Pg. 69: Maggie Nye's "The Curators"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Curators: A Novel by Maggie Nye.

About the book, from the publisher:

Violence haunts 1915 Atlanta and so does the golem a group of girls creates

A dark, lyrical blend of historical fiction and magical realism, The Curators examines a critically underexplored event in American history through unlikely eyes. All of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-year-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in 1915. None more so than thirteen-year-old Ana Wulff and her friends, who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they use dirt from Ana’s garden to build and animate a golem in Frank’s image. They’ll do anything to keep his story alive, but when their scheme gets out of hand, they must decide what responsibility requires of them. The Curators tells the story of five zealous girls and the cyclonic power of their friendship as they come of age in a country riven by white supremacy.

Visit Maggie Nye's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Curators.

Q&A with Maggie Nye.

The Page 69 Test: The Curators.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Richard Lange reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Richard Lange, author of Joe Hustle: A Novel.

His entry begins:

I read a number of books at once, consigning each to a certain time of day. One in current rotation is The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann. Vollmann is my favorite living author and has been for years. I’m awestruck by his formal experimentation, his historical research, and the emotional wallop his books pack. That he has not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize is a straight up crime. The Dying Grass is the fifth book in his Seven Dreams series (only six have been published so far), which examines the history of confrontation between Native Americans and various colonizers. Don’t think James Michener though. Vollmann turns historical fiction on its head. These books are spells, hallucinations, and...[read on]

About Joe Hustle, from the publisher:

From an award-winning author, a “lean and gritty, thoughtful and nuanced” neo-noir. Joe Hustle has never had much luck—but things start looking up when he meets an intriguing new woman and scores a rare windfall. Can he outrun disaster long enough to turn things around? (Michael Koryta, author of An Honest Man)

Joe Hustle is a survivor. A Gulf War vet and ex-con always one stumble away from catastrophe, he manages to scrape together enough money from various jobs to eke out a precarious existence on the darker fringes of Los Angeles. When he meets Emily, the black-sheep daughter of a wealthy family, the two spark an instant connection—she seems like the best thing to happen to him in a while.

But their whirlwind romance is put to the test when what starts out as a simple favor for a friend leaves Joe homeless, unemployed, and on the wrong side of a vengeful drug dealer. An impulsive offer to go on a road trip with Emily promises to take them out of harm’s way—but may only lead to more chaos.

Part hard-boiled love story, part thriller, part portrait of a tormented yet resilient soul, Joe Hustle ratchets up the tension as it rockets from the after-hours clubs and dive bars of the mean streets of L.A. to the mansions of the Hollywood Hills and, finally, to the desolate highways of the Southwest. What emerges is a gritty portrait of a man who may be down but can never be counted out.

Visit Richard Lange's website.

The Page 69 Test: This Wicked World.

The Page 69 Test: Angel Baby.

The Page 69 Test: The Smack.

The Page 69 Test: Rovers.

Q&A with Richard Lange.

Writers Read: Richard Lange.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top microhistories

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged eight must-read microhistories, including:

The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O'Connor

A fascinating read about a familiar concept from a fresh angle, The Secret History of Bigfoot is a deep dive into American mythmaking. Told with sharp, engaging prose reminiscent of the best travel writing, it has multiple entry points, from the supernatural to the more traditional outdoors.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Sharon Wishnow

From my Q&A with Sharon J. Wishnow, author of The Pelican Tide: A Novel:

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

I tell authors I know not to become hooked on their book title because chances are, it'll change. My original title for The Pelican Tide was axed by my agent. She renamed it and I hated it. It knew I'd have another chance if it was sold. And I was right. I feel the title does a 75% job of clueing readers into themes of the story, it deals with an ocean setting and there is most definitely a pelican. The word tide also evokes change and my characters face a lot of change. However, the other 25% of the book is about an oil spill and a hot sauce competition.

What's in a name?

Names are everything in my story and...[read on]

Visit Sharon J. Wishnow's website.

Q&A with Sharon J. Wishnow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Leslie Beth Ribovich's "Without a Prayer"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools by Leslie Beth Ribovich.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reframes religion’s role in twentieth-century American public education

The processes of secularization and desegregation were among the two most radical transformations of the American public school system in all its history. Many regard the 1962 and 1963 US Supreme Court rulings against school prayer and Bible-reading as the end of religion in public schools. Likewise, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case is seen as the dawn of school racial equality. Yet, these two major twentieth-century American educational movements are often perceived as having no bearing on one another.

Without a Prayer redefines secularization and desegregation as intrinsically linked. Using New York City as a window into a national story, the volume argues that these rulings failed to successfully remove religion from public schools, because it was worked into the foundation of the public education structure, especially how public schools treated race and moral formation. Moreover, even public schools that were not legally segregated nonetheless remained racially segregated in part because public schools rooted moral lessons in an invented tradition―Judeo-Christianity―and in whiteness.

The book illuminates how both secularization and desegregation took the form of inculcating students into white Christian norms as part of their project of shaping them into citizens. Schools and religious and civic constituents worked together to promote programs such as juvenile delinquency prevention, moral and spiritual values curricula, and racial integration advocacy. At the same time, religiously and racially diverse community members drew on, resisted, and reimagined public school morality.

Drawing on research from a number of archival repositories, newspaper and legal databases, and visual and material culture, Without a Prayer shows how religion and racial discrimination were woven into the very fabric of public schools, continuing to inform public education’s everyday practices even after the Supreme Court rulings.

Visit Leslie Ribovich's website.

The Page 99 Test: Without a Prayer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books about literary threesomes

Costanza Casati was born in Texas in 1995 and grew up in a village in Northern Italy, where she studied Ancient Greek, and Ancient Greek literature, under one of the country’s most rigorous academic programmes. She is a graduate of the prestigious Warwick Writing MA in the UK, and worked as a screenwriter and journalist.

Clytemnestra is her debut novel. It has sold into 18 territories worldwide, is a Saturday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Award.

Casati's new novel is Babylonia.

At the Guardian she tagged "five novels featuring some of my favourite literary threesomes." One title on the list:

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Jones’s novel focuses on newlyweds Roy and Celeste, whose relationship shatters when Roy is falsely accused of rape. While he serves time, Celeste grows closer toher childhood friend and sweetheart, Andre. Then Roy comes home, and chaos ensues. The love that the characters feel for one another is constantly destabilised by the fear that something could take away what they have.

Read about another entry on the list.

An American Marriage is among Isabelle McConville's top ten Taylor Swift song-to-book recommendations, Robin Kirman's seven novels told from both members of a couple, Christopher Louis Romaguera's nine books about mistaken identity, Scarlett Harris's eight classic and contemporary novels, written by women, that offer insight into damaged male psyches, Tochi Onyebuchi's seven books about surviving political & environmental disasters, Ruth Reichl's six novels she enjoyed listening to while cooking, Brad Parks's top eight books set in prisons, Sara Shepard's six top stories of deception,and Julia Dahl's ten top books about miscarriages of justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released (July 2024) is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July. It begins:

On July 5, l852, Frederick Douglass, who had been a slave until he escaped bondage when he was eighteen, gave a speech entitled, ‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July.’ He was brutally honest. “This fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand, illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthem, were inhuman mockery, and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?”

This, as it would seem, is completely consistent, added proof, if more proof were needed, that from the very beginning the American experiment was a hoax and a fraud. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, whatever else they may have done, had been slave owners and, when it came to that issue, as guilty as everyone else who believed that only white people were entitled to the blessings of liberty. Jefferson’s great work, the Declaration of Independence, was a white man’s call to a white man’s revolution; the Constitution, drawn under Washington’s watchful eye, was a white man’s declaration that a black man was only a fraction of a white man’s worth. America was not just racist, but the most racist nation on earth. More than any other day of the year, Douglass insisted, the Fourth of July reveals to the black slave, “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” There is no “nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

This is what Frederick Douglass said in his speech about the Fourth of July as reported in the Library of America’s edition of the works of Frederick Douglass, or what we would believe he said if we did not know that the last third of what Douglass said had been cut. And we would know that only if we read the speech in some other, more honest, edition. The Library of America did not just cut a third of the speech, the editor did not so much as bother to mention that the speech had been abridged. By leaving out, i.e. by concealing, what Douglass went on to say, the reader is not allowed to know that this speech, one of the most remarkable speeches ever given by an American, recognized not just America’s failures, but America’s greatness. The reader would never know that Douglass insisted that the men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence were great men, “great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable, and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen and patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

What too many of us have forgotten, but what Douglass understood, is...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.

Third Reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Third Reading: Fiction's Failure.

Third Reading: Hermann Hesse's Demian.

Third Reading: Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kathryn Hughes's "Catland"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania by Kathryn Hughes.

About the book, from the publisher:

How cat mania exploded in the early twentieth century, transforming cats from pests into beloved pets.

In 1900, Britain and America were in the grip of a cat craze. An animal that had for centuries been seen as a household servant or urban nuisance had now become an object of pride and deep affection. From presidential and royal families who imported exotic breeds to working-class men competing for cash prizes for the fattest tabby, people became enthralled to the once-humble cat. Multiple industries sprang up to feed this new obsession, selling everything from veterinary services to leather bootees via dedicated cat magazines. Cats themselves were now traded for increasingly large sums of money, bolstered by elaborate pedigrees that claimed noble ancestry and promised aesthetic distinction.

In Catland, Kathryn Hughes chronicles the cat craze of the early twentieth century through the life and career of Louis Wain. Wain's anthropomorphic drawings of cats in top hats falling in love, sipping champagne, golfing, driving cars, and piloting planes are some of the most instantly recognizable images from the era. His round-faced fluffy characters established the prototype for the modern cat, which cat "fanciers" were busily trying to achieve using their newfound knowledge of the latest scientific breeding techniques. Despite being a household name, Wain endured multiple bankruptcies and mental breakdowns, spending his last fifteen years in an asylum, drawing abstract and multicolored felines. But it was his ubiquitous anthropomorphic cats that helped usher the formerly reviled creatures into homes across Europe.

Beautifully illustrated and based on new archival findings about Wain's life, the wider cat fancy, and the media frenzy it created, Catland chronicles the fascinating history of how the modern cat emerged.

Learn more about Catland at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Catland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about learning & mastering a new skill

Camille Bordas is a novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels in English, The Material (2024) and How to Behave in a Crowd (2017). Her earlier two books, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French.

Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

Bordas has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill, including:

Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal

I consider Maylis de Kerangal a French national treasure. Her writing is out of this world. Her sentences are immediately recognizable, inimitable in their mix of registers (colloquial, technical, lyrical)—they’re luscious and immersive. Even though she’s writing about people today, speaking normally, going about their lives, there is a sense that you’re reading mythology. I do not understand how she does it. I encountered her writing first in 2008, with her book Corniche Kennedy (which someone needs to translate into English!) and I was immediately mesmerized. As a reader, up to that point, I’d never really pictured anything while I read. The words I read would create emotional responses within me, not images. With Maylis de Kerangal, I picture everything.

Which is especially useful in Painting Time, a novel that follows Paula Karst’s journey from student at the Institut Supérieur de Peinture in Brussels (where she studies not “traditional” painting, but the at of trompe-l’oeil) to professional artist on theater and film sets. What I love about this book is how we see her reaching mastery, one trompe-l’oeil at a time, and how de Kerangal describes what mastery also creates space for: instinct. Instinct can be such a cheesy notion in fiction (novels and movies alike), but here, it rings true. The repetition of the same gestures, no matter how small, will change your body and your brain, the way they respond to the world. It’s not a plot point. Instinct, in itself, is a skill.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the best toxic-wellness fiction titles

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged seven top works of "toxic-wellness fiction to keep you glowing from the inside," including:

youthjuice by E.K. Sathue

A novel that’ll have you looking at your favorite tub of moisturizer sideways, youthjuice is the story of a woman’s search for meaning, beauty and fulfillment at a luxury skincare company. Sinister and seductive, this is a searing beauty industry satire.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see Jamie Lee Sogn's eight top mysteries & thrillers set in the wellness industry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alison L. LaCroix's "The Interbellum Constitution"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms by Alison L. LaCroix.

About the book, from the publisher:

A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision

Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity.

The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing those principles with meaning through debate. Each of these shared principles—commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity—concerned what we now call “federalism,” meaning that they pertain to the relationships among multiple levels of government with varying degrees of autonomy. Alison L. LaCroix argues, however, that there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today’s constitutional debates admit.

As LaCroix shows, this was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model—a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new, more unified constitutional vision. This book is the first that synthesizes the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.

Learn more about The Interbellum Constitution at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Interbellum Constitution.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kathleen Bryant's "Over the Edge"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Over the Edge: A Novel by Kathleen Bryant.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Sedona’s red rock canyons, a former reporter must piece together her shattered memories in time to stop a killer in this cat-and-mouse thriller, perfect for fans of CJ Box and Anne Hillerman.

After a disastrous mistake ended her career as a crime reporter, Del Cooper returns to Sedona and takes a gig with a down-on-its-luck tour company while she rebuilds her life. Her peaceful small-town escape ends when, hiking in a remote red rock canyon, she finds the broken body of a murdered man.

At first, she believes the murder is connected to a proposed land trade that will pave the way for a luxury development on the edge of town, but it seems money isn’t the killer’s only motive. As she digs deeper, she uncovers the small town’s darkest secrets, all leading her to Lee Ranch, a former filming location for Western movies. Two women disappear after Del interviews them, and rumors begin to spin faster than Sedona’s famed energy vortexes. But she knows the truth: Someone is watching her from the shadows.

Desperate for answers, Del ventures into the wilderness to lure the killer into the open. But out here in the red rocks, bodies can be lost forever.

Visit Kathleen Bryant's website.

My Book, The Movie: Over the Edge.

Q&A with Kathleen Bryant.

The Page 69 Test: Over the Edge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four great novels of subtle espionage

Flynn Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of Under the Harrow, winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; A Double Life, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Northern Spy, a Reese’s Book Club pick that was named one of the ten best thrillers of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Northern Spy is being adapted for film by Netflix.

Berry's new novel is Trust Her.

At CrimeReads she tagged four

favorite novels about amateur spies. These characters go undercover, without extensive training, an extraction team, expensive equipment, or any idea of what damage might lie ahead.

One title on the list:

Ilium by Lea Carpenter

An aimless young woman marries a charismatic older man, and on their honeymoon on the Dalmatian Coast, her new husband recruits her for an intelligence operation. “What was laid out before me, then, felt less like a risk than like a promotion. I was being invited into something very special, important. He was handing me an identity I had been looking for without even knowing it.” She is to pose as an art advisor, and spy on the owner of a compound in France. The writing is cool, perceptive, and smart, and Ilium reads like a spy thriller by Joan Didion.

Read about another entry on the list.

Q&A with Lea Carpenter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Marjorie N. Feld's "The Threshold of Dissent"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism by Marjorie Feld.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores the long history of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist American Jews

Throughout the twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders projected a unified position of unconditional support for Israel, cementing it as a cornerstone of American Jewish identity. This unwavering position served to marginalize and label dissenters as antisemitic, systematically limiting the threshold of acceptable criticism. In pursuit of this forced consensus, these leaders entered Cold War alliances, distanced themselves from progressive civil rights and anti-colonial movements, and turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Israel. In The Threshold of Dissent, Marjorie N. Feld instead shows that today’s vociferous arguments among American Jews over Israel and Zionism are but the newest chapter in a fraught history that stretches from the nineteenth century.

Drawing on rich archival research and examining wide-ranging intellectual currents―from the Reform movement and the Yiddish left to anti-colonialism and Jewish feminism―Feld explores American Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel from the 1880s to the 1980s. The book argues that the tireless policing of contrary perspectives led each generation of dissenters to believe that it was the first to question unqualified support for Israel. The Threshold of Dissent positions contemporary critics within a century-long debate about the priorities of the American Jewish community, one which holds profound implications for inclusion in American Jewish communal life and for American Jews’ participation in coalitions working for justice.

At a time when American Jewish support for Israel has been diminishing, The Threshold of Dissent uncovers a deeper―and deeply contested―history of intracommunal debate over Zionism among American Jews.

Learn more about The Threshold of Dissent at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Threshold of Dissent.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Maggie Nye

From my Q&A with Maggie Nye, author of The Curators: A Novel:

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

For many years, while I was shopping my manuscript around, my title was How do you like these bad days? That original title came from a line in a postcard I found from murder victim Mary Phagan to her cousin. I dug up said postcard in the archives of the Breman Museum of Jewish History in Atlanta. I loved that it gave Mary a chance to speak, but editors and readers agreed that it was too long and obscure.

After much agonizing, I landed on The Curators because that title accurately depicts the desires of the adolescent girls who narrate my novel. They seek to collect and to control a historical perspective that is denied to them. An audience member at my book launch asked me recently: “Why not The Creators? They create a golem, so wouldn’t that title make more sense?” And my answer is that though they bring a golem to life, even that is an act of curation. Their golem can only...[read on]

Visit Maggie Nye's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Curators.

Q&A with Maggie Nye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: David Housewright's "Man in the Water"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Man in the Water: A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright.

About the book, from the publisher:

When his wife finds the body of an Army veteran in the lake, it is inevitable that former cop, now unofficial P.I. Rushmore McKenzie will get enmeshed in a complicated case of possible murder.

It all starts with the body in the water—on what should be the first boat day of the season, McKenzie’s wife Nina finds a dead Army vet. As the dock owner and the insurance companies claim that it was suicide, despite the deceased, E.J. Woods, having no obvious reason to kill himself, his widow starts acting suspiciously. McKenzie finds himself pulled into the fight when Naveah, the victim’s daughter, convinced her father was murdered, asks him to investigate.

Further complicating the situation are uncooperative boaters, allegations of PTSD, and the simple fact that there was no reason for E.J. to be in the water. McKenzie’s investigation unearths not only the petty squabbles surrounding the lake and its dock, but details of her father’s past that Naveah is perhaps better off not knowing. With Nina haunted by dreams of the body and the legal fight over cause of death becoming increasingly nasty, McKenzie may be the only one interested in finding justice for E.J.— and uncovering the truth before another person dies.

Learn more about the book and author at David Housewright's website and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Kind Word.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Kind Word.

The Page 69 Test: Stealing the Countess.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Leave Behind.

The Page 69 Test: First, Kill the Lawyers.

Writers Read: David Housewright (January 2019).

The Page 69 Test: In a Hard Wind.

Q&A with David Housewright.

Writers Read: David Housewright.

The Page 69 Test: Man in the Water.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David N. Gibbs's "Revolt of the Rich"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America's Class Divide by David N. Gibbs.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inequality in the United States has reached staggering proportions, with a massive share of wealth held by the very richest. How was such a dramatic shift in favor of a narrow elite possible in a democratic society? David N. Gibbs explores the forces that shaped the turn toward free market economics and wealth concentration and finds their roots in the 1970s. He argues that the political transformations of this period resulted from a “revolt of the rich,” whose defense of their class interests came at the expense of the American public.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Gibbs examines how elites established broad coalitions that brought together business conservatives, social traditionalists, and militarists. At the very top, Richard Nixon’s administration quietly urged corporate executives to fund conservative think tanks and seeded federal agencies with free-market economists. Even Jimmy Carter’s ostensibly liberal administration brought deregulation to the financial sector along with the imposition of severe austerity measures that hurt the living standards of the working class. Through a potent influence campaign, academics and intellectuals sold laissez-faire to policy makers and the public, justifying choices to deregulate industry, cut social spending, curb organized labor, and offshore jobs, alongside expanding military interventions overseas.

Shedding new light on the political alliances and policy decisions that tilted the playing field toward the ultrawealthy, Revolt of the Rich unveils the origins of today’s stark disparities.

Learn more about Revolt of the Rich at Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Revolt of the Rich.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that explore the emotional legacy of family life

Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. She has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University.

Takacs's debut novel, Pearce Oysters, is a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Electric Lit Takacs tagged seven titles "about the ways our family leave their mark on us," including:

Absolution by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s most recent novel is, like all her work, unparalleled in its emotional nuance and observation. It’s also the most difficult to summarize of the books on this list, weaving in epistolary form through the decades. The major events of the novel take place in 1963, Saigon. Two American women—the young idealistic Patricia and the worldly “dynamo” Charlene—are brought to Vietnam by their husbands’ work during the war. Together, the women concoct their own unofficial charity to raise money for a Vietnamese hospital. Now, sixty years later, Patricia begins writing Charlene’s grown daughter to revisit the past. They weigh the women’s well-meaning attempts at “inconsequential good.” And though the novel takes up far more than a mother-daughter relationship as its subject, the letters paint a vivid picture of Charlene as a mother. I read this novel in a gallop, mesmerized.

Read about another title on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue