Pg. 99: Carola Binder's "Shock Values"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy by Carola Binder.

About the book, from the publisher:

How inflation and deflation fears shape American democracy.

Many foundational moments in American economic history—the establishment of paper money, wartime price controls, the rise of the modern Federal Reserve—occurred during financial panics as prices either inflated or deflated sharply. The government’s decisions in these moments, intended to control price fluctuations, have produced both lasting effects and some of the most contentious debates in the nation’s history.

A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, Shock Values reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.

Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.

Visit Carola Binder's website.

The Page 99 Test: Shock Values.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ash Clifton's "Twice the Trouble," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Twice the Trouble by Ash Clifton.

The entry begins:

I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about this topic. A lot. Like practically everybody else these days, I'm a movie buff, and in my mind I'm a great film director. Specifically, I’m a big fan of Michael Mann's films, to the point that I believe the tone and pacing of movies like Thief, Heat, and Collateral were an influence on my book. Mann would be at the top of my dream list to direct any adaptation of Twice the Trouble. My second choice would be Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed a brilliant little noir thriller called Drive. That movie, also, had a strong influence on me.

(Heck, I believe that Steven Spielberg would be a great choice as director. No, I’m serious. People think he only directs fantasies, but he has a real dark side. Hello? Jaws? Munich? Schindler’s List?)

Regarding casting, my main character, Noland Twice, is a former star athlete who has become a private investigator. Whoever plays him would need to be relatively young (30-ish) and athletic. Also, Noland is smart, funny, and resourceful. He's a bit of a trickster. To top it all off, he's Southern, so...[read on]

Visit Ash Clifton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Twice the Trouble.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Kate Feiffer

From my Q&A with Kate Feiffer, author of Morning Pages:

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

Morning Pages — three pages written every morning, the moment you wake up. This was Julia Cameron's suggestion to help creatives get over their blocks in her beloved book The Artist’s Way. Just write, it doesn't matter what you're writing, what matters is that you’re writing. The story in my novel Morning Pages is revealed through the main character’s morning pages. I titled my novel for the device used to tell the story. I suppose if her story was told through diary entries, I would have titled the book Diary.

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

We like to believe that we've evolved since our gnarly teenage years, that we think about different things, that the years behind us have provided us with...[read on]

Visit Kate Feiffer's website.

Writers Read: Kate Feiffer (May 2011).

The Page 69 Test: Morning Pages.

Q&A with Kate Feiffer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven books for "The Three-Body Problem" fans

Neil McRobert is a writer and critic with a Ph.D. in contemporary horror fiction. At Vulture he tagged eleven books for fans of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem. One title on the list:

The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Science fiction is full of multiverses. Many stories follow along the branching paths of the Many Worlds theory, in which a butterfly flapping its wings causes an electro-quake in Orion’s Belt or the death of a god on Proxima Centauri. (Great idea actually, noted down!) The Doors of Eden is a different take on the conceit. Rather than positing the various forked futures ahead, Tchaikovsky peers into the deep past, examining all the potential routes of planetary evolution, had conditions differed just slightly. These musings are presented as interstitial chapters in between the central thrust of the plot, which concerns strange creatures on the English moors and a shadowy governmental conspiracy. It’s all great rollocking stuff, but those evolutionary thought experiments are where the author’s imagination really takes flight. Most fans would recommend Tchaikovsky’s lauded “Children of Time” trilogy, but The Doors of Eden shares more of the niche scientific enthusiasm of The Three-Body Problem.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Victor Manibo's "Escape Velocity"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo.

About the book, from the publisher:

A twisty new near-future genre-bending thriller: Knives Out in space with a Parasite twist.

A decades-old murder looms over the glamorous clientele of a high-end space hotel . . . while an unforeseen threat percolates in the service corridors. The guests are about to experience the hospitality they deserve.

Space Habitat Altaire is the premier luxury resort in low Earth orbit, playground of the privileged and the perfect location to host reunions for the Rochford Institute. Rochford boasts only the best: the wealthiest, most promising students with the most impressive pedigrees. Complete with space walks, these lavish reunions are a prime opportunity for alumni to jockey for power with old friends and rivals—and crucially, to advance their applications to live in an exclusive Mars settlement. Earth is dying, and only the best deserve to save themselves.

Aboard the Altaire for their 25th reunion, finance magnate Ava pursues the truth about her brother’s murder during their senior year, which cast a dark shadow over their time at Rochford. Laz, ambassador and political scion, hopes to finally win Ava’s heart. Sloane, collecting secrets to conceal his family’s decline, angles for a key client. And Henry, heir to a healthcare empire, creates an unorthodox opportunity to get to Mars in a last-ditch effort to outrun a childhood secret.

While these erstwhile friends settle scores and rack up points, they fail to notice that other agendas are afoot at the Space Habitat Altaire, and their own futures aren’t the only ones at stake—“the best” will soon regret underestimating those they would leave behind on Earth.

Visit Victor Manibo's website.

The Page 69 Test: Escape Velocity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Michael A. Cook's "A History of the Muslim World"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity by Michael A. Cook.

About the book, from the publisher:

A panoramic history of the Muslim world from the age of the Prophet Muḥammad to the birth of the modern era

This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

After setting the scene in the Middle East of late antiquity, the book depicts the rise of Islam as one of the great black swan events of history. It continues with the spectacular rise of the Caliphate, an empire that by the time it broke up had nurtured the formation of a new civilization. It then goes on to cover the diverse histories of all the major regions of the Muslim world, providing a wide-ranging account of the key military, political, and cultural developments that accompanied the eastward and westward spread of Islam from the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

At the same time, A History of the Muslim World contains numerous primary-source quotations that expose the reader to a variety of acutely insightful voices from the Muslim past.

Learn more about A History of the Muslim World at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A History of the Muslim World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels set on fictional islands

Elizabeth O'Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes.

O'Connor's new novel is Whale Fall.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight novels that are

set on unnamed or fictional islands; making them not grounded in a specific geography of place, but in the idea of an island. These unnamed islands have a global reach across Europe, Asia, East Africa, and North America, but the islands’ conditions—of isolation, of insularity, of instability—point to similar underlying ideas of disruption, allegory, colonial legacy and environmental care, forming an archipelago of novels mapping their connections to each other.

One title on O'Connor's list:

The Colony by Audrey Magee

I found The Colony greatly inspiring while finishing the edits for Whale Fall. Magee’s unnamed island has some geographical models in the peninsulas around the coastline of West Ireland, such as the Aran islands and Blasket islands, and clear literary heritage in J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Colm Tóibín. Yet as its title suggests, Magee’s island is deliberately unnamed to place its themes ahead of geography; it is a novel about colonialism, culture, and language.

Its drama, as with other titles on this list, concerns the arrival of outsiders: Lloyd is a London artist looking to revitalise his flagging career, and Jean-Pierre, a French linguist, charting and recording the island’s native Irish language. They clash over their mythologising of the islanders, whose numbers dwindle in the double-figures, and overlook their impact on this struggling community. While the story roots itself in an Irish perspective, with radio bulletins about the Troubles in Northern Ireland interspersing the narrative, it dramatises the legacy between colonised and coloniser with a global outlook.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marion McNabb's "Some Doubt About It," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Some Doubt About It: A Novel by Marion McNabb.

The entry begins:

I worked for several years as a screenwriter on a children’s animated preschool program and had an absolute ball. It was amazing to see WRITTEN BY with my name underneath scrolling across my television. My phone’s camera roll will prove just how exciting that felt. Which is to say I have some experience in Hollywood. I spent years toiling away on the craft and in that time wrote three feature films, one was optioned at one point, and several pilots and pitched to, and was working on producing material with, studios all over Los Angeles. Universal, Disney, Apple, Nickelodeon, etc. to name a few. Having honed my skills as a screenwriter I unconsciously perhaps trained myself to write with particular actors in mind.

Writing narrative fiction is a little bit of a different process. I don’t think I fully realize until I’m well into the story exactly who the actor is but once it clicks I see them in my mind’s eye as I continue on and all through edits. This isn’t necessarily the case for all of the characters, sometimes it’s more pronounced for one initially and then a mixture of other actors for the other characters which was the case for my latest.

This novel, Some Doubt About It straddles the Hollywood line in and of itself. Caroline, a self- billed “Success at Life” guru to the stars has a couple of very bad days and must leave the glitz and glamour of LA for stodgy old Cape Cod and in so doing she learns what true success, and love, are really about.

Caroline, our protagonist, is a small town girl who decided she would be rich and famous and she achieved that goal but she felt empty. I think as I wrote she morphed and change from what was in my head to what ended up in the edited final. She is a bit more of an amalgamation of several actors - Jennifer Garner, Reese Witherspoon and maybe a dash of Sandra Bullock and a spritz of Amy...[read on]

Visit Marion McNabb's website.

My Book, The Movie: Some Doubt About It.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg 99: Nadine A. Sinno's "A War of Colors"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut by Nadine A. Sinno.

About the book, from the publisher:

Demonstrates the role of Beirut’s postwar graffiti and street art in transforming the cityscape and animating resistance.

Over the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physical and social spaces. In A War of Colors, Nadine Sinno examines how graffiti and street art have been used in postwar Beirut to comment on the rapidly changing social dynamics of the country and region. Analyzing how graffiti makers can reclaim and transform cityscapes that were damaged or monopolized by militias during the war, Sinno explores graffiti’s other roles, including forging civic engagement, commemorating cultural icons, protesting political corruption and environmental violence, and animating resistance. In addition, she argues that graffiti making can offer voices to those who are often marginalized, especially women and LGBTQ people. Copiously illustrated with images of graffiti and street art, A War of Colors is a visually captivating and thought-provoking journey through Beirut, where local and global discourses intersect on both scarred and polished walls in the city.

Learn more about A War of Colors at the University of Texas Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A War of Colors.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the greatest campus novels ever written

Elise Juska’s new novel, Reunion, was named one of People Magazine’s “Best Books to Read in May 2024.” Her previous novels include The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and If We Had Known. Juska’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize from Ploughshares, and her short fiction has been cited by The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

[The Page 69 Test: Reunion; My Book, The Movie: Reunion]

At CrimeReads Juska tagged eight novels "that interrogate the modern college experience or reflect on the past with a knowing eye." One title on the list:

Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members

This blistering academic satire is composed as a series of letters by Jason Fitger, a writing and literature professor at a meh Midwestern college, contending with drastic budget cuts to the English department and his once-promising writing career. He’s routinely called upon to compose letters for students, colleagues, committees—the very relentlessness of these letters a jab at academic culture—to say nothing of their content, which is scathingly funny and wincingly true. (Schumacher’s sequels, The Shakespeare Experiment and The English Experience, are hilarious/painful too.)

Read about another entry on the list.

Dear Committee Members is among Emily Temple's sixty top campus novels from the last 100 years, Louise Dean's top ten novels about novelists, Emily Temple's fifteen great campus novels published in the last decade, Jenn Ashworth and Richard V. Hirst's ten top modern epistolary novels, Maureen Corrigan's top 12 books of 2014, Kate DiCamillo's 3 favorite books of 2014, and Ellen Wehle's four top novels "in which teachers and students run just a little bit off the rails."

The Page 69 Test: Dear Committee Members.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Catherine Ryan Hyde's "Life, Loss, and Puffins"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Life, Loss, and Puffins: A Novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exhilarating and emotional novel about grief, hope, friendship, and taking life one beautiful and spontaneous day at a time by New York Times bestselling author Catherine Ryan Hyde.

Freakishly smart. That’s the unwelcome box Ru Evans is put into for life. After all, she taught herself euclidean geometry at age seven, has an eidetic memory, and is about to enter college at thirteen years old.

Boarding at a house near campus 150 miles from home, Ru meets seventeen-year-old Gabriel, an outsider himself who, like Ru, has trouble making friends―until they form a fast sibling-like bond. Finding a relatable someone in the world to talk to is a first for both of them.

But when Ru’s mother dies and the threat of living with her miserable aunt looms, Ru hatches an escape. It’s an impulsive road trip that takes Ru and Gabriel from California to Canada, where Ru can fulfill her ultimate dream: to see Atlantic puffins in the glorious wild.

Mile by mile, Ru discovers the joy of friendship, found family, dark night skies, and the aurora borealis, and she basks in going from being a smart person to just a person. Though she knows they’ll be in trouble when they’re caught, for the short time they are navigating twist by twist of an unknown road, the freedom is liberating, and she is living for what feels like the first time.

Visit Catherine Ryan Hyde's website.

Q&A with Catherine Ryan Hyde.

The Page 69 Test: Brave Girl, Quiet Girl.

The Page 69 Test: My Name is Anton.

The Page 69 Test: Seven Perfect Things.

The Page 69 Test: Boy Underground.

The Page 69 Test: Dreaming of Flight.

The Page 69 Test: So Long, Chester Wheeler.

The Page 69 Test: A Different Kind of Gone.

The Page 69 Test: Life, Loss, and Puffins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Elizabeth Abel's "Odd Affinities"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies by Elizabeth Abel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new reading of Virginia Woolf in the context of “long modernism.”

In recent decades, Virginia Woolf’s contribution to literary history has been located primarily within a female tradition. Elizabeth Abel dislodges Woolf from her iconic place within this tradition to uncover her shadowy presence in other literary genealogies. Abel elicits unexpected echoes of Woolf in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called “odd affinities” that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence. Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and African American studies.

Learn more about Odd Affinities at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Odd Affinities.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top fictional works featuring sisters

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the new novel We Were the Universe and the short story collection Black Light, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.

At Lit Hub she tagged five favorite fictional works featuring sisters, including:

Cecily Wong, Kaleidoscope

Riley and Morgan Brighton—the dynamic, beautifully rendered sisters in Cecily Wong’s Kaleidoscope—are opposites in many ways, but they love each other tremendously. They are close-knit, well adjusted, and supportive (without giving too much away, the opening scene exemplifies the way siblings bond during hard times, showing how resilient they can be when tackling problems together). When a sudden tragedy strikes, Riley is forced to reexamine her relationship with Morgan, with herself, and with the world at large—she sets out on a radiant path of discovery.

Kaleidoscope is impeccably structured and thoroughly researched—it’s about sisterhood, but it’s also part adventure story, part travelogue, and there’s even a little bit of mystery mixed in. Wong’s dry humor and careful observations underpin this moving, ultimately hopeful novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elise Juska's "Reunion," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Reunion: A Novel by Elise Juska.

The entry begins:

The main characters in Reunion are three college friends—Polly, Adam, and Hope—who are emerging from the pandemic and returning to their twenty-fifth reunion. They’re bringing with them not only mixed feelings about their college years but concern about their children, particularly Polly’s teenage son Jonah, who’s traveling with her to Maine.

When working on my previous novels I never had actors in mind, but strangely enough, for this one, from the beginning I pictured Polly as Catherine Keener. I am a huge fan of her performances as witty, slightly acerbic, vulnerable women in indie films like Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and Please Give.

Adam is youthful-looking and young at heart—naturally my mind goes to Paul Rudd. Not only is Rudd seemingly age-defying, but I’ve been watching him since the nineties, in classics like Clueless, in which he looked how Adam might have in the novel’s flashbacks to his college years.

For Hope, upbeat and popular, the actor of my dreams is...[read on]

Visit Elise Juska's website.

The Page 69 Test: Reunion.

My Book, The Movie: Reunion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alex Edmans's "May Contain Lies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It by Alex Edmans.

About the book, from the publisher:

How our biases cause us to fall for misinformation—and how to combat it.

Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, executives, and authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.

In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples—from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death—Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.

Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics—the science of cause and effect—ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and better decisions.

Visit Alex Edmans's website.

The Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best Alice Munro short stories

Lisa Allardice is the Guardian's chief books writer.

She tagged five of the best Alice Munro short stories, including:

"Dance of the Happy Shades," 1968

Margaret Atwood cried when she first read this story, because “it was so well done”. “Spinster” Miss Marsalles, piano teacher to generations of children in the genteel southern Ontario town of Rosedale, is giving one of her annual piano-recital parties, a source of dread and scorn for the young mothers who feel obliged to attend. The story is narrated by the teenage daughter of one of the mothers, both past students of Miss Marsalles. The teacher and her elder sister (who has had a stroke – “She’s not herself though, poor thing”) no longer live in the smart family house, but have moved to a bungalow in the wrong part of town: “This aspect of Miss Marsalles’ life had passed into that region of painful subjects which it is crude and unmannerly to discuss.”

The Marsalles sisters, with their “kindly and grotesque faces” and insistence on throwing parties despite their reduced circumstances, have committed the female sins of being unmarried, elderly and poor. “It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be so marked in so many ways.” Such is Munro’s attention to detail – the flies buzzing around sandwiches put out too early, the dress that “smells of the cleaners”, the presents tied with silver ribbon, “not real ribbon, the kind that splits and threads” – that the reader squirms as uncomfortably as the mothers on that “hot gritty” afternoon. When a group of children with Down’s syndrome arrive to give recitals, none of the nice ladies of Rosedale know where to look – literally. “For it is a matter of politeness, surely not to look closely at such children, and yet where else can you look during a piano performance, but at the performer?”

In barely 10 pages (Munro’s early work was much shorter), Dance of the Happy Shades is a masterclass in authorial irony. The women’s well-mannered facades sliding like their makeup in the heat to reveal their snobbery and unkindness. A celebration of innocence and unexpected joy – but without a single note of sentimentality – it might make you cry too, and not just because it is so good, which it is, but because it is so sad and strange.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Leah Stecher's "The Things We Miss"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Things We Miss by Leah Stecher.

About the book, from the publisher:

When You Reach Me meets Starfish in this heartfelt contemporary middle grade about a misfit girl who finds a way to skip all of the hard parts of life.

J.P. Green has always felt out of step. She doesn't wear the right clothes, she doesn't say the right things, and her body…well, she'd rather not talk about it. And seventh grade is shaping up to be the worst year yet. So when J.P. discovers a mysterious door in her neighbor's treehouse, she doesn't hesitate before walking through. The door sends her three days forward in time.

Suddenly, J.P. can skip all the worst parts of seventh grade: Fitness tests in P.E., oral book reports, awkward conversations with her mom…she can avoid them all and no one even knows she was gone.

But can you live a life without any of the bad parts? Are there experiences out there that you can't miss?

This moving middle grade novel about mental health, body acceptance, and self-confidence asks what it truly means to show up for the people you love-and for yourself.

Visit Leah Stecher's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Things We Miss.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld's "The Hollow Parties"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major history of America's political parties from the Founding to our embittered present

America’s political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today’s parties, at once overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.

Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party’s first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today’s fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s. Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties. Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system, deeming it a mere instrument for power.

Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers powerful answers to pressing questions about how the nation’s parties became so dysfunctional—and how they might yet realize their promise.

Visit Sam Rosenfeld's website and Daniel Schlozman's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Polarizers by Sam Rosenfeld.

The Page 99 Test: When Movements Anchor Parties by Daniel Schlozman.

The Page 99 Test: The Hollow Parties.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight coming of age novels about immigrants and first generation Americans

Melissa Mogollon holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from the George Washington University. Originally from Colombia and raised in Florida, she now teaches at a boarding school in Rhode Island, where she lives with her partner and dog.

Oye is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Mogollon tagged eight "incredible books that I hope will inspire the chaotic, weird, unrestrained, and glorious, blossoming 1st-gen immigrant in you." One title on the list:

A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar

When I first read A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar I probably fell out of my chair. I didn’t know fiction could do half the things that Jarrar was doing, and I didn’t think I’d ever love a protagonist more than Nidali, the book’s captivating and righteous Palestinian-Egyptian-Greek-American narrator, who migrates across time to and from Kuwait, Egypt, and the United States. Nidali is defiant and curious, questioning her circumstances while embracing the traditions and people around her. We see Nidali flee war, search for a sense of a homeland, indulge in normal teen behaviors, grapple with her place in her family, and ultimately, define who she is on her own terms. Jarrar’s sentences control humor and heartbreak in this book magnificently. A valiant and gorgeous coming-of-age novel about power, identity, and the complex dance of growing up in the global immigrant diaspora.

Read about another entry on the list.

A Map of Home is among Laila Lalami's eight books about Muslim life for a nation that knows little about Islam and Ahmed Ali Akbar's 14 novels about Muslim life that open up worlds for their audiences.

My Book, The Movie: A Map of Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Kate White

From my Q&A with Kate White, author of The Last Time She Saw Him: A Novel:

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

I really love the title of my newest book, The Last Time She Saw Him, because it gets a potential reader into the story right away, and in some ways it’s a microcosm of the novel. In the book, Kiki Reed has a brief conversation with her ex-fiancé, Jamie, at a party, and then minutes later he’s found dead outside. Kiki soon becomes convinced he was murdered, but since the cops aren’t on the same page, she has to do everything in her power to make them see the light. Thus, she spends a lot of time thinking about the last time she saw Jamie. Was there something he said or something she saw that...[read on]

Visit Kate White's website, Facebook page, and Instagram page.

The Page 69 Test: Even If It Kills Her.

The Page 69 Test: Eyes on You.

The Page 99 Test: The Gutsy Girl Handbook.

The Page 69 Test: Have You Seen Me?.

The Page 69 Test: The Second Husband.

Q&A with Kate White.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top thrillers that explore a mother's worst nightmare

Andromeda Romano-Lax has been a journalist, a travel writer, and a serious amateur cellist. She is the author of The Spanish Bow, The Detour, and Behave, among others.

[The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow; The Page 69 Test: The Detour; Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012)]

Romano-Lax's new novel The Deepest Lake, set in Guatemala, is about a mother’s search for answers about her missing daughter.

At CrimeReads the author tagged four "emotional page-turners that convinced me the missing-child trope is both powerful and capacious, with room for further writerly exploration and interpretation." One title on the list:

Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier

The trail has gone even colder in another young-missing-child quest, Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier. A year and a half after her five-year-old son is grabbed from Pike’s Place Market by a man in a Santa suit, successful salon owner Marin hires a private investigator, whose digging leads not to the child but to other unsavory revelations, starting with the fact that Marin’s husband is having an affair with an art student named Kenzie. Numerous other secrets and twists follow. Unlike many novels of this kind, Hillier packs in surprises without depending on unreliable narration. The storyline jets beyond doubtful grief into red-hot anger, as Hillier’s Marin uses her rage to get to the bottom of things. If you enjoy flawed characters and a dual POV structure that complicates readers’ sympathies, this one’s for you.

Read about another entry on the list.

Little Secrets is among Jessica Hamilton's six top novels about extra marital affairs and Lisa Regan's ten riveting reads filled with shocking secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Laikwan Pang's "One and All"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty by Laikwan Pang.

About the book, from the publisher:

The concept of sovereignty is a crucial foundation of the current world order. Regardless of their political ideologies no states can operate without claiming and justifying their sovereign power. The People's Republic of China (PRC)—one of the most powerful states in contemporary global politics—has been resorting to the logic of sovereignty to respond to many external and internal challenges, from territorial rights disputes to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, Pang Laikwan analyzes the historical roots of Chinese sovereignty. Surveying the four different political structures of modern China—imperial, republican, socialist, and post-socialist—and the dramatic ruptures between them, Pang argues that the ruling regime's sovereign anxiety cuts across the long twentieth century in China, providing a strong throughline for the state–society relations during moments of intense political instability. Focusing on political theory and cultural history, the book demonstrates how concepts such as popular sovereignty, territorial sovereignty, and economic sovereignty were constructed, and how sovereign power in China was both legitimized and subverted at various times by intellectuals and the ordinary people through a variety of media from painting and literature to internet-based memes. With the possibility of a new Cold War looming large, globalization disintegrating, and populism on the rise, Pang provides a timely reevaluation of the logic of sovereignty in China as power, discourse, and a basis for governance.

Learn more about One and All at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: One and All.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Peter Colt reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Peter Colt, author of The Judge (An Andy Roark mystery, 5).

His entry begins:

I am currently reading Robert Mazur’s excellent book The Infiltrator: The True Story of One Man Against the Biggest Drug Cartel in History. Mazur’s story is a riveting look inside his complicated and dangerous undercover assignment to infiltrate the Medellin Cartel in the 1980’s. Mazur used his business and family background to pose as money launderer. He simultaneously got close to high-ranking members of the cartel as well as corrupt banking officials at Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The book, which I bought for research, reads like a spy novel. It is a must read for anyone interested in the 1980’s drug cartels or daring undercover operations.

I also just finished...[read on]

About The Judge, from the publisher:

When a Boston judge is being blackmailed, Andy Roark must find out who is behind the threat before lives get ruined in this thrilling mystery featuring the Vietnam veteran turned private investigator.

Boston, 1985. With the late December cold comes a new job for ex-military operative turned private investigator Andy Roark. Boston judge Ambrose Messer is being blackmailed, and he needs Roark's help to stop the culprit.

Messer is judging the bench trial of a chemical company accused of knowingly dumping chemical waste in an unsafe manner, causing birth defects and cancer. The evidence against them is overwhelming, but the message from the blackmailer is clear: If you don't want the world to know your secret, the chemical company wins. Messer doesn't want to let a threat corrupt his judgement . . . but then again, he could lose everything if his secret comes out!

Judging his client to be a man with morals, Roark plunges into action, determined to find the blackmailer before it's too late. But the disturbing, unexpected revelations he uncovers make him a target of some very dangerous people, who soon seem determined not only to wreck the life of his client, but to destroy Roark's too...

Written by a US Army veteran and New England police officer, this new instalment in the Andy Roark mystery series will appeal to fans who love a hard-boiled protagonist with a complex backstory and a plot filled with unexpected twists and action-packed scenes.

Visit Peter Colt's website.

My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues.

Q&A with Peter Colt.

The Page 69 Test: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: Death at Fort Devens.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (June 2022).

My Book, The Movie: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Judge.

My Book, The Movie: The Judge.

Writers Read: Peter Colt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kate Feiffer's "Morning Pages"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Morning Pages by Kate Feiffer.

About the book, from the publisher:

When her professional and family life collide, a playwright starts journaling every morning to push through her writer’s block in this laugh-out-loud and fresh take on family, friendship, and the chaos of midlife.

Elise Hellman was once heralded by audiences and critics as a “playwright to watch.” Then they forgot all about her. When a prestigious theater company unexpectedly offers her a generous commission to write a new play, she has an opportunity to turn her career around. With sixty-five days left until her deadline, Elise starts scribbling a few pages of stream-of-consciousness first thing every morning as a way to get over her writer’s block—a technique called Morning Pages, popularized in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

What emerges is a witty confessional in which Elise chronicles her life with her teenage stoner son and her overbearing and eccentric mother, who is losing her memory but not her profanity. She writes about her lingering feelings for her ex-husband, her best friend who is acting oddly, and the confusing encounters she has with a handsome stranger in an elevator.

As she writes, the marked-up scenes from her play, Deja New, are revealed, as a story within the story.

Morning Pages is about what life throws at you when you’re trying to write. It is both a humorous exploration of the creative process and a relatable coming-of-age tale for the generation sandwiched between caring for their parents and caring for their kids.

Visit Kate Feiffer's website.

Writers Read: Kate Feiffer (May 2011).

The Page 69 Test: Morning Pages.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susan D. Blum's "Schoolishness"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning by Susan D. Blum.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread.

Drawing on critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy in conversation with the anthropology of learning, and building on the insights of her two previous books Blum proposes less-schoolish ways of learning in ten dimensions, to lessen the mismatch between learning in school and learning in the wild. She asks, if learning is our human "superpower," why is it so difficult to accomplish in school? In every chapter Blum compares the fake learning of schoolishness with successful examples of authentic learning, including in her own courses, which she scrutinizes critically.

Schoolishness is not a pedagogical how-to book, but a theory-based phenomenology of institutional education. It has moral, psychological, and educational arguments against schoolishness that, as Blum notes, "rhymes with foolishness."

Visit Susan D. Blum's website.

The Page 99 Test: Schoolishness.

--Marshal Zeringue

The twenty-five best time travel books

At the Waterstones blog Mark Skinner tagged twenty-five of the best time travel books. One title on the list:

Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel

Another tour de force of imagination and dazzling construction from the author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, Mandel's audacious time travel novel intertwines the stories of an Edwardian exile in British Columbia and an Earth-hopping writer two centuries later.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Holly Smale's five time travel novels that explore what it means to be human and Damian Dibben's top ten time travel books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marjorie McCown's "Star Struck," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Star Struck by Marjorie McCown.

About the book, from the publisher:

Movie costumer Joey Jessop is working on a film with two of the biggest box office stars in the world. The leading man, Andrew DeRossi, is not only a serious actor but also a philanthropist and climate change warrior -- while his costar, Gillian Best, is an aging beauty who pours most of her time and energy into becoming the next celebrity entrepreneur with her start-up lifestyle brand.

When a fatal traffic accident happens within sight of the movie's shooting location in downtown Los Angeles, Joey realizes the car involved belongs to Gillian, and she starts to wonder if the star is hiding something. Gillian's strange behavior in the wake of the tragedy only deepens Joey's suspicions. When the authorities show no interest in further investigation of the circumstances surrounding the accident, Joey is faced with a choice: she can either maintain her professional detachment from the swirling orbits of the movie stars she works with and turn a blind eye to Gillian's scheming -- or she must launch her own search for the truth.

I have lots of ideas for casting the movie version of my book! Since I spent most of my career working as a costume designer and costumer for feature films, it's almost second nature for me to think about casting the characters.

I think Jennifer Lawrence would be perfect to play Joey. She projects an understated aura of personal confidence and competence that feels authentic on screen. And she has an easy intelligence about her along with a sense of humor that she just naturally brings to all her characters.

For Gillian Best, I think...[read on]

Visit Marjorie McCown's website.

Q&A with Marjorie McCown.

My Book, The Movie: Star Struck.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Larry Tye's "The Jazzmen"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America by Larry Tye.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.

This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America.

• Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category.
• Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom.
• William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans—the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller.

What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.

Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country’s most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians.

Visit Larry Tye's website.

The Page 99 Test: Demagogue.

My Book, The Movie: Demagogue.

The Page 99 Test: The Jazzmen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten novels about resisting productivity culture

Eliza Browning is an intern at Electric Literature.

She tagged ten writers who "use workplace fiction as a lens to examine late-stage capitalism, the gig economy, and the inevitable burnout." One title on the list:

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman

Help Wanted focuses on a group of underpaid workers at the big-box store Town Square who plan to get rid of their bad boss by getting her promoted to a position so high she won’t be able to bother them. The novel is a comedic critique of contemporary labor and a corporate culture that prioritizes efficiency above all else, even when it’s derived from underpaying workers. Adelle Waldman’s second novel traces the desperate striving for stability by minimum wage workers in America.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Abraham Chang

From my Q&A with Abraham Chang, author of 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers: A Novel:

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

The title 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers came to me in three distinct parts. It was quick and yet it was slow. I knew my book would address the big idea of belief, as a whole – and how much control we have over our destinies – especially, in luck and love.

I had the “888 Love” part figured out once I was well on my way into writing about the Eastern numerology, superstitions, and the things you pick up from your family growing up that can influence susceptible young minds – especially when there are mental health issues. I had always known that Chinese people loved the number 8, because the number (“bah”) sounds like the word “fah” for “grow, thrive” – so “88” was a common sight, especially around the Lunar New Year. The extra 8 was natural for my main character, Young, to add on as his personal extra bit of “oomph” to ensure that additional stamp of good luck in his life.

I wasn’t aware that the Triple 8, the “888” was circulating around as well. I had not noticed it until I had completed my book and happened across it while walking through a casino! But it’s a “thing” and you’ll see it on license plates, names of restaurants, all sorts of things. Chances are if there are 8s – a Chinese person is likely nearby.

Working through our mental and spiritual health is what I believe is at the core of the meaning of life. We are constantly carrying the weight of our own humanity – this “divine burden” – it can come in different forms, to different people. For Young, he wants to understand the...[read on]

Visit Abraham Chang's website.

Q&A with Abraham Chang.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: John Soluri's "Creatures of Fashion"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia by John Soluri.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalization. Creatures of Fashion upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region's transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chile. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, John Soluri traces the circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe's houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, and textile manufacturers with those of fur seals, guanacos, and sheep at the "end of the world."

From the nineteenth-century rise of commercial hunting to twentieth-century sheep ranching to contemporary conservation-based tourism, Soluri's narrative explains how struggles for control over the production of commodities and the reproduction of animals drove the social and environmental changes that tied Patagonia to global markets, empires, and wildlife conservation movements. By exposing seams in national territories and global markets knit together by force, this book provides perspectives and analyses vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond.

Learn more about Creatures of Fashion at the University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Creatures of Fashion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books featuring killer women

Julie Mae Cohen is a UK-bestselling author of book club and romantic fiction, including the award-winning novel Together. Her work has been translated into 17 languages. She is vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK. Cohen grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the University of Reading, where she is now an associate lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Berkshire in the United Kingdom.

Cohen's new novel is Bad Men, her first thriller.

[The Page 69 Test: Bad Men; Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen]

At CrimeReads Cohen tagged six top female killer books, including:

Wahala by Nikki May

In Nigeria, ‘Wahala’ means ‘trouble’, and that’s what friends Ronke, Boo and Simi get when they welcome glamorous and rich Isobel into their group. Issues about friendship and culture take the star places in this novel but there’s murder, too, all set in the Anglo-Nigerian community of London. Unlike the killer protagonists of the other novels on this list, Ronke is totally sympathetic—a food-loving dentist on the lookout for love—and the violence in the book is an expression of the toxic unspoken jealousy that can simmer beneath some female friendships.

Read about another entry on the list.

Wahala is among Justine Sullivan's ten novels with heroines who are hot messes.

--Marshal Zeringue