Ten top teens in trouble

After graduating from Trinity College Cambridge, Non Pratt became a nonfiction editor at Usborne, working on the bestselling Sticker Dolly Dressing and the Things to Make and Do series before moving across to fiction. She ran the list at Catnip Publishing from 2009 to 2013. She lives in Enfield with her husband and small(ish) child. Trouble is her first novel.

Pratt tagged her top ten teens in trouble for the Guardian, including:

This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales

Elise is the girl no one likes at school and the effect on her is (unsurprisingly) damaging. When she comes across Start, an underground nightclub, and she starts DJ-ing, she finds a place where people don't just accept her – they like her. The depiction of classroom bullying stripped back the years, leaving me as raw as if they happened yesterday afternoon, but Elise's journey provides the kind of hope I could have used growing up. (Her music tips would have helped too!)

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Tim Townsend's "Mission at Nuremberg"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis by Tim Townsend.

About the book, from the publisher:

The gripping story of the American army chaplain sent to save the souls of the Nazis incarcerated at Nuremberg

Lutheran minister Henry Gerecke was fifty years old when he enlisted as an army chaplain during World War II. As two of his three sons faced danger and death on the battlefield, Gerecke tended to the battered bodies and souls of wounded and dying GIs outside London. But at the close of the European theater, with Hitler defeated and scores of American troops returning home to resume their lives, Gerecke received his most challenging assignment: he was sent to Nuremberg to minister to the twenty-one imprisoned Nazi leaders awaiting trial for crimes against humanity.

A crucial yet largely untold coda to the horrors of World War II, Mission at Nuremberg unearths groundbreaking new research and compelling firsthand accounts to take us deep inside the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, into the very cells of the accused and the courtroom where they answered to the world for their crimes. Never before in modern history had man accomplished mass slaughter with such precision. These twenty-one Nazis had sat at the right hand of Adolf Hitler; Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Frank, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner were the orchestrators, and in some cases the direct perpetrators, of the most methodical genocide in history.

As the drama leading to the court's final judgments unfolds, Tim Townsend brings Henry Gerecke's impossible moral quandary to life: How, having risked his own life (and those of his sons) to eliminate the Nazi threat, could he now win the confidence of these men? In the months after the war ended, Gerecke had visited Dachau. He had touched the walls of the camp's crematorium. He had seen the consequences of the choices these men had made, the orders they had given and carried out. As he worked to form compassionate relationships with them, how could he preach the gospel of mercy, knowing full well the devastating nature of the atrocities they had committed? And as the day came nearer when he had to escort these men to the gallows, what comfort could he offer—and what promises of salvation could he make—to evil itself?

Detailed, harrowing, and emotionally charged, Mission at Nuremberg is an incisive new history of the Nuremberg trials as well as a nuanced reflection on the nature of morality and sin, the price of empathy, and the limits of forgiveness.

Visit the Mission at Nuremberg website.

The Page 99 Test: Mission at Nuremberg.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best readers of fiction in fiction

Hannah Jane Parkinson is a writer on pop culture, lifestyle and the arts, and performs poetry around Oxford, on evenings when Coronation Street isn't on. She likes reading, sauvignon blanc, laughing and Liverpool FC.

At the Guardian she tagged ten top readers of fiction in fiction, including:

The Great Gatsby – read by D’Angelo Barksdale, The Wire

One of the most underrated scenes in The Wire is this one in which D’Angelo Barksdale, after listening patiently to his fellow inmates in the prison book club, gives an astute analysis of The Great Gatsby. (He has been working in the prison library). “He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it – all that shit matters,” he tells the group. An important life lesson for any of The Wire’s characters, and indeed, anyone at all.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Great Gatsby appears among Molly Schoemann-McCann's list of five of the lamest girlfriends in fiction, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books, Elizabeth Wilhide's nine illustrious houses in fiction, Suzette Field's top ten literary party hosts, Robert McCrums's ten best closing lines in literature, Molly Driscoll's ten best literary lessons about love, Jim Lehrer's six favorite 20th century novels, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best clocks in literature and ten of the best misdirected messages, Tad Friend's seven best novels about WASPs, Kate Atkinson's top ten novels, Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition, Robert McCrum's top ten books for Obama officials, Jackie Collins' six best books, and John Krasinski's six best books, and is on the American Book Review's list of the 100 best last lines from novels. Gatsby's Jordan Baker is Josh Sorokach's biggest fictional literary crush.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Nickerson's "The Mirk and Midnight Hour," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Mirk and Midnight Hour by Jane Nickerson.

The entry begins:

You know, I do believe The Mirk and Midnight Hour would make a riveting costume drama—lush Southern scenery, heartwarming bits, chilling bits, moral questions to ponder, and an opportunity for lovely clothes and an all-star cast.

At first glance, the heroine, Violet, looks like an ordinary, not pretty, not plain 1860’s seventeen-year-old Southern farmgirl, but in reality she’s extraordinary. With cleverness and resilience, she deals with all that’s thrown at her—even the climactic scene where she must save her beloved Thomas from being a voodoo sacrifice. I would choose Jennifer Lawrence to play Violet. Jennifer is pretty, but not in a flashy way, and she could handle the required physical action.

Violet’s family includes gorgeous, spoiled stepsister, Sunny (Jessica Biel when she was a teenager), her dreamy, vague, laudanum-addicted stepmother, Miss Elsa (Cate...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Jane Nickerson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Mirk and Midnight Hour.

My Book, The Movie: The Mirk and Midnight Hour.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten best poems about spring

At the Observer, Kate Kellaway named the ten best poems about spring, including:

"In Perpetual Spring"
Amy Gerstler

I like the way this poem starts in the middle of a conversation: “Gardens are also good places / to sulk. You pass beds of / spiky voodoo lilies…” Spring does not encourage her to prolong the sulk – she is overtaken by a sudden sense of unity in nature. It is a bordering-on-perverse coming together, in which she allows a thistle (“queen of weeds”) to contribute to the harmony exercise. She also cracks a joke about the lion cuddling up with the lamb, and yet is serious; her poem works like a curative, modern psalm: “your secret belief / in perpetual spring, / your faith that for every hurt / there is a leaf to cure it.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Elisa Ludwig's "Pretty Sly"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Pretty Sly by Elisa Ludwig.

About the book, from the publisher:

Willa Fox was told to stay out of trouble.

In fact, it was an order from a very serious juvenile court judge.

However, that was before Willa found her house ransacked and a mysterious note from her mother, telling Willa she had to leave Paradise Valley for a while and not to come looking for her. Since her close friend Cherise has disowned her for stealing from the Glitterati, and practically everyone else at school is against her, Willa figures she has nothing keeping her here. So with the help of her pal Tre, Willa violates her probation and hits the California highway in search of the only person who really cares about her.

Other than fellow outlaw Aidan Murphy, that is. He offered to be Willa's wingman on her latest adventure—a sure sign that their one kiss is anything but a fluke. But will Aidan stand by her when their journey turns dangerously criminal and they wind up being the focus of a national manhunt?

Pretty Sly is a wild ride with a thrilling mystery that will make you smile and leave you breathless.

Visit Elisa Ludwig's website and view the trailer for Pretty Sly.

The Page 69 Test: Pretty Sly.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about Cambodia

Peter Fröberg Idling, born in 1972, is a writer and journalist. His first book, Pol Pot's Smile (2006) was a critically acclaimed work of literary nonfiction published in eight languages. He trained as a lawyer, and was working as legal advisor to an aid organization in Cambodia when the idea for his first book came about. His new novel, Song for an Approaching Storm, is also set in Cambodia.

One of his top ten books about Cambodia, as shared at the Guardian:

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short

In David Chandler's excellent biography Brother Number One from 1993, the author has an eerie feeling of being watched by the elusive and smiling dictator while he is writing the book. A decade later, Philip Short manages to drag Pol Pot out of the shadows. Where the earlier biographer had a more academic approach, Short's book reads almost like a thriller at times. The research he has put into the book is in itself mindblowing, and the result constitutes a large and important step towards understanding the Cambodian tragedy.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Patrick Allitt reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Patrick Allitt, author of A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism.

His entry begins:

All my own writing is non-fiction but I love to read fiction for pleasure. Mrs. Allitt and I, over the last thirty years, have read aloud to one-another almost every day. We’ve made our way through twenty or more of Anthony Trollope’s massive novels, everything by David Lodge, everything by Nick Hornby, and nearly everything by Ian McEwen, William Boyd, and many others.

Our most recent book has been Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, which is in equal degrees painful and delightful. Its central character, Edie Middlestein, is an intelligent Jewish lawyer with a serious weight problem. Alternate chapter headings throughout the book mark her increasing heft: “Edie, 56 pounds,” “Edie, 220 pounds,” “Edie 300 pounds,” and so on. In these chapters we see the world from her point of view. We learn that her husband, in his late fifties, has left her, that she is diabetic, that she’s had one serious operation and must soon have another, that she’s morbidly obese to a life-threatening degree, and that she...[read on]

About A Climate of Crisis, from the publisher:

A provocative history of the environmental movement in America, showing how this rise to political and social prominence produced a culture of alarmism that has often distorted the facts

Few issues today excite more passion or alarm than the specter of climate change. In A Climate of Crisis, historian Patrick Allitt shows that our present climate of crisis is far from exceptional. Indeed, the environmental debates of the last half century are defined by exaggeration and fearmongering from all sides, often at the expense of the facts.

In a real sense, Allitt shows us, collective anxiety about widespread environmental danger began with the atomic bomb. As postwar suburbanization transformed the American landscape, more research and better tools for measurement began to reveal the consequences of economic success. A climate of anxiety became a climate of alarm, often at odds with reality. The sixties generation transformed environmentalism from a set of special interests into a mass movement. By the first Earth Day in 1970, journalists and politicians alike were urging major initiatives to remedy environmental harm. In fact, the work of the new Environmental Protection Agency and a series of clean air and water acts from a responsive Congress inaugurated a largely successful cleanup.

Political polarization around environmental questions after 1980 had consequences that we still feel today. Since then, the general polarization of American politics has mirrored that of environmental politics, as pro-environmentalists and their critics attribute to one another the worst possible motives. Environmentalists see their critics as greedy special interest groups that show no conscience as they plunder the earth while skeptics see their adversaries as enemies of economic growth whose plans stifle initiative under an avalanche of bureaucratic regulation.

There may be a germ of truth in both views, but more than a germ of falsehood too. America’s worst environmental problems have proven to be manageable; the regulations and cleanups of the last sixty years have often worked, and science and technology have continued to improve industrial efficiency. Our present situation is serious, argues Allitt, but it is far from hopeless. Sweeping and provocative, A Climate of Crisis challenges our basic assumptions about the environment, no matter where we fall along the spectrum—reminding us that the answers to our most pressing questions are sometimes found in understanding the past.

Learn more about A Climate of Crisis at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Conservatives.

Writers Read: Patrick Allitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen books everyone should read before having children

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Ester Bloom tagged fifteen books everyone should read before having kids, including:

Room Temperature, by Nicholson Baker

Perhaps the best novel ever written about a stay-at-home dad rocking his infant daughter on a weekday afternoon, by the peerlessly inventive author of The Fermata and The Everlasting Story of Nory.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Daniel E. Sutherland's "Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake by Daniel E. Sutherland.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first biography in more than twenty years of James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) is also the first to make extensive use of the artist’s private correspondence to tell the story of his life and work. This engaging personal history dispels the popular notion of Whistler as merely a combative, eccentric, and unrelenting publicity seeker, a man as renowned for his public feuds with Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin as for the iconic portrait of his mother. The Whistler revealed in these pages is an intense, introspective, and complex man, plagued by self-doubt and haunted by an endless pursuit of perfection in his painting and drawing.

In his beautifully illustrated and deeply human portrayal of the artist, Daniel E. Sutherland shows why Whistler was perhaps the most influential artist of his generation, and certainly a pivotal figure in the cultural history of the nineteenth century. Whistler comes alive through his own magnificent work and words, including the provocative manifestos that explained his bold artistic vision, sparked controversy in his own time, and resonate to this day.

Visit Daniel Sutherland's faculty webpage, and learn more about Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Savage Conflict.

The Page 99 Test: Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joanna Trollope's six favorite books

Joanna Trollope is the author of 17 bestselling novels, including The Choir, A Village Affair and The Rector's Wife. One of her six best books, as shared at the Daily Express:

VANITY FAIR by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray turns the beautiful orphan myth on its head and slyly suggests that being a good girl is deadly boring.

How clever it was to make a horrible heroine so compelling. The pages are dead unless Becky Sharp is on them. It's probably the first really accomplished portrait of a woman survivor.

Read about another book on the list.

Vanity Fair also appears on Maddie Crum's top ten list of fictional characters who just might be psychopaths, Allegra Frazier's list of five of her favorite fictional gold diggers, John Mullan's list of ten of the most memorable governesses in literature, Stella Tillyard's list of favorite historical novels, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best fat men in literature and ten of the best pianos in literature, and Thomas Mallon's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Anne Clinard Barnhill's "Queen Elizabeth's Daughter"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Queen Elizabeth's Daughter by Anne Clinard Barnhill.

About the book, from the publisher:

From Anne Barnhill, the author of At the Mercy of the Queen, comes the gripping tale of Mary Shelton, Elizabeth I’s young cousin and ward, set against the glittering backdrop of the Elizabethan court

Mistress Mary Shelton is Queen Elizabeth’s favorite ward, enjoying every privilege the position affords. The queen loves Mary like a daughter, and, like any good mother, she wants her to make a powerful match. The most likely prospect: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. But while Oxford seems to be everything the queen admires: clever, polished and wealthy, Mary knows him to be lecherous, cruel, and full of treachery. No matter how hard the queen tries to push her into his arms, Mary refuses.

Instead, Mary falls in love with a man who is completely unsuitable. Sir John Skydemore is a minor knight with little money, a widower with five children. Worst of all, he’s a Catholic at a time when Catholic plots against Elizabeth are rampant. The queen forbids Mary to wed the man she loves. When the young woman, who is the queen’s own flesh and blood, defies her, the couple finds their very lives in danger as Elizabeth’s wrath knows no bounds.

Visit Anne Clinard Barnhill's website.

The Page 69 Test: Queen Elizabeth's Daughter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the best crime & thriller stories set in the former Soviet Union

J. Kingston Pierce is both the editor of The Rap Sheet and the senior editor of January Magazine. One of eight top former Soviet Union-set crime and thriller novels he tagged at Kirkus Reviews:

Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith (2008)

Leo Demidov is a true believer in the Soviet Union as a Glorious Workers’ Paradise, a place where misdeeds common to the decadent West—such as homicide—don’t exist, and the only criminals are political ones. Yet it’s 1953, and this secret policeman has just been handed the case of a 4-year-old boy whose parents insist he was murdered. As more children turn up dead, mutilated and with their mouths full of dirt, Demidov begins to believe the impossible: that a serial killer is at large, one who’s claiming victims hundreds of miles apart. Of course, this theory is unpopular with his bosses, and it soon leads to Demidov and his beautiful (but suspect) wife being banished from their agreeable Moscow digs to the frozen hinterlands. Still, Demidov maintains the chase, one destined to make him both hunter and target. Smith’s story was inspired by real-life Russian butcher Andrei Chikatilo, aka “the Red Ripper.”

Read about another book on the list.

Child 44 is among Rebecca Armstrong's ten best thrillers.

The Page 69 Test: Child 44.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aaron Thier's "The Ghost Apple," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Ghost Apple by Aaron Thier.

The entry begins:

When people ask me what The Ghost Apple is about, my instinct is to keep silent, but this is pointless and self-defeating and it really isn’t so hard to say. It’s about a small college that sells itself to a snack food company called Big Anna. This company overthrows the college president, drugs the professors, and enslaves a group of study-abroad students on its plantations in the Caribbean. The principal characters are Bill Brees, the elderly dean of students, who goes undercover as an incoming freshman to learn what student life is really like; Maggie Bell, a student who travels to the Caribbean; John Kabaka, a history professor turned revolutionary; and William Beckford, a depraved English professor who speaks in quotations from Mussolini and becomes the college’s Big Anna-appointed dictator.

The Ghost Apple: A Hollywood Movie is a thing almost impossible to imagine, but why should that matter? The easy choice for the kind bemused loveable dean is Bill Murray, who plays every kind bemused loveable old man, and we all love him, and why shouldn’t we? But an edgier choice would be my grandfather, or yours. For Maggie, with whom the dean falls in love, we can think of no one better than...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Aaron Thier's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Ghost Apple.

My Book, The Movie: The Ghost Apple.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the creepiest short stories

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Nicole Hill tagged seven short stories that haunt her, including:

“The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson

As Springfield’s finest news anchor, Kent Brockman, says, “The Lottery” is “a chilling tale of conformity gone mad.” You really don’t want to hit the jackpot in this rural community, because this lottery is more like an old-fashioned Panem reaping than a town-wide hootenanny.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jill Kelly's "Fog of Dead Souls"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Fog of Dead Souls: A Thriller by Jill Kelly.

About the book, from the publisher:

When college professor Ellie McKay walks into the Maverick Bar in Farmington, New Mexico, late one evening, she plans to get drunk, not engaged. But within thirty minutes, she’s met cowboy Al Robison, he’s proposed to her, and she’s accepted. Al only knows that Ellie is attractive, vulnerable, and single; he doesn’t know that she has been on the run for weeks from a sociopath who killed her surgeon boyfriend in Pennsylvania and raped and tortured her.

Reeling from the ordeal and deeply scarred emotionally and physically, Ellie flees first to Paris, where she seeks refuge in the bottle. Then, coming to her senses, she returns to Pittsburgh to resume her life and her career, believing she will be safe there. When that proves untrue, she takes to the road, no longer caring much what happens to her.

Ellie’s escape route leads her to Santa Fe and then north to Farmington, where Al seems the safest bet. When she says yes to Al’s proposal, she knows only that he is a local rancher. She doesn’t know about Al’s own dark past, and she doesn’t tell him that her heart belongs to Doug Hansen, the detective who originally investigated the case.

Visit Jill Kelly's website.

The Page 69 Test: Fog of Dead Souls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kate Côté Gillin's "Shrill Hurrahs"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Shrill Hurrahs: Women, Gender, and Racial Violence in South Carolina, 1865--1900 by Kate Côté Gillin.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Shrill Hurrahs, Kate Côté Gillin presents a new perspective on gender roles and racial violence in South Carolina during Reconstruction and the decades after the 1876 election of Wade Hampton as governor. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Southerners struggled to either adapt or resist changes to their way of life. Gillin accurately perceives racial violence as an attempt by white Southern men to reassert their masculinity, weakened by the war and emancipation, and as an attempt by white Southern women to preserve their antebellum privileges.

As she reevaluates relationships between genders, Gillin also explores relations within the female gender. She has demonstrated that white women often exacerbated racial and gender violence alongside men, even when other white women were victims of that violence. Through the nineteenth century, few bridges of sisterhood were built between black and white women. Black women asserted their rights as mothers, wives, and independent, free women in the postwar years, while white women often opposed these assertions of black female autonomy. Ironically even black women participated in acts of intimidation and racial violence in an attempt to safeguard their rights. In the turmoil of an era that extinguished slavery and redefined black citizenship, race, not gender, often determined the relationships that black and white women displayed in the defeated South.

By canvassing and documenting numerous incidents of racial violence, from lynching of black men to assaults on white women, Gillin proposes a new view of postwar South Carolina. Tensions grew over the struggle for land and labor, black politicization, the creation of the Ku Klux Klan, the election of 1876, and the rise of lynching. Gillin addresses these issues and more as she focuses on black women's asserted independence and white women's role in racial violence. Despite the white women's reactionary activism, the powerful presence of black women and their bravery in the face of white violence reshaped Southern gender roles forever.

Learn more about Shrill Hurrahs at the University of South Carolina Press website. 

The Page 99 Test: Shrill Hurrahs.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ben Tarnoff reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Ben Tarnoff, author of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature.

His entry begins:

Writing a book destroys your life. It consumes all the time allotted for it, and everything else besides. All those hours you had hoped to spend doing normal human things like socializing and cooking and exercising must be sacrificed to the hungry monster that lives inside every manuscript. And if you manage to pry yourself away from your desk and actually do something recreational, your ability to enjoy it will always run up against one recurring thought: I should be working on my book.

Under these conditions, the idea of reading for pleasure is absurd. A writer reading a book while also trying to write one is either doing research or procrastinating or looking for inspiration or sizing up competitors. Pleasure rarely enters the picture. Writing has made me a terrible reader: distractible, impatient, nit-picky, guilt-ridden. But every now and then, I stumble on a book that's so perfectly keyed to what I need at that particular moment that everything else falls away.

Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians is...[read on]

About the book, from the publisher:

The unforgettable story of the birth of modern America and the western writers who gave voice to its emerging identity

The Bohemians begins in 1860s San Francisco. The Gold Rush has ended; the Civil War threatens to tear apart the country. Far from the front lines, the city at the western edge roars. A global seaport, home to immigrants from five continents, San Francisco has become a complex urban society virtually overnight. The bards of the moment are the Bohemians: a young Mark Twain, fleeing the draft and seeking adventure; literary golden boy Bret Harte; struggling gay poet Charles Warren Stoddard; and beautiful, haunted Ina Coolbrith, poet and protectorate of the group. Ben Tarnoff’s elegant, atmospheric history reveals how these four pioneering western writers would together create a new American literature, unfettered by the heavy European influence that dominated the East.

Twain arrives by stagecoach in San Francisco in 1863 and is fast drunk on champagne, oysters, and the city’s intoxicating energy. He finds that the war has only made California richer: the economy booms, newspapers and magazines thrive, and the dream of transcontinental train travel promises to soon become a reality. Twain and the Bohemians find inspiration in their surroundings: the dark ironies of frontier humor, the extravagant tales told around the campfires, and the youthful irreverence of the new world being formed in the west. The star of the moment is Bret Harte, a rising figure on the national scene and mentor to both Stoddard and Coolbrith. Young and ambitious, Twain and Harte form the Bohemian core. But as Harte’s star ascends—drawing attention from eastern taste makers such as the Atlantic Monthly—Twain flounders, questioning whether he should be a writer at all.

The Bohemian moment would continue in Boston, New York, and London, and would achieve immortality in the writings of Mark Twain. San Francisco gave him his education as a writer and helped inspire the astonishing innovations that radically reimagined American literature. At once an intimate portrait of an eclectic, unforgettable group of writers and a history of a cultural revolution in America, The Bohemians reveals how a brief moment on the western frontier changed our country forever.

View the trailer for The Bohemians, and visit Ben Tarnoff's website.

Writers Read: Ben Tarnoff.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine notable literary talking animals

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Joel Cunningham tagged several favorite talking animals in fiction, including:

Behemoth (The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov)

Speaking of felines, it’s pretty hard to compete with Behemoth, a massive, demonic black cat who arrives in 1930s Moscow on the coattails of none other than Satan himself, looking to stir up trouble. Behemoth loves guns, vodka, and chess, in that order, but most of all, he loves a perfectly timed sarcastic remark. If you substitute “food, naps, and naps,” that probably pretty much describes my cat, too.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Master and Margarita is among Josh Ritter's six favorite books that invoke the supernatural, Cornelius Medvei's's top ten talking animals in literature, Joseph Fiennes' six best books, and Daniel Johnson's five best books about Cold War culture. It's also a book that English actor and writer Stephen Fry tries to read as often as he can.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Maxwell's "Happily Ever After," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Happily Ever After by Elizabeth Maxwell.

The entry begins:

I see Renée Zellweger in the role of Sadie Fuller. I think this stems from Ms. Zellweger playing Bridget Jones and while writing Happily Ever After, I’d occasionally think of Sadie as the grown up American version of Bridget. And I love the idea of John Cusack in the role of Jason, Sadie’s sort of boyfriend. He does a great job with the bumbling guy who ends up being kind of cool, despite himself. Roger, Sadie’s gay ex husband, would have to be Rob...[read on]

Visit Elizabeth Maxwell's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: Happily Ever After.

Writers Read: Elizabeth Maxwell.

My Book, The Movie: Happily Ever After.

--Marshal Zeringue