Pg. 99: Mary K. Bercaw Edwards's "Sailor Talk"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Sailor Talk: Labor, Utterance, and Meaning in the Works of Melville, Conrad, and London by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book investigates the highly engaging topic of the literary and cultural significance of 'sailor talk.' The central argument is that sailor talk offers a way of rethinking the figure of the nineteenth-century sailor and sailor-writer, whose language articulated the rich, layered, and complex culture of sailors in port and at sea. From this argument many other compelling threads emerge, including questions relating to the seafarer's multifaceted identity, maritime labor, questions of performativity, the ship as 'theater,' the varied and multiple registers of 'sailor talk,' and the foundational role of maritime language in the lives and works of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London. The book also includes nods to James Fenimore Cooper, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Meticulous scholarly research underpins the close readings of literary texts and the scrupulously detailed biographical accounts of three major sailor-writers. The author's own lived experience as a seafarer adds a refreshingly materialist dimension to the subtle literary readings. The book represents a valuable addition to a growing scholarly and political interest in the sea and sea literature. By taking the sailor's viewpoint and listening to sailors' voices, the book also marks a clear intervention in this developing field.

Learn more about Sailor Talk at the Liverpool University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Sailor Talk.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Catherine Ryan Hyde's "Seven Perfect Things"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Seven Perfect Things: A Novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

About the book, from the publisher:

Thirteen-year-old Abby Hubble lives in an unhappy home in the Sierra Nevada foothills where her father makes life miserable for her and her mother, Mary. One day Abby witnesses a man dump a litter of puppies into the nearby river. Diving in to rescue all seven, she knows she won’t be able to bring them home. Afraid for their fate at the pound, she takes them to an abandoned cabin, where all she can offer is a promise that she’ll be back the next day.

To grieving widower Elliot Colvin, life has lost meaning. Looking for solace, he retreats to the hunting cabin he last visited years ago, before his wife’s illness. What he discovers is not at all what he expected: seven puppies and one determined girl with an indomitable heart.

As Abby and Elliot’s friendship deepens, Abby imagines how much better her life―and the puppies’ lives―would be if her mother were married to Elliot instead of her father. But when Abby’s father moves the family hundreds of miles away, Abby and her mother must decide how long they’re willing to defer happiness.

Seven Perfect Things is a story about joy, where to find it, how to know it when you see it, and the courage it takes to hang on to it once you have it.

Visit Catherine Ryan Hyde's website.

Q&A with Catherine Ryan Hyde.

The Page 69 Test: Brave Girl, Quiet Girl.

The Page 69 Test: My Name is Anton.

The Page 69 Test: Seven Perfect Things.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about misfits trying to escape societal pressure

Ailsa McFarlane was born in 1997 in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in Snowdonia in the United Kingdom. After leaving school, she studied veterinary science before dropping out to travel the United States and Europe by road.

Highway Blue is her first novel.

At Electric Lit McFarlane tagged seven novels about running away from the past, including:

The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima

In the opening pages of Mishima’s novel, Koji looks back from the deck of a moving ship as it leaves the town of Numazu behind him on the shore. The ship is a prison boat, and Koji has just been discharged from the penitentiary where he has served out his sentence for attacking his lover’s husband with a metal wrench. Waiting for him on the other side of his journey are Yuko, his lover, and Ippei, her husband and Koji’s victim, whose life has been irrevocably changed by his injuries.

The narrative is punctuated regularly by Mishima’s often-startling, bad-dream imagery that sometimes borders on the surrealistic—pale fetuses, wilting lilies, the shadow of a rat thrown across a face. In many places, this imagery is linked to regression or stilted growth, as ideas of the traditional loving, respectful man-woman dynamic—so important to the Japanese society of the time—are twisted out of shape, refracted through the panel of dark glass that Mishima holds against them.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Gian Sardar

From my Q&A with Gian Sardar, author of Take What You Can Carry: A Novel:

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

Take What You Can Carry is a title I lifted from the pages of my book, in a scene where one of my Kurdish characters talks about being forced to flee to the mountains during the government attacks. The book takes place in 1979, mostly in Kurdistan of Iraq, and was originally called No Friends But The Mountains, which is a Kurdish proverb. However, right as I finished the book, another work came out with that same title. Perhaps it was fortuitous, because while hunting for a title I saw the words on the page and knew right away that I’d found my title - and it’s a title I love. Not only does it capture the actual physical goal of running with whatever you can grab, but it plays upon a thematic element of the book as well.

What's in a name?

Picking a name can make or break a character for me. In...[read on]

Visit Gian Sardar's website.

Q&A with Gian Sardar.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five SFF books that showcase siblings at their core

Sarah Pinsker is the author of over fifty works of short fiction, including the novelette "Our Lady of the Open Road," winner of the Nebula Award in 2016. Her novelette "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind," was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Uncanny and in numerous anthologies and year's bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages, and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, Eugie, and World Fantasy Awards.

Pinsker's first collection, the Philip K Dick Award winning Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories, was published in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, was published in September 2019. Her latest book is We Are Satellites.

[The Page 69 Test: A Song for a New Day]

At Tor.com Pinsker tagged five "adult SFF books built around a rich, gooey, sibling core," including:

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

Three estranged sisters in a historical alternate United States find themselves in the city of New Salem after years apart, drawn together reluctantly by the magical threads that still bind them. They have longstanding and well-founded issues with each other, which have only festered and grown over their years apart. In order to work together, they have to learn to communicate, to understand, to forgive, and to recognize each others’ differences and strengths. These are real sibling relationships, fraught, lived in, drenched in personal history. As one of three sisters (and the daughter of one of three sisters) I finished this book and immediately bought it for my sisters and my mother.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Once and Future Witches is among Heather Walter's five SFF books about wicked women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Patricia Fara's "Life after Gravity"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Life after Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career by Patricia Fara.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of Isaac Newton's decades in London - as ambitious cosmopolitan gentleman, President of London's Royal Society, Master of the Mint, and investor in the slave trade.

Isaac Newton is celebrated throughout the world as a great scientific genius who conceived the theory of gravity. But in his early fifties, he abandoned his life as a reclusive university scholar to spend three decades in London, a long period of metropolitan activity that is often overlooked. Enmeshed in Enlightenment politics and social affairs, Newton participated in the linked spheres of early science and imperialist capitalism. Instead of the quiet cloisters and dark libraries of Cambridge's all-male world, he now moved in fashionable London society, which was characterized by patronage relationships, sexual intrigues and ruthless ambition.

Knighted by Queen Anne, and a close ally of influential Whig politicians, Newton occupied a powerful position as President of London's Royal Society. He also became Master of the Mint, responsible for the nation's money at a time of financial crisis, and himself making and losing small fortunes on the stock market. A major investor in the East India Company, Newton benefited from the global trading networks that relied on selling African captives to wealthy plantation owners in the Americas, and was responsible for monitoring the import of African gold to be melted down for English guineas.

Patricia Fara reveals Newton's life as a cosmopolitan gentleman by focussing on a Hogarth painting of an elite Hanoverian drawing room. Gazing down from the mantelpiece, a bust of Newton looms over an aristocratic audience watching their children perform a play about European colonialism and the search for gold. Packed with Newtonian imagery, this conversation piece depicts the privileged, exploitative life in which this eminent Enlightenment figure engaged, an uncomfortable side of Newton's life with which we are much less familiar.

Learn more about Life after Gravity at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Erasmus Darwin.

The Page 99 Test: A Lab of One's Own.

The Page 99 Test: Life after Gravity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jessica Anya Blau's "Mary Jane"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Mary Jane: A Novel by Jessica Anya Blau.

About the book, from the publisher:

Almost Famous meets Daisy Jones & The Six in this funny, wise, and tender novel about a fourteen-year-old girl’s coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her straight-laced family and the progressive family she nannies for—who happen to be secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer.

In 1970s Baltimore, fourteen-year-old Mary Jane loves cooking with her mother, singing in her church choir, and enjoying her family’s subscription to the Broadway Showtunes of the Month record club. Shy, quiet, and bookish, she’s glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Jane’s mother says. In a respectable house.

The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it’s a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, Impeachment: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane’s mother to know, which she does not): the doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job—helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.

Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be.

Learn more about the book and author at Jessica Anya Blau's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Jessica Anya Blau and Pippa.

The Page 69 Test: The Wonder Bread Summer.

My Book, The Movie: The Wonder Bread Summer.

The Page 69 Test: The Trouble with Lexie.

My Book, The Movie: The Trouble with Lexie.

Writers Read: Jessica Anya Blau (June 2016).

The Page 69 Test: Mary Jane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Linda L. Richards

From my Q&A with Linda L. Richards, author of Endings:

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

This book is all about Endings. Well, and beginnings as well, I guess, but that doesn’t make as good a title! But as we join the book, a lot of things have ended and as we move forward with the narrating character we are with her for still more ends. Do wonderful new things almost always come out of endings? Well, yes. Of course. But she doesn’t...[read on]

Visit Linda L. Richards's website.

My Book, The Movie: Endings.

The Page 69 Test: Endings.

Q&A with Linda L. Richards.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine great thrillers featuring alter egos

Saul A. Lelchuk holds a B.A. in English from Amherst College and a master's degree from Dartmouth College. He divides his time between Oakland, California and New Hampshire, where he teaches graduate creative writing at Dartmouth. He has served as a PEN America Prison Writing Mentor and makes regular appearances discussing fiction writing around the country.

Save Me From Dangerous Men was the start of a series featuring bookseller and private investigator Nikki Griffin. The series was optioned for film and television and has been published in translations around the world. Save Me From Dangerous Men was named a USA Today Best Book of 2019, a Booklist Top 10 Crime Debut of 2019, a Kirkus Best Mystery/Thriller of 2019, a Hudson Booksellers Best of the Year, and was short-listed for a Barry Award.

The sequel, One Got Away, was named as a “5 Books Not to Miss” by USA Today and was published in April 2021.

At CrimeReads Lelchuk tagged nine favorite thrillers featuring alter egos, including:

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

It would be an egregious omission if I didn’t include one of the most iconic alter egos out there: Tom Ripley. In the first of the series, Patricia Highsmith introduces us to her con man and murderer extraordinaire. Charming but bland, attractive yet unassuming, likeable and forgettable—this is Ripley’s meticulously curated exterior. This mask hides a rather sociopathic personality with a hellbent willingness to opportunistically take what he wants, regardless of who he hurts (or worse) in the process. Fittingly, Ripley also shows himself to be a man of supreme ambivalence in all matters—sexually, morally, vocationally. Yet despite his many proven talents, we wonder whether his chameleon nature will catch up to him eventually.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Talented Mr Ripley is on Emma Stonex's list of seven top mystery novels set by the sea, Russ Thomas's top ten list of queer protagonists in crime fiction, Paul Vidich's list of five of the most enduring imposters in crime fiction & espionage, Lisa Levy's list of eight of the most toxic friendships in crime fiction, Elizabeth Macneal's list of five sympathetic fictional psychopaths, Laurence Scott's list of seven top books about doppelgangers, J.S. Monroe's list of seven suspenseful literary thrillers, Simon Lelic's top ten list of false identities in fiction, Jeff Somers's list of fifty novels that changed novels, Olivia Sudjic's list of eight favorite books about love and obsession, Roz Chast's six favorite books list, Nicholas Searle's top five list of favorite deceivers in fiction, Chris Ewan's list of the ten top chases in literature, Meave Gallagher's top twenty list of gripping page-turners every twentysomething woman should read, Sophia Bennett's top ten list of books set in the Mediterranean, Emma Straub's top ten list of holidays in fiction, E. Lockhart's list of favorite suspense novels, Sally O'Reilly's top ten list of novels inspired by Shakespeare, Walter Kirn's top six list of books on deception, Stephen May's top ten list of impostors in fiction, Simon Mason's top ten list of chilling fictional crimes, Melissa Albert's list of eight books to change a villain, Koren Zailckas's list of eleven of literature's more evil characters, Alex Berenson's five best list of books about Americans abroad John Mullan's list of ten of the best examples of rowing in literature, Tana French's top ten maverick mysteries list, the Guardian's list of the 50 best summer reads ever, the Telegraph's ultimate reading list, and Francesca Simon's top ten list of antiheroes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Charles Seife's "Hawking Hawking"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by Charles Seife.

About the book, from the publisher:

Stephen Hawking was widely recognized as the world’s best physicist and even the most brilliant man alive–but what if his true talent was self-promotion?

When Stephen Hawking died, he was widely recognized as the world’s best physicist and even its smartest person.

He was neither.

In Hawking Hawking, science journalist Charles Seife explores how Stephen Hawking came to be thought of as humanity’s greatest genius. Hawking spent his career grappling with deep questions in physics, but his renown didn’t rest on his science. He was a master of self-promotion, hosting parties for time travelers, declaring victory over problems he had not solved, and wooing billionaires. In a wheelchair and physically dependent on a cadre of devotees, Hawking still managed to captivate the people around him—and use them for his own purposes.

A brilliant exposé and powerful biography, Hawking Hawking uncovers the authentic Hawking buried underneath the fake. It is the story of a man whose brilliance in physics was matched by his genius for building his own myth.

Visit Charles Seife's website.

The Page 99 Test: Hawking Hawking.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Nick Pirog's "Jungle Up"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Jungle Up by Nick Pirog.

About the book, from the publisher:

“Please find me, Thomas! Please!”

Two years ago, Dr. Gina Brady broke Thomas Prescott’s heart, but now her panic-stricken satellite phone call starts it beating again with a fury. Thugs kidnapped the good doctor from the remote jungle village where she was working, and now the retired homicide detective’s expert skills are desperately needed to save her.

Led by a colorful, but perhaps untrustworthy local guide, Prescott journeys deep into the Bolivian Amazon, plunging into a world where the only thing more dangerous than the gun-toting drug traffickers and the ruthless tribesmen, is the jungle itself.

When Gina’s trail leads to a chance encounter with an archaeological expedition, the search for the missing doctor takes on even deadlier consequences. But Prescott will not relent in this punishing quest until, once again, he holds Gina in his arms.

The books in The Thomas Prescott Series can be enjoyed in any order, so grab Jungle Up and get started today.

Visit Nick Pirog's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jungle Up.

The Page 69 Test: Jungle Up.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about the Partition of India & Pakistan

Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, organizer, and award-winning journalist based near Atlanta.

A graduate of Duke University, Washington University School of Law, and the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, she teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University.

Enjeti's collection of essays, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and her debut novel The Parted Earth will be published in the spring of 2021.

At Electric Lit Enjeti tagged seven of the best books about the Partition of India and Pakistan, including:

Victory Colony 1950 by Bhaswati Ghosh

This engrossing debut novel begins in 1950, three years after the formation of what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Amala Manna and her younger brother Kartik owe their lives to a local Muslim family who hid them when rioters were roaming their village. They escape only to be separated at a train station in Calcutta. Amala must build a new life in a refugee camp in the new India with strangers who share similar, unimaginable losses.

Ghosh is a journalist, a translator of Bengali and English, and the granddaughter of a Partition survivor. In an interview with The Rumpus, the Canadian author talked about the general lack of awareness about how Partition played out along the eastern border: “There was tremendous loss on the eastern border, too, perhaps not the same in scale but definitely huge psychological and sociocultural losses, the effects of which continue to impact subsequent generations.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Gin Phillips

From my Q&A with Gin Phillips, author of Family Law:

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

This is my sixth novel, and it’s the first one where my original title has stuck. Normally one of the first things that happens in the publishing process is for my editors to tell me—in detail—why my title doesn’t work at all. Maybe I’m getting better at this. At any rate, Family Law has both an obvious connection to the story and a more layered one. The book follows the friendship between Rachel, a teenager struggling with the expectations of her very traditional family, and Lucia, a young lawyer who specializes in family law. So that’s a pretty obvious reference. But the book also looks at the reach and limitations of family: it’s a story about the mothers we’re born to and the mothers we choose for ourselves. So “family law” also works as a nod to our ability to expand the very definition of family.

That said, the title might lead readers to believe it’s more of a courtroom drama than it is. It’s a very straightforward sort of title, and it doesn’t necessarily convey lyricism and warmth and humor, all of which I hope are...[read on]

Visit Gin Phillips's website.

Writers Read: Gin Phillips (August 2017).

The Page 69 Test: Fierce Kingdom.

The Page 69 Test: Family Law.

Q&A with Gin Phillips.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joshua D. Rothman's "The Ledger and the Chain"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America by Joshua D. Rothman.

About the book, from the publisher:

An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave trade—and its role in the making of America.

Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men—who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States.

In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital flows connecting southern fields to northeastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.

Follow Joshua D. Rothman on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The Ledger and the Chain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the best books about sex

Kate Lister is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Communication at Leeds Trinity University.

She is the author of A Curious History of Sex and won the Sexual Freedom award for publicist of the year in 2017.

At the Guardian Lister tagged six of her favorite books about the beauty, ugliness and joy of sexuality. One title on the list:

Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France by Robin Mitchell is an impeccably researched history of how ideas of blackness and black women were appropriated by 19th-century white French culture as hypersexual, predatory and “exotic”. It opens with the story of Sarah Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus” who was paraded on tour before white paying tourists, and Mitchell’s passionate rejection of the idea that historians should be objective and unemotional about their subject. The book is a triumph not only because it shows how narratives around black women’s bodies have evolved, but because Mitchell unashamedly makes the personal political.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Dahlia Adler's "Cool for the Summer"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dahlia Adler's Cool for the Summer is a story of self-discovery and new love. It’s about the things we want and the things we need. And it’s about the people who will let us be who we are.

Lara's had eyes for exactly one person throughout her three years of high school: Chase Harding. He's tall, strong, sweet, a football star, and frankly, stupid hot. Oh, and he's talking to her now. On purpose and everything. Maybe...flirting, even? No, wait, he's definitely flirting, which is pretty much the sum of everything Lara's wanted out of life.

Except she’s haunted by a memory. A memory of a confusing, romantic, strangely perfect summer spent with a girl named Jasmine. A memory that becomes a confusing, disorienting present when Jasmine herself walks through the front doors of the school to see Lara and Chase chatting it up in front of the lockers.

Lara has everything she ever wanted: a tight-knit group of friends, a job that borders on cool, and Chase, the boy of her literal dreams. But if she's finally got the guy, why can't she stop thinking about the girl?

Visit Dahlia Adler's website.

The Page 69 Test: Cool for the Summer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Lynn Painter

From my Q&A with Lynn Painter, author of Better Than the Movies:

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

The title of my book – Better Than The Movies – is, in a sense, the final answer to the main character’s misguided quest. Liz Buxbaum is obsessed with rom-com movies and is convinced that her life should follow the plot of a romantic film. She is a lady-in-waiting for big Hollywood love, the kind of running-through-the-train-station drama she has always adored. But life isn’t a movie, and nothing goes as she’d have planned. But sometimes real life and its messiness ends up being – wait for it – better than the movies.

The book’s working title was All Is Fair In Love And Parking, and I’m very grateful for agents and editors with better ideas than mine.

What's in a name?

In this instance, with this book, I was...[read on]

Visit Lynn Painter's website.

Q&A with Lynn Painter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six medical nonfiction books that read like thrillers

Audrey Blake has a split personality-- because she is the creative alter ego of Regina Sirois and Jaima Fixsen, two authors who met online in a survivor style writing contest. They live 1500 miles apart, but both are prairie girls: Fixsen hails from Alberta, Canada, and Sirois from the wheatfields of Kansas. Both are addicted to history, words, and stories of redoubtable women, and agree that their friendship, better and longer lasting than any other prize, is proof that good things happen in this random, crazy universe.

Blake's new novel is The Girl in His Shadow.

At CrimeReads the authors tagged six "current non-fiction titles...every bit as gripping as the latest forensic thriller," including:

The Knife Man by Wendy Moore

Doctor John Hunter’s life and personality have to be seen to be believed. His guests never could acclimate to the skeletons, specimens, and exotic animals that filled his home and garden. Author Wendy Moore illuminates him with style and skill.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Steven Casey's "The War Beat, Pacific"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan by Steven Casey.

About the book, from the publisher:

The definitive history of American war reporting in the Pacific theater of World War II, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After almost two years slogging with infantrymen through North Africa, Italy, and France, Ernie Pyle immediately realized he was ill-prepared for covering the Pacific War. As Pyle and other war correspondents discovered, the climate, the logistics, and the sheer scope of the Pacific theater had no parallel in the war America was fighting in Europe.

From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The War Beat, Pacific provides the first comprehensive account of how a group of highly courageous correspondents covered America's war against Japan, what they witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the home front's perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American military history. In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, Casey takes us from MacArthur's doomed defense on the Philippines and the navy's overly strict censorship policy at the time of Midway, through the bloody battles on Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarawa, Saipan, Leyte and Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, detailing the cooperation, as well as conflict, between the media and the military, as they grappled with the enduring problem of limiting a free press during a period of extreme crisis.

The War Beat, Pacific shows how foreign correspondents ran up against practical challenges and risked their lives to get stories in a theater that was far more challenging than the war against Nazi Germany, while the US government blocked news of the war against Japan and tried to focus the home front on Hitler and his atrocities.

Learn more about The War Beat, Pacific at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Europe.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Pacific.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten essential books inspired by Greek myth

Jennifer Saint grew up reading Greek mythology and was always drawn to the untold stories hidden within the myths. After thirteen years as a high school English teacher, she wrote Ariadne which tells the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur from the perspective of Ariadne - the woman who made it happen.

Saint is now a full-time author, living in Yorkshire, England, with her husband and two children.

At Publishers Weekly she tagged ten of her "favorite books about Greek mythology that breathe new life into old legends," including:

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

The Iliad retold through the eyes of women, this novel has a vast ensemble of narrators. Creusa, the wife left behind by Aeneas, awakens to the sack of Troy–her city on fire, her husband and son gone, her world reduced to ashes. While the men are slaughtered, the women are lined up on the beach to be chosen by the conquering Greek warriors. At home in Mycenae, Clytemnestra plots an unforgettable homecoming for Agamemnon. The goddesses that preside over the devastation have their say, too. There is humor alongside the tragedy and brutality in this brilliant retelling.

Read about another entry on the list.

A Thousand Ships is among Deanna Raybourn's six top novels based on historical scandals and Alyssa Vaughn's forty-two books to help you get through the rest of quarantine.

The Page 69 Test: A Thousand Ships.

--Marshal Zeringue