Top ten books about vegetarians

Binnie Kirshenbaum is a novelist and short story writer. She has twice won the Critic's Choice Award and the Discovery Award. She was one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and one of Paper magazine's Beautiful People. Her books have been selected as Favorite Books of the Year by The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, Vogue and National Public Radio. Her work has been translated into seven languages. She is a professor and Fiction Director at Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts.

Kirshenbaum's latest novel is Rabbits for Food.

At the Guardian, she tagged ten great books about vegetarians, including:

Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee

Coetzee’s eponymous character is a brilliant writer, a highly opinionated literary celebrity, a complicated woman and an avowed vegetarian. The novel is structured around a series of formal lectures, some of which are on animal rights. A person of focused concerns, she doesn’t always have room for sensitivities beyond that sphere. At one lecture, Elizabeth compares the treatment of cattle to Nazi atrocities. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t go over well with the audience, or with her son – who implores her to quit making a spectacle of herself.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Roberson's "Life and Limb," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Life and Limb by Jennifer Roberson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Life and Limb is the first volume in an ongoing urban fantasy series about the End of Days, and two perfectly ordinary young men who are strangers to one another have been conscripted to join the heavenly host in a battle against Lucifer’s spec ops troops: demons who now inhabit characters and creatures from fiction, history, myths, legends, and folklore. But the angels have agendas, and Gabe and Remi—an ex-con biker and Texas cowboy—must also come to grips with the unwelcome discovery that they themselves are not after all entirely human, even as they climb the steepest of learning curves in an attempt to save the world.

Gabe and Remi are not related on a biological level, but because of their true heritage they do bear a resemblance to one another. Gabe is a long-haired biker in boots and black leather, while Remi is a Texas cowboy in boots and blue denim. Both have very dark hair and tanned skin, and I would love to see Jason Momoa, Adrian Paul in his Highlander days for coloring and eye-candy, and...[read on]

Visit Jennifer Roberson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Life and Limb.

My Book, The Movie: Life and Limb.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Erik Seeman's "Speaking with the Dead in Early America"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Speaking with the Dead in Early America by Erik R. Seeman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice.

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

Learn more about Speaking with the Dead in Early America at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Speaking with the Dead in Early America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: JP Gritton's "Wyoming"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Wyoming by JP Gritton.

About the book, from the publisher:

It’s 1988 and Shelley Cooper is in trouble. He’s broke, he’s been fired from his construction job, and his ex-wife has left him for their next door neighbor and a new life in Kansas City. The only opportunity on his horizon is fifty pounds of his brother’s high-grade marijuana, which needs to be driven from Colorado to Houston and exchanged for a lockbox full of cash. The delivery goes off without a hitch, but getting home with the money proves to be a different challenge altogether. Fueled by a grab bag of resentments and self punishment, Shelley becomes a case study in the question of whether it’s possible to live without accepting yourself, and the dope money is the key to a lock he might never find. JP Gritton’s portrait of a hapless aspirant at odds with himself and everyone around him is both tender and ruthless, and Wyoming considers the possibility of redemption in a world that grants forgiveness grudgingly, if at all.

Visit JP Gritton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Wyoming.

The Page 69 Test: Wyoming.

--Marshal Zeringue

The twenty best novels of the decade

Emily Temple is a senior editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, will be published by William Morrow in 2020.

Temple and the Literary Hub staff picked the twenty best novels of the decade. One title on the list:

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (2016)

This was one of those novels I had to be told multiple times to read. I just didn’t want to read a sad book about depression! And to be fair ... it is sad. But even so, I was wrong to resist, and so are you if you missed this one.

Adam Haslett’s second novel is a full and frank portrait of a family and the mental illness that besieges its members—some genetically, others merely experientially. It’s no more complicated than that—there’s no hook, no high concept twist, just the story of a family, told over the years and through the lens of each member: John, Margaret, and their (adult) children Michael, Celia, and Alec. Michael is the most intense narrator, and the one who has inherited his father’s “beast,” though in him it is changed into an obsessive, endlessly riffing master. In fact, Michael’s writing shows up quite a bit in the novel, and it’s one of the book’s best parts—a direct lens, as it were, into a highly unusual mind.

Throughout, the writing is perfectly calibrated, shifting in tenor between characters but always elevated, even lovely. But the most impressive feat is the empathy with which Haslett unravels this family, and the tenderness with which he writes about love in all of its forms. This is a striking novel, and one of the best examples in recent memory of a certain literary mode: quiet, moving, immersive, beautiful.
–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Read about another entry on the list.

Imagine Me Gone is among Saskia Lacey's fifty incredible literary works destined to become classics.

The Page 69 Test: Imagine Me Gone.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Margaret Mizushima & Hannah

Featured at Coffee with a Canine: Margaret Mizushima & Hannah.

The author, on Hannah's reluctance to head outdoors:

I once thought it was because her thin skin made her susceptible to hot and cold weather, but she’s this way year round. We found it interesting when we learned that her mother is just like her, and her family says they could barely get her to go outside to do her business. Hannah is exactly the same way, which I thought might be because she was perhaps…could it be…spoiled? But now I have to ask...[read on]

Tracking Game: A Timber Creek K-9 Mystery by Margaret Mizushima.

About Mizushima's new novel, Tracking Game, from the publisher:

Two brutal murders, a menacing band of poachers, and a fearsome creature on the loose in the mountains plunge Mattie Cobb and her K-9 partner Robo into a sinister vortex.

An explosion outside a community dance sends Mattie Cobb and Cole Walker reeling into the night, where they discover a burning van and beside it the body of outfitter Nate Fletcher. But the explosion didn't kill Nate—it was two gunshots to the heart.

The investigation leads them to the home of rancher Doyle Redman, whose daughter is Nate's widow, and the object of one of their suspect's affection. But before they can make an arrest, they receive an emergency call from a man who's been shot in the mountains. Mattie and Robo rush to the scene, only to be confronted by the ominous growl of a wild predator.

As new players emerge on the scene, Mattie begins to understand the true danger that's enveloping Timber Creek. They journey into the cold, misty mountains to track the animal—but discover something even more deadly in Tracking Game, the fifth installment in Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek K-9 mysteries.

Visit Margaret Mizushima's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Margaret Mizushima & Hannah, Bertie, Lily and Tess.

My Book, The Movie: Burning Ridge.

The Page 69 Test: Burning Ridge.

Writers Read: Margaret Mizushima.

The Page 69 Test: Tracking Game.

Coffee with a Canine: Margaret Mizushima & Hannah.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Howard Andrew Jones reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Howard Andrew Jones, author of Upon the Flight of the Queen.

His entry begins:

While my screen media intake has pretty much dwindled to documentaries and Bob’s Burgers, the kinds of material I consume via the written word changed and grew in the last decade. Lately I’ve spent less and less time reading in the genres where I usually write.

A recent discovery for me has been the work of Marvin Albert, who was writing from the 1950s until his death in the 1990s. Almost from the start his books were regularly adapted for the cinema, and he’s apparently revered in France, where he spent the last few decades of his life. I’ve seen some critics dismiss him because he’s never as good as the very best, and yet I find that he always delivers, whether it be with hardboiled westerns or detective yarns. As a matter of fact, I use his work as a kind of “safe base” to which I can return. I explore other mystery and western writers unknown to me with some regularity, and when I find that work wanting and desire a palate cleanser, I head back to my storehouse of Marvin Albert books. Just last week I finished off his three detective novels written under his Anthony Rome alias, featuring Miami private eye and boat owner Tony Rome. They are, in order, Miami Mayhem, The Lady in Cement, and My Kind of Game. The first two were made into Sinatra films I’ve never seen. I found all three to be taut, well-paced, surprising, and atmospheric. Albert always...[read on]

About Upon the Flight of the Queen, from the publisher:

In this sequel to For the Killing of Kings, Howard Andrew Jones returns to the ring-sworn champions of the Altenerai in Upon the Flight of the Queen to continue this thrilling, imaginative and immersive epic fantasy trilogy.

While the savage Naor clans prepare to march on the heart of the Allied Realms, Rylin infiltrates the highest of the enemy ranks to learn their secrets and free hundreds of doomed prisoners. His ailing mentor Varama leads the ever-dwindling Altenerai corps in a series of desperate strikes to cripple the Naor occupiers, hoping for a relief force that may not come in time to save what’s left of the city and her charges.

Elenai, Kyrkenall, and the kobalin Ortok ride through the storm-wracked Shifting Lands to rekindle an alliance with the ko’aye, the only possible counter to the terrible Naor dragons. Even if they survive the hazardous trek deep through kobalin territory to find the winged lizards, though, the three are unlikely to get a warm reception, for the queen of the five realms refused to aid the ko’aye when their homelands were attacked, and the creatures have long memories.

While the Altenerai fight impossible odds to save the realms, their queen delves further and deeper into the magic of the mysterious hearthstones in a frantic attempt to unlock secrets that might just destroy them all.

Praised for his skills in drafting modern epic fantasy that engrosses and entertains, Howard Andrew Jones delivers a sequel that expands the amazing world, relationships, and adventure introduced in the first book of this series.

Learn more about the book and author at Howard Andrew Jones's website.

View the animated book trailer for Upon the Flight of the Queen.

The Page 69 Test: The Bones of the Old Ones.

My Book, The Movie: The Bones of the Old Ones.

Writers Read: Howard Andrew Jones.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Roger Crowley's "The Accursed Tower"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley.

About the book, from the publisher:

From a New York Times-bestselling author, a stirring account of the siege of Acre in 1291, when the last Christian stronghold fell to the Muslim army

The 1291 siege of Acre was the Alamo of the Christian Crusades — the final bloody battle for the Holy Land. After a desperate six weeks, the beleaguered citadel surrendered to the Mamluks, bringing an end to Christendom’s two-hundred year adventure in the Middle East.

In The Accursed Tower, Roger Crowley delivers a lively narrative of the lead-up to the siege and a vivid, blow-by-blow account of the climactic battle. Drawing on extant Arabic sources as well as untranslated Latin documents, he argues that Acre is notable for technical advances in military planning and siege warfare, and extraordinary for its individual heroism and savage slaughter. A gripping depiction of the crusader era told through its dramatic last moments, The Accursed Tower offers an essential new view on a crucial turning point in world history.

Visit Roger Crowley's website.

Writers Read: Roger Crowley (December 2015).

The Page 99 Test: Conquerors.

The Page 99 Test: The Accursed Tower.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books whose protagonists are "trapped in the in-between"

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of the Middle Grade historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, Star Wars: Last Shot, and the award winning Young Adult series the Shadowshaper Cypher, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read.

Older's The Book of Lost Saints, a magic-realist epic about a Cuban-American family, is his first non-Y.A. novel.

At The Week magazine, he tagged six books whose protagonists are "trapped in the in-between," including:

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (2016).

This is one of my favorite examples of a novel that critically remixes the canon. LaValle takes one of H.P. Lovecraft's most horrific and racist tales — 1924's "The Horror at Red Hook" — and injects it with a heart and new life by adding the perspective of a new character, a young black hustler named Tommy Tester. A tale about an occult presence in an immigrant New York City neighborhood becomes something rebellious and ­ferocious — a masterpiece.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

JP Gritton’s "Wyoming," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Wyoming by JP Gritton.

The entry begins:

In high school I gravitated toward nerdy, artistically inclined types, and together we completed a slow orbit of the theater and film programs. Some of us were in set design, and some of us did lighting and sound, and some of us fretted and strutted (in minor roles, of course) upon the stage. Not so long ago, a film I co-wrote and starred in back in high school appeared on the local-access television channel.

It was baffling. Where had they found it, this thing I only half-remembered creating? Why were they running it now? Who had given them the say-so? Even when I made it, I’d had only a vague sense of the film's plot. I can say only that it featured a younger, huskier version of myself with a zip-lock bag of powdered sugar in his hand (its title, I should mention, was Colombian Blizzard). My best friend had recruited a beautiful crush to star opposite me. In one of the only scenes I remember, I wave Jenna into my mom’s house and explain: “Feel free to take your clothes off.” In the next scene I remember with any real clarity, my car gets stalled on some train tracks and then (get this) a train comes! That’s how the movie ends.

I think about this story often: it tells me something of how random, how chaotic artistic expression can truly be. I guess we made that movie in 1997 or ‘98—it was only a few years ago I saw it on local access. You never know who is going to pick up your TV script, or your demo tape, or your chapbook—what are the chances, after all, that I’d turn on local access and see my own pimply face on the screen?

Maybe as a consequence of this optimism, I’ve played the casting game at every stage of the writing process. The main character of my novel is a surly, misanthropic, drug-slinging construction worker named Shelley. My buddy Jon, who read the first complete draft, thought Josh Brolin would make a good leading man. My editor and girlfriend both suggested...[read on]

Visit JP Gritton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Wyoming.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jennifer Roberson's "Life and Limb"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Life and Limb by Jennifer Roberson.

About the book, from the publisher:

His voice was rich, a much loved baritone, as he handed his seven-year-old grandson a gun.

“It’s time we had a talk, you and I. You won’t remember it, but you need to know it, and one day, when it’s time, I’ll call it up in you. You’ll know who you are, and what you’re intended to do. You’ll be a soldier, boy. Sealed to it. Life and limb, blood and bone. Not a soldier like others are, for it’s not the kind of war most people fight on earth. But because we’re not ‘most people,’ you and I, it will be far more important. The fate of the world will hinge upon it.”

Now no longer that wide-eyed child, Gabe is fresh out of prison, a leather-clad biker answering Grandaddy’s peremptory summons to, of all places, a cowboy bar in Northern Arizona. He is about to find out just how different he is from “most people”—and to meet the stranger with whom he will be sealed: life and limb, blood and bone, conscripted to fight an unholy war unlike any other.

For the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

When he does.

And Gabe, thrown into the unlikely company of a country-music-loving rodeo cowboy from West Texas, an ancient Celtic goddess of war, an African Orisha who sings volcanoes awake, a Chinese goddess of mercy, Nephilim, and Grigori, finds himself fighting a battle he was bred for, but wants no part of.

Visit Jennifer Roberson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Life and Limb.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven eye-opening books about Appalachia

Kaytie Norman joined Open Road Integrated Media in 2019 after spending three years writing and editing books for Media Lab Books. Her hobbies include cooking, honing her Liz Lemon impression and encouraging people to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At Early Bird Books she tagged seven top books about Appalachia, including:

Sugar Run
By Mesha Maren

Thirty-five-year-old Jodi McCarty has just been released from prison after 18 years. Unable to yet face going back to her former home in the Appalachian Mountains, she instead heads south. This leads Jodi to Miranda, a single mother making ends meet by living in a motel room. As Jodi and Miranda fall for one another, they’re both determined to start their lives over. But fresh starts are hard to come by when you come from a place that refuses to forget the past. Described as “a literary page-turner, hair-raising in both plot and prose” by O, The Oprah Magazine, you won’t be able to put down Mesha Maren’s Southern noir until you’ve reached the very last page.

Read about another entry on the list.

Writers Read: Mesha Maren (January 2019).

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Roland De Wolk's "American Disruptor"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford by Roland De Wolk.

About the book, from the publisher:

American Disruptor is the untold story of Leland Stanford – from his birth in a backwoods bar to the founding of the world-class university that became and remains the nucleus of Silicon Valley. The life of this robber baron, politician, and historic influencer is the astonishing tale of how one supremely ambitious man became this country's original "disruptor" – reshaping industry and engineering one of the greatest raids on the public treasury for America’s transcontinental railroad, all while living more opulently than maharajas, kings, and emperors.

It is also the saga of how Stanford, once a serial failure, overcame all obstacles to become one of America’s most powerful and wealthiest men, using his high elective office to enrich himself before losing the one thing that mattered most to him – his only child and son. Scandal and intrigue would follow Stanford through his life, and even after his death, when his widow was murdered in a Honolulu hotel – a crime quickly covered up by the almost stillborn university she had saved. Richly detailed and deeply researched, American Disruptor restores Leland Stanford’s rightful place as a revolutionary force and architect of modern America.

Visit Roland De Wolk's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Disruptor.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Olivia Hawker reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Olivia Hawker, author of One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow.

Her entry begins:

I’ve been on a huge Joan Didion kick lately. That started this summer while I was working on a new book for Lake Union Publishing. It’s set in the late sixties and early seventies, and it deals with two women in their late twenties who are feeling thoroughly dissatisfied with their lives. I wanted to understand what women of that age were thinking and feeling during that time, which was a strange gray area between the exuberance and optimism of the hippie movement and the cynicism that gripped America once Nixon’s misdeeds were exposed. The peace-and-love thing was just starting to die down and no one was sure yet what kind of culture would grow up out of all the shocking societal changes that happened in the early and mid-sixties. I figured the best way to find the right tone for my book was to read what women in their late twenties and early thirties were writing about during that time, which naturally led me to Joan Didion.

I started with Play It as It Lays, her 1970 novel about a woman struggling to navigate Hollywood culture and a rather grim marriage. It was dark and honest and weird—three things I absolutely love in fiction—and that...[read on]

About One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow, from the publisher:

Wyoming, 1876. For as long as they have lived on the frontier, the Bemis and Webber families have relied on each other. With no other settlers for miles, it is a matter of survival. But when Ernest Bemis finds his wife, Cora, in a compromising situation with their neighbor, he doesn’t think of survival. In one impulsive moment, a man is dead, Ernest is off to prison, and the women left behind are divided by rage and remorse.

Losing her husband to Cora’s indiscretion is another hardship for stoic Nettie Mae. But as a brutal Wyoming winter bears down, Cora and Nettie Mae have no choice but to come together as one family—to share the duties of working the land and raising their children. There’s Nettie Mae’s son, Clyde—no longer a boy, but not yet a man—who must navigate the road to adulthood without a father to guide him, and Cora’s daughter, Beulah, who is as wild and untamable as her prairie home.

Bound by the uncommon threads in their lives and the challenges that lie ahead, Cora and Nettie Mae begin to forge an unexpected sisterhood. But when a love blossoms between Clyde and Beulah, bonds are once again tested, and these two resilient women must finally decide whether they can learn to trust each other—or else risk losing everything they hold dear.

Visit Olivia Hawker's website.

My Book, The Movie: One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow.

The Page 69 Test: One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow.

Writers Read: Olivia Hawker.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books centered around military conflict and its aftermath

Mary Paulson-Ellis lives in Edinburgh. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and was awarded the inaugural Curtis Brown Prize for Fiction in 2009 and the Literature Works First Page Prize in 2013. Her debut novel, The Other Mrs Walker was a Times bestseller and Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year. Paulson-Ellis was Highly Commended as a Rising Star in the DIVA Literary Awards and shortlisted as a Breakthrough Author in the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2017. In 2016 she was named an Amazon Rising Star.

The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing is her second novel.

For Waterstones, Paulson-Ellis tagged six top titles centered around military conflicts and their aftermath, including:

War and Turpentine
Stefan Hertmans

This poignant novel returns us to the territory where I began – WW1. It contains at its heart an outstanding piece of recreated memoir based on a diary Hertmans’ grandfather wrote about his experiences with the Belgian army in 1914-18. But Hertmans’ modern reflection on war and memory is so much more than that, taking in everything from his grandfather’s youth of almost Dickensian poverty in Ghent, to memories of an old man crying over a painting in the 1970s. A supremely moving ‘detective’ story about what it means to excavate the past.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Chad Zunker's "An Equal Justice"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: An Equal Justice by Chad Zunker.

About An Equal Justice, from the publisher:

Inside a prestigious law firm, a rookie lawyer is pulled into a dark maze of lies and violence.

An ambitious Stanford graduate, David Adams has begun a fast-track career at Austin’s most prestigious law firm. It’s a personal victory for the rising superstar—a satisfying reversal from his impoverished and despairing childhood. Now he has the life he’s always wanted: an extravagant salary, a high-rise condo, a luxury SUV, and no limit to how far he can go in the eyes of the top partners.

But after the shocking suicide of a fellow associate—one who, in his final hours, offered David an ominous warning—he feels the pull of powerful forces behind the corporation’s enviable trappings. The suicide leads unexpectedly to David’s discovery of a secret enclave of the city’s homeless, where he can’t help but feel an affinity to these outcast souls. Nor can he ignore the feeling that they hold the key to the truth behind a dark conspiracy.

When one of his new street friends is murdered, David’s clear doubts about his employer start shifting into a dark reality. Now torn between two worlds, David must surrender all that he’s achieved to fight for a larger cause of justice—and become his firm’s most dangerous acquisition.

Visit Chad Zunker's website.

My Book, The Movie: Hunt The Lion.

The Page 69 Test: Hunt the Lion.

Writers Read: Chad Zunker.

The Page 69 Test: An Equal Justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that explore the physical & emotional impact of dementia

Emma Healey is the author of Elizabeth Is Missing and Whistle in the Dark.

At the Guardian, she tagged five titles that explore the physical and emotional impact of dementia, including:

Looking at the condition from the outside can only get us so far, but the best fiction can almost put us inside the head of another person. The “For” section of Ali Smith’s brilliant novel There But For The recreates the internal workings of a mind with dementia. Written as a stream of consciousness, vivid moments from the past are presented between parentheses and in the present tense, giving the sense that those memories are much more immediate than the past-tense contemporary account. Playful and quick witted, the sum total of a woman’s life – her tragedies, jokes and certainties – is jumbled together, yet Smith creates a vivid sense of a person rather than a sufferer.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Cedric de Leon's "Crisis!"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Crisis!: When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule by Cedric de Leon.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely analysis of the power and limits of political parties—and the lessons of the Civil War and the New Deal in the Age of Trump.

American voters have long been familiar with the phenomenon of the presidential frontrunner. In 2008, it was Hillary Clinton. In 1844, it was Martin Van Buren. And in neither election did the prominent Democrat win the party's nomination. Insurgent candidates went on to win the nomination and the presidency, plunging the two-party system into disarray over the years that followed.

In this book, Cedric de Leon analyzes two pivotal crises in the American two-party system: the first resulting in the demise of the Whig party and secession of eleven southern states in 1861, and the present crisis splintering the Democratic and Republican parties and leading to the election of Donald Trump. Recasting these stories through the actions of political parties, de Leon draws unsettling parallels in the political maneuvering that ultimately causes once-dominant political parties to lose the people's consent to rule.

Crisis! takes us beyond the common explanations of social determinants to illuminate how political parties actively shape national stability and breakdown. The secession crisis and the election of Donald Trump suggest that politicians and voters abandon the political establishment not only because people are suffering, but also because the party system itself is unable to absorb an existential challenge to its power. Just as the U.S. Civil War meant the difference between the survival of a slaveholding republic and the birth of liberal democracy, what political elites and civil society organizations do today can mean the difference between fascism and democracy.

Learn more about Crisis!: When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago by Cedric de Leon.

The Page 99 Test: Crisis!: When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about the struggle of being a writer

Gnesis Villar, an intern at Electric Literature, tagged seven books about the struggle of being a writer, including:

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Arthur Less is about to turn fifty and is failing—at writing, at dating, at life in general. After receiving a wedding invitation from his not-boyfriend of nine years Arthur is at a crossroads. He can’t say yes because of the awkwardness but he also can’t say no because it would look like defeat. So he comes up with a half-baked idea to travel the world, going to every literary event he’s been invited to. From a romance cut short in Paris to a near-deadly fall in Berlin, Arthur along the way finds his first love and his last.

Read about another entry on the list.

Less is among Sarah Skilton's six novel novels about novelists.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Chad Zunker reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Chad Zunker, author of An Equal Justice.

His entry begins:

I’m currently knee deep in Lying Next To Me, a fantastic new domestic thriller by Gregg Olsen about a husband whose life gets shattered when his wife is abducted right in front of him. Of course, not everything is what it seems. As a husband with my own young kids, the book is absolutely gripping for me. Gregg...[read on]

About An Equal Justice, from the publisher:

Inside a prestigious law firm, a rookie lawyer is pulled into a dark maze of lies and violence.

An ambitious Stanford graduate, David Adams has begun a fast-track career at Austin’s most prestigious law firm. It’s a personal victory for the rising superstar—a satisfying reversal from his impoverished and despairing childhood. Now he has the life he’s always wanted: an extravagant salary, a high-rise condo, a luxury SUV, and no limit to how far he can go in the eyes of the top partners.

But after the shocking suicide of a fellow associate—one who, in his final hours, offered David an ominous warning—he feels the pull of powerful forces behind the corporation’s enviable trappings. The suicide leads unexpectedly to David’s discovery of a secret enclave of the city’s homeless, where he can’t help but feel an affinity to these outcast souls. Nor can he ignore the feeling that they hold the key to the truth behind a dark conspiracy.

When one of his new street friends is murdered, David’s clear doubts about his employer start shifting into a dark reality. Now torn between two worlds, David must surrender all that he’s achieved to fight for a larger cause of justice—and become his firm’s most dangerous acquisition.

Visit Chad Zunker's website.

My Book, The Movie: Hunt The Lion.

The Page 69 Test: Hunt the Lion.

Writers Read: Chad Zunker.

--Marshal Zeringue