about this until you asked me this question and then my brain immediately screamed Olivia Colman, duh. Olivia Colman would be great as Edna Sloane – the way she can be so funny and also have such depth of emotion, how she’s at once totally unafraid of looking or seeming any particular way, and at the same time is so sexy. A slightly unhinged Colman, playing deep smoldering rage frosted with brilliance and wit, that’s what we’re wanting here.

For Seth, we’re going to need...[read on]

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Catherine Mack's "Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies: A Novel (The Vacation Mysteries, Volume 1) by Catherine Mack.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ten days, eight suspects, six cities, five authors, three bodies . . . one trip to die for.

All that bestselling author Eleanor Dash wants is to get through her book tour in Italy and kill off her main character, Connor Smith, in the next in her Vacation Mysteries series—is that too much to ask?

Clearly, because when an attempt is made on the real Connor’s life—the handsome but infuriating con man she got mixed up with ten years ago and now can't get out of her life—Eleanor’s enlisted to help solve the case.

Contending with literary competitors, rabid fans, a stalker—and even her ex, Oliver, who turns up unexpectedly—theories are bandied about, and rivalries, rifts, and broken hearts are revealed. But who’s really trying to get away with murder?

Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies is the irresistible and hilarious series debut from Catherine Mack, introducing bestselling fictional author Eleanor Dash on her Italian book tour that turns into a real-life murder mystery, as her life starts to imitate the world in her books.

Visit Catherine McKenzie's website.

The Page 69 Test: Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten great books about books

Elly Griffiths is the author of the Ruth Galloway and Brighton mystery series, as well as the standalone novels The Stranger Diaries, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and The Postscript Murders. She is the recipient of the CWA Dagger in the Library Award and the Mary Higgins Clark Award.

[The Page 69 Test: The Crossing Places; My Book, The Movie: The House at Sea’s End; The Page 69 Test: A Room Full of Bones; The Page 69 Test: A Dying Fall]

Griffith's newest Ruth Galloway mystery is The Last Word.

At CrimeReads she tagged her ten favorite books about books, including:

The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves is one of the most successful crime writers in Britain. She also a great champion of books, reading and libraries. This book is set at a writer’s retreat with a stunning glass observatory. It’s the perfect location for a classic locked-room mystery with Ann’s usual clever twists and hall-of-mirrors misdirection. What’s not to love? As an added bonus, you have the delight of DI Vera Stanhope mixing with the arty types.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Seraphina Nova Glass reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Seraphina Nova Glass, author of The Vacancy in Room 10.

Her entry begins:

I think everyone expects me to answer this question with a thriller title, but I haven’t read a thriller in a long while. My go-to in the past was often literary fiction, but these days I have fallen in love with personal development books like The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle and The Seven Spiritual Laws Of Success by Deepak Chopra. These books that have taught me to...[read on]

About The Vacancy in Room 10, from the publisher:

The Paris Apartment meets The Wrong Family in this thrilling tale of crime, passion and murder set in a run-down apartment complex packed with shady characters willing to go to deadly lengths to keep their darkest secrets from the stranger in their midst.

When Anna Hartley’s husband, Henry, calls her with a terrible, guilty confession, she can’t believe what she hears. It has to be a bad joke—the mild, predictable artist she married would never hurt a fly, let alone commit murder. But her confusion turns to horror when police find his body washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande.

Desperate for answers to the millions of questions his untimely death has raised, Anna checks in to The Sycamores, the run-down motel turned apartment Henry rented as an art studio. As she absorbs every bit of gossip the eclectic mix of residents are willing to share about her husband and each other, she begins to piece together a picture of a very different man than the one she married, and the life he led behind her back. The more she learns, and the less sense things seem to make, she finds herself wondering: Did she ever really know Henry at all?

But Henry’s secrets aren’t the only ones; as Anna’s search for clues expands, Cass, the mysterious, jaded motel manager, seems more and more determined to keep Anna in the dark. And when threatening letters start appearing at her door, Anna has to decide what’s more important—the truth, or her own safety.

Visit Seraphina Nova Glass's website.

Q&A with Seraphina Nova Glass.

My Book, The Movie: The Vacancy in Room 10.

Writers Read: Seraphina Nova Glass.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles featuring fictional tech with world-altering consequences

Joe Fassler is a writer and editor based in Denver, Colorado. He is an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in The Boston Review and Electric Literature. In 2013, Fassler started The Atlantic’s “By Heart” series, in which he interviewed authors—including Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Carmen Maria Machado, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and more—about the literature that shaped their lives and work. That led to editing Light the Dark, a book-length collection that included favorites from “By Heart” alongside new contributions. Fassler’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, Longreads, and The Best American Food Writing. Fassler currently teaches writing at Vermont’s Sterling College. The Sky Was Ours is his first novel.

At Electric Lit Fassler tagged seven "warped versions of reality [in which] tech is expanding the scope of what’s possible, at a cost." One title on the list:

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

This novel, by far the oldest book on this list, came out in 1995. But its plot could have been ripped from this week’s headlines. The narrator, a mid-career novelist also named Richard Powers, is up late in his campus office when he hears strains of Mozart echoing down the hall, the same passage played again and again. He investigates, and discovers a colleague looping the sonata for his computer system—an early attempt to train a neural net. Powers steps into the teacher role, and over time a new character emerges: Helen, an artificially intelligent machine consciousness, at once eerily human and profoundly not. Their story pulls at knotty questions about machine authorship, human-AI relationships, and the origins of consciousness itself. An astonishing, prescient tale that reads with fresh urgency today.

Read about another entry on the list.

Galatea 2.2 is among Ceridwen Christensen's twelve stories of truly science fictional romance and Ian R. MacLeod's five top novels on the perils of education.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David W. Congdon's "Who Is a True Christian?"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Who Is a True Christian?: Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture by David W. Congdon.

About the book, from the publisher:

"No true Christian could vote for Donald Trump."

"Real Christians are pro-life."

"You can't be a Christian and support gay marriage."

Assertive statements like these not only reflect growing religious polarization but also express the anxiety over religious identity that pervades modern American Christianity. To address this disquiet, conservative Christians have sought security and stability: whether by retrieving "historic Christian" doctrines, reconceptualizing their faith as a distinct culture, or reinforcing a political vision of what it means to be a follower of God in a corrupt world. The result is a concerted effort to "Make Christianity Great Again": a religious project predating the corresponding political effort to "Make America Great Again."

Part intellectual history, part nuanced argument for change, this timely book explores why the question of what defines Christianity has become, over the last century, so damagingly vexatious—and how believers might conceive of it differently in the future.

Visit David W. Congdon's website.

The Page 99 Test: Who Is a True Christian?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Amy Shearn

From my Q&A with Amy Shearn, author of Dear Edna Sloane:

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

I think this title is the most straightforward of all my book titles – it’s an epistolary novel which begins with someone trying to reach, and therefore writing to, Edna Sloane. It’s also the title the book had the whole time, from before I started drafting all the way to publication, which is rare for me – most of my books have their titles changed at some point!

What's in a name?

I liked the idea of creating a kind of totally exaggerated, fantasy alter-ego for myself, and so from the start I wanted my protagonist to...[read on]

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Katie Tietjen's "Death in the Details"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Death in the Details: A Novel by Katie Tietjen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inspired by the real-life mother of forensic science, Frances Glessner Lee, and featuring a whip-smart, intrepid sleuth in post-WWII Vermont, this debut historical mystery will appeal to fans of Victoria Thompson and Rhys Bowen.

Maple Bishop is ready to put WWII and the grief of losing her husband, Bill, behind her. But when she discovers that Bill left her penniless, Maple realizes she could lose her Vermont home next and sets out to make money the only way she knows how: by selling her intricately crafted dollhouses. Business is off to a good start—until Maple discovers her first customer dead, his body hanging precariously in his own barn.

Something about the supposed suicide rubs Maple the wrong way, but local authorities brush off her concerns. Determined to help them see “what’s big in what’s small,” Maple turns to what she knows best, painstakingly recreating the gruesome scene in miniature: death in a nutshell.

With the help of a rookie officer named Kenny, Maple uses her macabre miniature to dig into the dark undercurrents of her sleepy town, where everyone seems to have a secret—and a grudge. But when her nosy neighbor goes missing and she herself becomes a suspect, it’ll be up to Maple to find the devil in the details—and put him behind bars.

Drawing inspiration from true crime and offering readers a smartly plotted puzzle of a mystery, Death in the Details is a stunning series debut.

Visit Katie Tietjen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death in the Details.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Anna S. Mueller & Seth Abrutyn's "Life under Pressure"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Life under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them by Anna S. Mueller & Seth Abrutyn.

About the book, from the publisher:

A rare study that transforms our understanding of why youth die by suicide, why youth suicide clusters happen, and how to stop them

Youth suicide clusters have deeply unsettled communities in recent years. While clusters have been widely documented in the media, too little is known about why youth die by suicide, why youth suicide clusters happen, and how to stop them both.

In Life under Pressure, Anna S. Mueller and Seth Abrutyn investigate the social roots of youth suicide and why certain places weather disproportionate incidents of adolescent suicides and suicide clusters. Through close examination of kids' lives in a community repeatedly rocked by youth suicide clusters, Mueller and Abrutyn reveal how the social worlds that youth inhabit and the various messages they learn in those spaces--about who they are supposed to be, mental illness, and help-seeking--shape their feelings about themselves and in turn their risk of suicide. With great empathy, Mueller and Abrutyn also identify the moments when adults unintentionally fail kids by not talking to them about suicide, teaching them how to seek help, or helping them grieve.

Through stories of survival, resilience, and even rebellion, Mueller and Abrutyn show how social environments can cause suicide and how they can be changed to help kids discover a life worth living. By revealing what it is like to live and die in one community, Life under Pressure offers tangible solutions to one of the twenty-first century's most tragic public health problems.

Visit Anna S. Mueller's website and Seth Abrutyn's website.

The Page 99 Test: Life under Pressure.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about queer relationships

At the Guardian Safi Bugel tagged five "rich, nuanced LGBTQ+ tales," including:

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

Rotting fruit, flies and urine may not be the typical markers of a sexual awakening tale, but somehow Jenny Hval’s strange, feverish world perfectly captures the dizzying feelings associated with unspoken, and unfamiliar, sexual chemistry. After responding to a newspaper ad from another girl at her college, Jo finds herself sharing a dank warehouse flat with no walls and little privacy; tension between the two roommates swells as boundaries break down. Like in her music, which is both uncanny and intimate, Hval’s debut novel is hypersensual and completely immersive.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Cara Hunter

From my Q&A with Cara Hunter, author of The Whole Truth: A Novel:

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

Titles play such an important part in establishing the reader's route into a book. Like the jacket design, it's like a signpost for the sort of experience to expect. You only have to look at the original titles for classic novels to see how vital they can be - would The Great Gatsby have been such a hit if it had been issued as Trimalchio in West Egg? And what about All's Well That Ends Well - doesn't have quite the gravitas of War and Peace, does it.

As for my own books, all the novels in the Fawley series thus far have had three-word titles, all of which have a double meaning. Thus Close to Home (literally, figuratively), In the Dark (likewise), All the Rage (fashion, but also anger - the theme of the book). The Whole Truth is number five, and here the title is - of course - a deliberate reference to the oath taken by witnesses in court, but it's also, as the reader quickly discovers, the name of a podcast, included in full in the book, which analyses a possible miscarriage of justice. The rub there is that the case in question is one where my lead character, Adam Fawley, was instrumental in securing the conviction. And as he well knows, he wasn't the only one back then who didn't tell...[read on]

Learn more about The Whole Truth and visit Cara Hunter's website.

Q&A with Cara Hunter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Peter Carruthers's "Human Motives"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect by Peter Carruthers.

About the book, from the publisher:

Motivational hedonism (often called “psychological hedonism”) claims that everything we do is done in pursuit of pleasure (in the widest sense) and to avoid pain and displeasure (again, in the widest sense). Although perennially attractive, many philosophers and experimental psychologists have claimed to refute it. Human Motives shows how decision-science and the recent science of affect can be used to construct a form of motivational hedonism that evades all previous critiques. On this view, we take decisions by anticipating and responding affectively to the alternatives, with the pleasure / displeasure component of affect constituting the common currency of decision-making. But we do not have to believe that the alternatives will bring us pleasure or displeasure in the future. Rather, those feelings get bound into and become parts of the future-directed representation of the options, rendering the latter attractive or repulsive. Much then depends on what pleasure and displeasure really are. If they are intrinsically good or bad properties of experience, for example, then motivational hedonism results. Carruthers argues, in contrast, that the best account is a representational one: pleasure represents its object (nonconceptually, in a perception-like manner) as good, and displeasure represents it (nonconceptually) as bad. The result is pluralism about human motivation, making room for both genuine altruism and intrinsic motives of duty.

Clearly written and deeply scientifically informed, Human Motives has implications for many areas of philosophy and cognitive science, and will be of interest to anyone wanting to understand the foundations of human motivation.

Learn more about Human Motives at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Human Motives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top gothic novels about distressed women

Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (2023) and a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (2014).

Her work has also appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, and Joyland, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans.

At Shepherd Lee tagged five favorite gothic novels about distressed women. One title on the list:

The Need by Helen Phillips

One of my favorite hair-raising tropes is the hostile doppelgänger, and this one really delivers! After sensing an intruder in the house, Molly, a young mother, encounters a menacing double who calls herself “Moll” and claims to be her from an alternate reality, one where she has no children—which prompts her to claim Molly’s.

What makes this book so tense and creepy is Molly’s unreliable POV as she wrestles with her anxiety, exhaustion, and protectiveness over her two young children. Is Moll the manifestation of a psychotic breakdown? Does Molly want to vanquish her or trade places? The prose is potent and spare, with short chapters alternating between past and present action, twisting the suspense all the way to its ambiguous—but for me, satisfying—conclusion.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Need is among Ainslie Hogarth's eight novels about monstrous mothers, Amanda Mactas's five top horror novels driven by maternal instinct, Michael J. Seidlinger's top ten terrifying home invasions in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Samantha M. Bailey reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Samantha M. Bailey, author of A Friend in the Dark.

Her entry begins:

One of the best things about being an author is when I’m asked to blurb upcoming books from writers I love and admire. One of these exceptional authors is Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, whose latest suspense, Till Death Do Us Part, releases on August 13th . I just finished devouring it, and it’s outstanding. Set in the wine-soaked Napa Valley, this masterful novel ignites in the first paragraph, catching fire until the explosive conclusion. It’s...[read on]

About A Friend in the Dark, from the publisher:

A digital romance turns deadly in this sensual domestic thriller from USA Today bestselling author Samantha M. Bailey.

Eden Miller’s world is crumbling. Her husband blindsided her with divorce, and her daughter barely speaks to her. In an impulsive decision to escape her present and revisit the past, she sends a friend request to her college crush, Justin Ward.

One night twenty-three years ago changed the course of her life. It closed the door on Justin and opened the door to her husband, Dave. But what if Eden could have a do-over?

Eden begins an online relationship with Justin that awakens her in ways she never thought possible, and his voice and words make her take bold risks. But something’s off. He knows too much about her and her family…he’s been following her.

Eden is forced to awaken from her fantasy and look for answers―who really is the man on the other line? The truth about Justin―and about what happened that fateful night two decades ago―puts her and her family in a fight for their lives.

Visit Samantha M. Bailey's website.

Q&A with Samantha M. Bailey.

Writers Read: Samantha M. Bailey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seraphina Nova Glass's "The Vacancy in Room 10," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Vacancy in Room 10 by Seraphina Nova Glass.

The entry begins:

Anna receives a call one evening to hear her husband in a panic admitting that he killed someone which is followed by a bang and the call dropping. Later, his body is found on the banks of the Rio Grande and is considered a suicide. It doesn't make sense, so Anna moves into the Sycamore apartments where he kept his art studio and decides to investigate herself.

Cass has found herself left with nothing after a messy breakup. She is living in this same rundown apartment complex. Desperate for money, she starts a little scheme, blackmailing men for bits of money to get by. One day, however, she blackmails the wrong person and all hell breaks loose as Anna and Cass’s stories crash into one another.

So, for this book, I have been already tasked to think about who would play the lead characters in a movie because one of my previous books, On A Quiet Street, was offered a movie deal and this book is being shopped around for one as well. My husband jokes that he sees Kristen Wiig playing the...[read on]

Visit Seraphina Nova Glass's website.

Q&A with Seraphina Nova Glass.

My Book, The Movie: The Vacancy in Room 10.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Colleen Taylor's "Irish Materialisms"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830 by Colleen Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:

Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830, is the first book to apply recent trends in new materialist criticism to Ireland. It radically shifts familiar colonial stereotypes of the feminized, racialized cottier according to the Irish peasantry's subversive entanglement with nonhuman materiality. Each of the chapters engages a focused case study of an everyday object in colonial Ireland (coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs) to examine how each object's unique materiality contributed to the colonial ideology of British paternalism and afforded creative Irish expression.

The main argument of Irish Materialisms is its methodology: of reading literature through the agency of materiality and nonhuman narrative in order to gain a more egalitarian and varied understanding of colonial experience. Irish Materialisms proves that new materialism holds powerful postcolonial potential. Through an intimate understanding of the materiality Irish peasants handled on a daily basis, this book presents a new portrait of Irish character that reflects greater empowerment, resistance, and expression in the oppressed Irish than has been previously recognized.

Learn more about Irish Materialisms at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Irish Materialisms.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top crime stories set in small towns

Samantha Jayne Allen is the author of the Annie McIntyre Mysteries. She has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Common, and Electric Literature. Raised in small towns in Texas and California, she now lives with her husband in Atlanta.

Allen's new novel is Next of Kin.

[Q&A with Samantha Jayne Allen]

At CrimeReads she tagged six "titles that use crime as the vehicle and small towns as the fuel, all in service of a well-told story." One entry on the list:

Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy

A beautifully written, sharply observed novel told in alternating viewpoints of the residents of Colliersville, Indiana, Tornado Weather’s plot centers around the disappearance of a five-year-old girl who is last seen at the bus stop near her home during a tornado watch. But the real small-town mystery here is actually how the people in a community—in much of America, really—are both disparate and interlocked. Using the kaleidoscopic framework of many different voices, Kennedy examines the forces that both connect and divide the town’s residents: race, class, the feeling of being trapped (by poverty or sheer inertia), gossip, and perhaps even more powerfully, what’s left unsaid and unknown.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Tornado Weather; The Page 69 Test: Tornado Weather; Writers Read: Deborah E. Kennedy (July 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Caroline Leavitt’s "Days of Wonder"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Days of Wonder: A Novel by Caroline Leavitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

New York Times bestselling author Caroline Leavitt returns with a tantalizing, courageous story about mothers and daughters, guilt and innocence, and the lengths we go for love.

As a teenager, for a moment, Ella Fitchburg found love—yearning, breathless love—that consumed both her and her boyfriend, Jude, as they wandered the streets of New York City together. But her glorious life was pulled out from beneath her after she was accused of trying to murder Jude’s father, an imperious superior court judge. When she learns she’s pregnant shortly after receiving a long prison sentence, she reluctantly decides to give up the child.

Ella is released from prison after serving only six years and is desperate to turn the page on a new life, but she can’t seem to let go of her past. With only an address as a possible lead, she moves to Ann Arbor, Michigan, determined to get her daughter back. Hiding her identity and living in a constant state of deception, she finds that what she’s been searching for all along is a way to uncover—and live with—the truth. Yet a central mystery endures: neither Jude nor Ella can remember the events leading up to the attempted murder—that fateful night which led to Ella’s conviction.

For fans of Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace and Allegra Goodman’s Sam, Caroline Leavitt’s Days of Wonder is a gripping high-drama page-turner about the elusive nature of redemption and the profound reach of love.

Learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.

The Page 69 Test: Days of Wonder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kristalyn Marie Shefveland "Selling Vero Beach"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Selling Vero Beach: Settler Myths in the Land of the Aís and Seminole by Kristalyn Marie Shefveland.

About the book, from the publisher:

Separating “Old Florida” myths from realities in a tourist haven with a deep Indigenous past

Themes of unspoiled paradise tamed by progress can be seen in stories about pioneer history across the United States, especially in Florida. Selling Vero Beach explores how settlers from northern states created myths about the Indian River area on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, importing ideas about the region’s Indigenous peoples and marketing the land as an idyllic, fertile place of possibilities.

In this book, Kristalyn Shefveland describes how in the Gilded Age, Indian River Farms Company and other boosters painted the region as a wild frontier, conveniently accessible by train via Henry Flagler’s East Coast Railway. Shefveland provides an overview of local Aís and Seminole histories that were rewritten by salespeople, illustrates how agricultural companies used Native peoples as motifs on their fruit products, and includes never-before-published letters between Vero Beach entrepreneur Waldo Sexton and writer Zora Neale Hurston that highlight Sexton’s interest in story-spinning and sales.

Selling Vero Beach unpacks real and fabricated pasts, showing how the settler memory of Florida distorted or erased the fascinating actual history of the region. With a wide variety of stories invented to lure investors and tourists, many of which circulate to this day in a place that remains a top vacation destination, Vero Beach is an intriguing example of why and how certain pasts were concocted to sell Florida land and products.

Learn more about Selling Vero Beach at the University Press of Florida website.

The Page 99 Test: Selling Vero Beach.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about unconventional situationships

Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American.

Her work and writing have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

The Band is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Ma-Kellams tagged seven books that feature situationships "replete with the kind of sexual tension that makes you wonder: will they or won’t they?" One title on the list:

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Some readers went crazy over the fact that at the end of 432 pages, Selin and Ivan (the protagonist and her love interest) seems to have never consummated their relationship. I found it the most relatable thing I read all year because I, too, spent all my college years in the same kind of sexual repression driven by a cocktail of being the good daughter of immigrants meets excessive intellect meets nerd school. Like the elusive Hungarian mathematician that is the (potentially underserved) target of Selin’s desires, the book can come off like a giant tease—the literary equivalent of blue balls—but then again, that might be part of its appeal.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Idiot is among Lauren Hutton's ten books about young women in (and out) of love and Katherine Heiny's eight of the best books about modern dating.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt

From my Q&A with Caroline Leavitt, author of Days of Wonder: A Novel:

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

Days of Wonder is a little deceptive as a name of a book because it’s a title of hope. The book is about two 15-year-olds from different classes in NYC who fall madly in love and are about to be separated by the boy’s abusive father, and so they start fantasizing about killing him. And then the fantasy veers into something realer, and both kids are accused of attempted murder. Both kids were sleep-deprived and drugged-up the night of crime, and neither can really remember just what happened. Jude, with a wealthy dad and a good lawyer, goes free, but Ella gets 25 years. When she’s early released after six years, she’s desperate to find Jude, to find her child, and to find out what really happened that night, and why?

Doesn’t seem like the stuff of wonder, does it? But I wanted to focus on the bright glints of life or hope that appear in a lot of the novel’s darkness. Yes, this great gorgeous young love is destroyed, but like that great old movie, Splendor in the Grass, there is always the memory of it. Things don’t work out the way any of the characters imagine they will, and there is a tremendous cost to everyone, but out of that darkness, there is growth, understanding, and yeah, a sense of wonder about how the world works. I wanted that wonder to be revealed at the end when...[read on]

Visit Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Regina Kunzel's "In the Shadow of Diagnosis"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life by Regina Kunzel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.

In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

Learn more about In the Shadow of Diagnosis at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Criminal Intimacy.

The Page 99 Test: In the Shadow of Diagnosis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books for fans of David Nicholls's "One Day"

British author David Nicholls is best-known for the globally bestselling love story One Day, adapted first as a feature film and more recently as a major Netflix production. It charts the lives of two people over 20 years on the same day. People magazine called it an "instant classic.... One of the most ...emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter."

Nicholls's new novel is You Are Here.

At the Waterstones blog Mark Skinner tagged nine literary love stories for fans of One Day. One title on the list:

Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Rootless Hannah finds her future split two ways as she decides whether or not to spend the night with her high school boyfriend in this escapist romance from the bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

Read about another entry on the list.

Maybe in Another Life is among David M. Barnett's top ten summer love stories and Phoebe Fox's seven books to help you cope with heartbreak.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Helen Benedict's "The Good Deed"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Good Deed by Helen Benedict.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set in 2018 against the ironic backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful, Homeric island of Samos in Greece, The Good Deed follows the stories of five women: Amina, who is nineteen and has just been released from one of Bashar al-Assad's secret and torture-ridden prisons in Syria; Leila, a Syrian widow with two little sons, who has lost her daughter and granddaughter to smugglers on a Turkish beach; Nafisa, who survived civil war and gang rape in Sudan only to see her entire family murdered, save for one daughter; Farah, Leila's lost daughter; and finally, an American named Hilma, who came from New York to Samos to escape her own dark secret, only to become entangled in conflict with the very people she wishes to help.

Drawing from four years of interviews with refugees on Samos, along with twelve previous years of work on the Iraq War, Benedict has written The Good Deed as a series of lyrical, intensely felt alternating voices, following these women’s everyday lives in the camp, as well each of their backstories—stories of families, love, secrets, violence, war, and flight. When Hilma, the American, unwittingly does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

In essence, The Good Deed is about the struggle never to lose hope, even in the face of war and the world’s hostility to refugees; the complexities that arise out of trying to help others; the healing power of friendship; and the everlasting bonds between mothers and children.

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

The Page 69 Test: The Good Deed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Charles Trueheart's "Diplomats at War"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict by Charles Trueheart.

About the book, from the publisher:

For two Americans in Saigon in 1963, the personal and the political combine to spark the drama of a lifetime

Before it spread into a tragic war that defined a generation, the conflict in Vietnam smoldered as a guerrilla insurgency and a diplomatic nightmare. Into this volatile country stepped Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, the US ambassador, and his second-in-command, William “Bill” Trueheart, immortalized in David Halberstam’s landmark work The Best and the Brightest and accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern US history.

Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart—Bill’s son and Nolting’s godson—who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States’ headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point—that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, served as a dramatic preface to the United States’ disastrous involvement in the Vietnam conflict.

Visit Charles Trueheart's website.

The Page 99 Test: Diplomats at War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five great murder mysteries set in college towns

Harry Dolan is the author of the mystery/suspense novels Bad Things Happen, Very Bad Men, The Last Dead Girl, The Man In The Crooked Hat, and The Good Killer. He graduated from Colgate University, where he majored in philosophy and studied fiction-writing with the novelist Frederick Busch. A native of Rome, New York, he now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Dolan's new novel is Don't Turn Around.

At CrimeReads he tagged "five crime novels that have entertained and influenced me—all of them set in college towns." One title on the list:

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Scarlett Clark is a professor of English literature at Pennsylvania’s Gorman University—and a killer who targets men who abuse Gorman’s female students. She’s been getting away with it for sixteen years, but her most recent kill prompts the university to set up a task force to look into the suspicious deaths that keep happening on campus. Now she’ll need to take special care as she plans her next murder and strikes up a relationship with the head of the task force, Mina Pierce. In a parallel storyline, Gorman student Carly Schiller witnesses an assault on her roommate Allison at a party and begins to think about taking revenge on the fellow student who’s responsible. Fargo writes in short, propulsive chapters that ratchet up the tension on the way to a conclusion that’s both disturbing and satisfying.

Read about another entry on the list.

They Never Learn is among Katherine A. Olson's five top books with righteous female rage, Laura Picklesimer's seven dark and thrilling novels about women who kill, Julia Bartz's five thrillers featuring female psychopaths, Misha Popp's eight recent novels featuring truly fatal femmes fatales, Lesley Kara's six top crime novels about settling old scores, Heather Levy's top eight books on those darkest guilty pleasures we love to devour, Melissa Colasanti's six deliciously duplicitous female characters in thrillers, Amy Gentry's novels of the new Dark Academia canon, and Molly Odintz's six best vigilante thrillers.

My Book, The Movie: They Never Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue