Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos

From my Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos, author of Asterwood:

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

Asterwood is a clean, simple title and I love that. It signals the novel's setting to readers, and I'm a setting-oriented writer--it's usually the detail that comes first in the pre-draft, dreamstorm stage of my work and the detail that speaks loudest in my finished books--so it feels right. I can't take credit though! There were many placeholder titles before my brilliant editor, Wendy Loggia, suggested Asterwood.

What's in a name?

So much. The novel's protagonist, Madelyn, is named...[read on]

Visit Jacquelyn Stolos's website.

Writers Read: Jacquelyn Stolos.

The Page 69 Test: Asterwood.

My Book, The Movie: Asterwood.

Q&A with Jacquelyn Stolos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Fabricio Tocco's "Precarious Secrets"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Fabricio Tocco's Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of the political thriller genre and its context in Latin American politics and entertainment.

For the past five decades, a distinctive type of political thriller has been steadily developing in Latin America. Precarious Secrets is a panoramic overview of the genre in the hands of renowned writers and filmmakers from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, as well as lesser-known Peruvian, Uruguayan and Paraguayan artists for whom the style has been a vehicle for pungent narratives shot through with menace and conspiracy.

Fabricio Tocco explores the genre’s unique role in Latin American entertainment and activism. Precarious Secrets traces the evolutions of the Latin American political thriller from its emergence in the 1970s, through the silence imposed by dictatorships and the genre’s resurgence after the Cold War. The political thriller has dramatized the region’s turbulent past, through assassinations, coups, mass killings, revolutions and the search of desaparecidos by human rights organizations. In the process, Tocco isolates the Latin American political thriller’s particular grammar of secrecy. In the Hollywood thriller, revealing secrets involves high stakes and transformative consequences. In Latin American political thrillers, by contrast, secrets produce only more precarity—moral ambiguity as unsettling as it is unshakeable.

Learn more about Precarious Secrets at the University of Texas Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Precarious Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top sad books by funny women

Sydney Rende is a writer and editor. You can read her work in The New York Times Style Magazine, Carve Magazine, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University.

Rende's debut short story collection is I Could Be Famous.

At Lit Hub she tagged six sad books by funny women "who give grief and humor the equal respect they deserve." One title on the list:

Weike Wang, Chemistry

Weike Wang’s debut novel is quick, wry, and fraught with self-deprecating humor. Wang’s unnamed narrator, whose boyfriend Eric has just proposed, is pursuing her PhD in chemistry without much success. Through often fragmented narration, we see her unravel as she fails to meet the expectations she’s set for herself. But even in her darkest moments of identity crisis, her insights are self-aware, profound, and, yes, funny, including a bit where she impulsively chops off her hair because her mother told her that “too much hair will suck nutrients away from the head and leave it empty.”

Read about another entry on the list.

Chemistry is among K.D. Walker's eight top campus novels set in grad school and Anne Heltzel's seven novels about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Kelli Stanley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Kelli Stanley, author of The Reckoning (A Renata Drake Thriller, 1).

Her entry begins:

Well, because I’m on a deadline to finish the second Renata novel, I can’t read fiction. That’s a huge frustration for me, because I’d like to start plunging into Cara Black’s Huguette and James L’Etoile’s Illusion of Truth and Rhys Bowen’s Silent as the Grave, to name a few.

I make it a practice to avoid reading current fiction while I’m actively writing (as opposed to researching) a book, because I’m afraid that I’ll unconsciously start imitating it. So….

Non-fiction is my getaway, and I’m currently reading a delightful book...[read on]

About The Reckoning, from the publisher:

SHE KILLED A MAN.
HE DESERVED IT.
BUT JUSTICE ISN’T YET DONE.

First in an explosive new thriller series set in the eighties from the author of the critically acclaimed Miranda Corbie series introduces the fierce feminist Renata Drake—on the run from the FBI for the execution-style murder of her little sister’s killer.

California, Southern Humboldt County, 1985. Renata Drake steps off a Greyhound bus and into small-town Garberville, hoping to disappear. She checks the papers. She’s not headline news. Not yet.

But she’s made a mistake. The FBI have the cannabis-producing “Emerald Triangle” town— and its corrupt residents—in their sights. Even worse, a teenage girl is missing, and when she turns up dead, the third in three years, it’s clear a serial killer is living among them.

Renata knows about murdered girls and the burning desire for justice—and for revenge. Her younger sister Josie is gone, and now, so is the man who killed her. Renata didn’t stay in Washington, D.C. to be arrested for executing a murderer, and she shouldn’t stay here either. But Renata decides to investigate, and what she uncovers will trigger a final reckoning: For herself, for a killer, and for all of Southern Humboldt.

This powerful, page-turning thriller explores the human cost of corruption and the psychological toll that violence takes on women.

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that grapple with the gig economy

Anandi Mishra is a Sweden-based critic and communications professional. She has worked as a reporter for The Times of India and The Hindu. One of her essays has been translated to Italian and published in the Internazionale magazine. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Public Books, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, Popula, The Brooklyn Rail, Al Jazeera, among others.

At Electric Lit Mishra tagged seven books that "show us the varied relationships people have with money, who gets to make it, and at what cost to themselves." One title on the list:

Temporary by Hilary Leichter (2020)

“There is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This mantra guides the unnamed protagonist of Temporary, who is currently between 23 temp gigs while chasing the ultimate dream of a steady, permanent job. She trusts the temp agency to “knead my résumé into a series of paychecks that constitute a life.” She delivers mail, shines shoes at Grand Central, does high-level window cleaning, stands in place of mannequins in stores, and fills in for the Chairman of the Board of a corporation. In the hands of a lesser writer, these exaggerated, absurdist scenarios might fall flat. But Leichter’s deadpan delivery seethes and stings. Temporary questions the way we work now and how a certain sense of depravity in work has been normalized. Is it even possible to stop working?

Read about another entry on the list.

Temporary is among Dustin M. Hoffman's twelve books that center work and working-class lives and Josh Riedel's nine novels about losing / finding yourself in work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Esther Eidinow's "Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth by Esther Eidinow.

About the book, from the publisher:

This study explores the hidden histories offered by Greco-Roman myths of metamorphosis, and what they can reveal about the lived experience of ancient men and women. It investigates the role of the body, and the embodied experiences of emotions in these stories, arguing that these narratives of transformation allow us to glimpse aspects of our historical subjects, which in other sources remain largely unseen.

In these narratives of metamorphosis, we discover ancient worldviews: they disclose the perceived inter-relationships of human, non-human, and more-than-human entities. They show us that the human body was understood not only as a part of an extended network of beings, but also to consist of, and interact with, the same substances that were believed to comprise the surrounding landscapes: earth, air, fire, and water.

By grouping together stories according to these elements, this study highlights the patterns that underline different metamorphoses, comparing the experiences of male and female protagonists. These stories, it argues, express risks of transgressions, both for individuals and for the wider community. They tell us about the dangers that were perceived to be inherent in social roles, and in relations with the gods; they describe bodies both at risk and of risk.

And among those risks are extreme emotions--appearing as both cause and result of these startling bodily changes. These are narratives of the body that capture one of its most ephemeral aspects: the experience of intense, even traumatic emotions, in which a person and the world around them comes to seem transformed. Drawing on psychological research, this study suggests that these stories evoke experiences that persist across time and place, conveying an experience of the emotional body that speaks to us still.

Learn more about Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Andromeda Romano-Lax's "What Boys Learn"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn by Andromeda Romano-Lax.

About the book, from the publisher:

A twisty, jaw-dropping psychological thriller that unravels a mother's worst nightmare—that her child is capable of terrible violence—when her teenage son becomes a suspect in the murder of two classmates, from the author of The Deepest Lake.

Over one terrible weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in a wealthy Chicago suburb. As the community mourns, Abby Rosso, the girls’ high school counselor, begins to suspect that her son was secretly involved in their lives—and possibly, their deaths.

Abby doesn’t want to believe Benjamin hurt anyone. But she’s seen the warning signs before. Two decades ago, her brother was imprisoned for a disturbing crime—he was only a little older than Benjamin is now. And Abby has more troubling memories from her own adolescence that confirm what boys and men are capable of. As Abby searches for the truth about what happened to her students, she’s forced to face the question: Has she been making excuses for Benjamin for years?

Swirling with sharp questions about family and masculinity, What Boys Learn unravels a mother’s worst fears.

Learn more about the book and author at Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012).

The Page 69 Test: What Boys Learn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Jenna Blum

From my Q&A with Jenna Blum, author of Murder Your Darlings: A Novel:

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

Great question. I think a title needs to be both memorable and applicable, and I hope Murder Your Darlings is both. Most readers know this phrase means to cut things from a manuscript that are beloved but not essential, but what they might not know is that "murder your darlings" is the original advice to writers, given by a gentleman named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in 1914....and then it was appropriated, and changed, by Faulkner to "kill your darlings." When I learned this, I knew my title had to be the original Murder Your Darlings, since my thriller is after all not only about ruthless writers behaving badly but about the most extreme form of...[read on]

Visit Jenna Blum's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Lost Family.

Q&A with Jenna Blum.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles that take you deep inside the ivory tower

Screenwriter Nora Garrett’s debut film, After the Hunt -- directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny -- is set on the campus of Yale University.

At Bustle Garrett tagged "five college-set works that informed After the Hunt." One novel on the list:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

It's that rare, perfect novel where it's both incredibly well-written and so propulsive that you just can't stop reading it. When I read it, I felt so steeped in both the insularity and the exclusivity of the higher education environment. But since you're experiencing it from the [perspective of this] relative outsider, you're able to understand both the desire to be a part of it and the abhorrence of it. Which I think is kind of [After the Hunt character] Maggie's struggle, in some ways.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Secret History is among Chris Wheatley's six best dark academia novels, Ali Lowe's six best campus crime novels, Edwin Hill's six perfectly alluring academic mysteries, a top ten Twinkies in fiction, Kate Weinberg's five top campus novels, Emily Temple's twenty best campus novels, and Ruth Ware's top six books about boarding schools.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Andrew Burstein's "Being Thomas Jefferson"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History by Andrew Burstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently reviled American icon.

Perhaps no founding father is as mysterious as Thomas Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence was both a gifted wordsmith and a bundle of nerves. His superior knowledge of the human heart is captured in the impassioned appeal he brought to the Declaration. But as a champion of the common man who lived a life of privilege on a mountaintop plantation of his own design, he has eluded biographers who have sought to make sense of his inner life. In Being Thomas Jefferson, acclaimed Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein peels away layers of obfuscation, taking us past the veneer of the animated letter-writer to describe a confused lover and a misguided humanist, too timid to embrace antislavery.

Jefferson was a soft-spoken man who recoiled from direct conflict, yet a master puppeteer in politics. Whenever he left Monticello, where he could control his environment, he suffered debilitating headaches that plagued him for decades, until he finally retired from public life. So, what did it feel like to be Thomas Jefferson? Burstein explains the decision to take as his mistress Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his late wife, who bore him six children, none of whom he acknowledged. Presenting a society that encouraged separation between public and private, appearance and essence, Burstein paints a dramatic picture of early American culture and brings us closer to Jefferson's life and thought than ever before.

Learn more about Being Thomas Jefferson at the Bloomsbury website.

The Page 99 Test: Being Thomas Jefferson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Madeleine Dunnigan's "Jean," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Jean: A Novel by Madeleine Dunnigan.

The entry begins:

Jean is a novel set in a hippie, rural English boarding school for boys with ‘problems’. At its heart is Jean: antisocial, violent, with a refugee single-mother, and on a scholarship, Jean is an outcast even among these outcasts. But then he strikes up a friendship with Tom, a wealthier, fee-paying boy at the school. When things turn romantic, it seems as if Jean has finally found a way to transcend the trappings of his former life. Yet inevitably reality comes crashing in, and Jean must find a new way to escape.

From its inception, my novel Jean has had a strong connection with film. When I described it to people, I would often call it ‘an English Call Me By Your Name’. Andre Aciman’s novel was a huge influence; but it was Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation that informed the visual language of my book. The touches, the looks, the way Jean and Tom interact with and within nature. Similarly Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country showed me how to write queerness within a rural setting; and the heartbreaking tenderness that can come out of new love. One of my favourite films of all time is Lynne Ramsay’s Movern Callar: for its sparse dialogue and for its masterful use of music. Jean would be nothing without music. If Guadagnino, Lee or Ramsay wanted to direct the movie of Jean, I would...[read on]

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kelli Stanley's "The Reckoning"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Reckoning (A Renata Drake Thriller, 1) by Kelli Stanley.

About the book, from the publisher:

SHE KILLED A MAN.
HE DESERVED IT.
BUT JUSTICE ISN’T YET DONE.

First in an explosive new thriller series set in the eighties from the author of the critically acclaimed Miranda Corbie series introduces the fierce feminist Renata Drake—on the run from the FBI for the execution-style murder of her little sister’s killer.

California, Southern Humboldt County, 1985. Renata Drake steps off a Greyhound bus and into small-town Garberville, hoping to disappear. She checks the papers. She’s not headline news. Not yet.

But she’s made a mistake. The FBI have the cannabis-producing “Emerald Triangle” town— and its corrupt residents—in their sights. Even worse, a teenage girl is missing, and when she turns up dead, the third in three years, it’s clear a serial killer is living among them.

Renata knows about murdered girls and the burning desire for justice—and for revenge. Her younger sister Josie is gone, and now, so is the man who killed her. Renata didn’t stay in Washington, D.C. to be arrested for executing a murderer, and she shouldn’t stay here either. But Renata decides to investigate, and what she uncovers will trigger a final reckoning: For herself, for a killer, and for all of Southern Humboldt.

This powerful, page-turning thriller explores the human cost of corruption and the psychological toll that violence takes on women.

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

The Page 69 Test: The Reckoning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Christina Schwenkel's "Sonic Socialism"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi by Christina Schwenkel.

About the book, from the publisher:

In an era dominated by visual information, what can the sounds of a pandemic reveal about crisis and care? How might attuning to sonic atmospheres uncover new dimensions to states of emergency and their implications for collective life? In Sonic Socialism, Christina Schwenkel examines the use of sound in COVID-19 response efforts in urban Vietnam. Based on "soundwork" conducted in Hanoi in 2020 during the pandemic's first year, she shows how acoustic technologies played a pivotal yet overlooked role in state efforts to achieve record-low infection rates worldwide. Across lived experiences of quarantine, lockdown, and spatial distancing, Schwenkel explores sound-based interventions to curb virus transmission, and the public's response to these auditory measures. From instant messaging alerts to public health videos and neighborhood loudspeakers, sonic governance sought to transform urban sounds and listening practices to mobilize action, drawing people into networks of care and control. As anthropology stands at a crossroads, Sonic Socialism makes the compelling case for the value of sensory autoethnography in reimagining a more careful and caring ethnographic practice in a post-pandemic world.

Visit Christina Schwenkel's website.

The Page 99 Test: The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.

The Page 99 Test: Sonic Socialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"CrimeReads" -- best traditional mysteries of 2025

One novel on the CrimeReads list of the best traditional mysteries released in 2025:

Fair Play, Louise Hegarty

In Hegarty’s ingenious and deeply felt mystery, a group of friends has gathered at an AirBnb to celebrate, but after a fractious evening, the birthday boy is found dead, casting a group of friends as the closed circle of suspects. The traditional mystery genre is paid its due as a detective arrives, along with a butler and a gardiner, appropriate enough since the friends were celebrating by playing a murder mystery game themselves. The result is a layered meta-fiction that plays out to a surprising and well-earned finish, one of the strongest mysteries start to finish to come around in years.

Read about another mystery on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Fair Play.

Q&A with Louise Hegarty.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Van Jensen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Van Jensen, author of Godfall.

His entry begins:

The book I've read that stuck with me lately is The Dog of the South by Charles Portis.

A jilted husband follows his wife and her new paramour to Mexico, seeking revenge, or at least to reclaim his Ford Torino. The book is about exactly that, but not really that at all. It's a shaggy travelogue, a picaresque character study, an anthology of broken and insane oddballs, an ode to adventure, or perhaps a warning of...[read on]

About Godfall, from the publisher:

In this riveting small town thriller, Sheriff David Blunt is faced with a string of murders following the arrival of an alien life form—perfect for fans of Blake Crouch and Jeff Vandermeer, and soon to be a television series from Ron Howard!

When a massive asteroid hurtles toward Earth, humanity braces for annihilation—but the end doesn’t come. In fact, it isn’t an asteroid but a three-mile-tall alien that drops down, seemingly dead, outside Little Springs, Nebraska.

Dubbed “the giant,” its arrival transforms the red-state farm town into a top-secret government research site and major metropolitan area, flooded with soldiers, scientists, bureaucrats, spies, criminals, conspiracy theorists—and a murderer.

As the sheriff of Little Springs, David Blunt thought he’d be keeping the peace among the same people he’d known all his life, not breaking up chanting crowds of cultists or battling an influx of drug dealers. As a series of brutal, bizarre murders strikes close to home, Blunt throws himself into the hunt for a killer who seems connected to the Giant.

With bodies piling up and tensions in Little Springs mounting, he realizes that to find the answers he needs, he must reconcile his old worldview with the town he now lives in—before it’s too late.

Visit Van Jensen's website.

Writers Read: Van Jensen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jeff Roche's "The Conservative Frontier"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right by Jeff Roche.

About the book, from the publisher:

How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.

Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region—larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart—develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?

Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right—the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.

Visit Jeff Roche's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Conservative Frontier.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the best locked room murder mysteries

Emily Burack is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site.

At Town & Country she tagged fifteen of the best locked room murder mysteries, including:

With a Vengeance by Riley Sager

A modern entry on this list (published this year), Riley Sager’s With a Vengeance is set during 1954 on a luxury overnight train. As the New York Times Book Review wrote, it is ‘a fast-paced thriller, a locked-room mystery and a violent tale of revenge...impeccable pacing and signature twists.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacquelyn Stolos's "Asterwood," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Asterwood by Jacquelyn Stolos.

The entry begins:

Asterwood, my first middle grade novel and first foray into fantasy, follows Madelyn, a ten-year-old who discovers an enchanted world through a shimmering rift in the forest behind her New Hampshire home. After learning that she might not be who she's been raised to think she is, Madelyn joins up with The New Hopefuls, a group of rag-tag child activists resisting the social, economic, and downright evil adult forces harming this enchanted forest. While honing the tone of the novel, it was important for me to balance my respect for young readers and their desire and ability to engage with some serious themes with the way a child's perspective sprinkles an iridescent dust of magic and wonder on everything, especially interactions with the natural world. Hayao Miyazaki is the master of this duality, and so, for Asterwood, the movie, I would want to call this animation great out of retirement to direct.

My favorite film moment of all time is...[read on]

Visit Jacquelyn Stolos's website.

Writers Read: Jacquelyn Stolos.

The Page 69 Test: Asterwood.

My Book, The Movie: Asterwood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Bruce Robert Coffin

From my Q&A with Bruce Robert Coffin, author of Bitter Fall (Detective Justice, 2):

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

I would say it does quite a bit. Bitter Fall captures both the mood and the season in which the story takes place. While I’ve had a vague idea for the titles on each of the Detective Justice novels, I wasn’t entirely happy with what I had come up with. My publishing team has been very involved in both title suggestions and cover art concepts and I must say I’m very happy with the results.

What's in a name?

Much like book titles, I think the names of characters play a vital role in how the readers see them and even...[read on]

Visit Bruce Robert Coffin's website.

Q&A with Bruce Robert Coffin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Flannery Burke's "Back East"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region by Flannery Burke.

About the book, from the publisher:

Western imaginations of "Back East" rewrote America's cultural identity, shaping myths and realities alike

Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East flips the script of American regional narratives.

In novels, travel narratives, popular histories, and dude ranch brochures, twentieth-century western US writers saw the East through the lens of their experiences and ambitions. Farmers following the railroad saw capitalists exploiting their labor, while cowboys viewed urban easterners as soft and effete. Westerners of different racial backgrounds, including African Americans and Asian Americans, projected their hopes and critiques onto an East that embodied urbanity, power, and opportunity.

This interplay between “Out West” and “Back East” influenced income inequality, land use, cultural identities, and national government. It fueled myths that reshaped public lands, higher education, and the publishing industry. The cultural exchange was not one-sided; it contributed to modern social sciences and amplified marginalized voices from Chicane poets to Native artists.

By examining how westerners imagined the American East, Back East provides a fresh perspective on the American cultural landscape, offering a deeper understanding of the myths that continue to shape it.

Visit Flannery Burke's website.

The Page 99 Test: Back East.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven top books about road trips

At PopSugar Helen Carefoot tagged eleven great books about road trips, including:

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

It's June of 1954 when 18-year-old Emmet Watson is driven home to Nebraska from a juvenile work farm. Before he starts fresh in California, though, he learns that two friends from the farm have stowed away in the warden's trunk with a plan to involve him in an adventure to New York. This book has a bit of everything: wit, suspense, adventure, humor, and heart.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Lincoln Highway is among Andrew Welsh-Huggins's five novels drawing inspiration from the Odyssey and Perri Ormont Blumberg's nine top travel books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jacquelyn Stolos's "Asterwood"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Asterwood by Jacquelyn Stolos.

About the book, from the publisher:

Family secrets, friendship, and magic burst from the seams of this thrilling fantasy adventure that follows a ten-year-old girl as she discovers a new world behind her home in desperate need of her help and within it, her own troubling family legacy.

Madelyn has always been satisfied with her life of cozy meals, great books, and adventures with her father in the woods behind their farmhouse.

But when a mysterious child appears and invites her down a forbidden trail and into a new world, Madelyn realizes that there’s far more to life than she ever allowed herself to realize.

This new world, Asterwood, is wider, wilder, and more magical than she could ever imagine. And somehow, it’s people know who she is—and desperately need her help.

Accompanied by new friends—one ​who can speak the language of the trees and one with a mind as sharp as her daggers—and her calico cat, Dots, Madelyn embarks on an epic quest across a strange and sprawling forest world whose secrets just might help her save her own.​

Visit Jacquelyn Stolos's website.

Writers Read: Jacquelyn Stolos.

The Page 69 Test: Asterwood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kimberley Johnson's "Dark Concrete"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis by Kimberley Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dark Concrete is about how the Black Power movement reshaped urban politics in the United States―from expectations to practices. Although the national and international dimensions of the Black Power movement are often focused on, Kimberley Johnson looks at the movement at the local level, highlighting Newark and East Orange, New Jersey, and Oakland and East Palo Alto, California, and three policy areas: housing, education, and policing. She examines how Black Power Urbanism had its own local meanings as it was defined by local activists, neighborhood residents, parents, tenants, and others who sought to repair cities and particularly black neighborhoods that were shattered due to urban renewal and highway construction, as well as ongoing political and economic disinvestment. Dark Concrete depicts how local conditions influenced the emergence of the Black Power movement and, in turn, the ways in which these local movements reshaped urban politics, institutions, and place.

Visit Kimberley Johnson's website.

The Page 99 Test: Dark Concrete.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top titles for K-Pop fans

Giaae Kwon is the author of I’ll Love You Forever: Notes From a K-Pop Fan. In the essay collection, she

explores her personal history as a bbasooni (K-pop stan) alongside the evolution of the K-pop industry. In doing so, she uncovers the cultural and political forces that birthed the K-pop idol and paints a compassionate portrait of fandom — a much-needed counterweight to all the ink spilled about its harmful excesses.

At Bustle Kwon tagged "five books that every bbasooni should read," including:

Excavations by Hannah Michell

Excavations is a lovely novel to pair with Korea: A New History of South and North [by Victor Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo]. A fictionalized account of the 1995 collapse of the Sampoong department store, it does a great job of synthesizing Korean history from the postwar through the demos by university students and factory workers that marked the 1960s to 1980s, and the novel brings us to the doorstep of K-pop. I was really impressed with how Michell compresses modern Korean history into a pretty slim, engaging novel without dumbing anything down.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue