Six top books about crime & colonialism at the U.S.-Mexico border

Bruce McCandless III grew up in the shadow of Houston’s Johnson Space Center during the Apollo and Skylab eras. He graduated from the Plan II Honors Program of the University of Texas in 1983 and went on to earn degrees from the University of Reading in England and the University of Texas School of Law. After teaching at Saint David’s School in New York City, he returned to Austin to practice law and retired as general counsel of Superior HealthPlan in 2019. He is the author of Sour Lake (2011), Beatrice and the Basilisk (2014), and, with his daughter Carson, Carson Clare’s Trail Guide to Avoiding Death (And Other Unpleasant Consequences) (2017).

His latest work, In the Land of Dead Horses, is a spine-tingling tale of Texas history and supernatural terror. A prequel to 2011’s Sour Lake, In the Land of Dead Horses reintroduces readers to Texas Ranger Jewel Lightfoot and his macabre world of double-barreled demon hunting.

At CrimeReads McCandless tagged six books "to truly understand the currents of violence and criminality that run just below the surface of U.S.-Mexican relations," including:

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Jupiter of the border fiction solar system, a sort of Bible of blood and bad feeling, McCarthy’s 1985 masterpiece chronicles the relationship of two men—the Kid and the bizarre, possibly supernatural Judge—as they immerse themselves in murder and mayhem from Texas down into Mexico and back again. Set against the horrific true tale of the 1842 Mier Expedition, Blood Meridian has enough apocalyptic prose and dreamlike distancing to double as a script for the end of the world. Truly horrific and stunning, not quite allegorical but not entirely real either, you’ll want to wash your hands after reading this one—and maybe scrub your soul while you’re at it. For a more recent treatment of similar themes, try the 2021 film “The Forever Purge” (seriously).

Read about another entry on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel; it is among Paul Howarth's top ten tales from the frontier, Craig DiLouie’s ten top fantasy books steeped in the Southern Gothic, Graham McTavish's six best books, ShortList's roundup of literature's forty greatest villains, Brian Boone's five great novels that will probably never be made into movies, Sarah Porter's five best books with unusual demons and devils, Chet Williamson's top ten novels about deranged killers, Callan Wink's ten best books set in the American West, Simon Sebag Montefiore's six favorite books, Richard Kadrey's five books about awful, awful people, Jason Sizemore's top five books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, Robert Allison's top ten novels of desert war, Alexandra Silverman's top fourteen wrathful stories, James Franco's six favorite books, Philipp Meyer's five best books that explain America, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, David Vann's six favorite books, Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Margaret Verble's "When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky by Margaret Verble.

About the book, from the publisher:

Louise Erdrich meets Karen Russell in this deliciously strange and daringly original novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Margaret Verble: set in 1926 Nashville, it follows a death-defying young Cherokee horse-diver who, with her companions from the Glendale Park Zoo, must get to the bottom of a mystery that spans centuries.

Two Feathers, a young Cherokee horse-diver on loan to Glendale Park Zoo from a Wild West show, is determined to find her own way in the world. Two’s closest friend at Glendale is Hank Crawford, who loves horses almost as much as she does. He is part of a high-achieving, land-owning Black family. Neither Two nor Hank fit easily into the highly segregated society of 1920s Nashville.

When disaster strikes during one of Two’s shows, strange things start to happen at the park. Vestiges of the ancient past begin to surface, apparitions appear, and then the hippo falls mysteriously ill. At the same time, Two dodges her unsettling, lurking admirer and bonds with Clive, Glendale’s zookeeper and a World War I veteran, who is haunted—literally—by horrific memories of war. To get to the bottom of it, an eclectic cast of park performers, employees, and even the wealthy stakeholders must come together, making When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky an unforgettable and irresistible tale of exotic animals, lingering spirits, and unexpected friendship.

Visit Margaret Verble's website.

My Book, The Movie: Maud's Line.

Writers Read: Margaret Verble (March 2019).

The Page 69 Test: When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Claudia Goldin's "Career and Family"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity by Claudia Goldin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining.

Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Learn more about Career and Family at the Princeton University Press website and follow Claudia Goldin on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Career and Family.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books about love, loss, and belonging set in the Caribbean

Myriam J. A. Chancy, Guggenheim Fellow & HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College, is a Haitian-Canadian/American writer born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and subsequently raised there and in Canada. After obtaining her BA in English/Philosophy from the University of Manitoba (1989) and her MA in English Literature from Dalhousie University, she completed her Ph. D. in English at the University of Iowa.

Chancy's new novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake is What Storm, What Thunder.

At Electric Lit she tagged nine books about love, loss, and belonging set in the Caribbean, including:

Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall

Paule Marshall’s classic tackles themes of lost love, ideals, and spirituality in the journey of her African American protagonist, Avey (short for Avatara) who finds herself compelled to leave a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean. Disembarked in the small island of Carriacou, Avey recovers her African roots through local traditions like the “drum dance” and recalls traditions from her childhood in Ibo Landing in Georgia. Fleeting references through sub-headings and epigraphs to Haitian vodou relate the story to a wider web of African retentions through the Francophone Caribbean.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alessandra Tanesini's "The Mismeasure of the Self"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology by Alessandra Tanesini.

About the book , from the publisher:

The Mismeasure of the Self is dedicated to vices that blight many lives. They are the vices of superiority, characteristic of those who feel entitled, superior and who have an inflated opinion of themselves, and those of inferiority, typical of those who are riddled with self-doubt and feel inferior. Arrogance, narcissism, haughtiness, and vanity are among the first group. Self-abasement, fatalism, servility, and timidity exemplify the second. This book shows these traits to be to vices of self-evaluation and describes their pervasive harmful effects in some detail. Even though the influence of these traits extends to any aspect of life, the focus of this book is their damaging impact on the life of the intellect. Tanesini develops and defends a view of these vices that puts vicious motivations at their core. The analyses developed in this work build on empirical research in attitude psychology and on philosophical theories in virtue ethics and epistemology. The book concludes with a positive proposal for weakening vice and promoting virtue.

Visit Alessandra Tanesini's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: The Mismeasure of the Self.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on troublesome Windsor women

Wendy Holden has written numerous books and is a celebrated journalist. She lives in England.

Her latest novel is The Duchess.

At Lit Hib Holden tagged five top books on Troublesome Women in the House of Windsor. One title on the list:

Marion Crawford, The Little Princesses

When this book fell off the shelf in a second-hand bookshop in the North of England, I picked it up to put it back. Then I opened it and read the first page in which Marion Crawford explains that she never intended to work for royalty; her interest was in the children of the Edinburgh slums. I was hooked right there and then and that was without even knowing she was with the King, Queen, and Princesses throughout the seismic events of the Abdication, Coronation, and the whole of World War II, all of which she saw exactly as they did. And yet the reward for her devotion was ostracism. It’s an utterly incredible story and one I made into my 2020 novel The Royal Governess.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kate Clifford Larson's "Walk With Me"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson.

About the book, from the publisher:

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America—the right to cast a ballot—in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population.

And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadel—her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party—including its standard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson—tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionary change.

Kate Clifford Larson's biography of Fannie Lou Hamer is the most complete ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the civil rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. It also makes full use of interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Democratic National Committee archives, in addition to extensive conversations with Hamer's family and with those with whom she worked most closely. Stirring, immersive, and authoritative, Walk with Me does justice to Fannie Lou Hamer's life, capturing in full the spirit, and the voice, that led the fight for freedom and equality in America at its critical moment.

Visit Kate Clifford Larson's website.

The Page 99 Test: Walk with Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four books featuring paintings that illuminate their characters

Katie Lattari is the author of two novels, Dark Things I Adore (2021), her thriller debut, and American Vaudeville (2016), a small press work. Her short stories have appeared in such places as NOO Journal, The Bend, Cabildo Quarterly, and more. She lives in Maine with her husband Kevin and Alex the cat.

At CrimeReads Lattari tagged four books featuring paintings that reveal emotional truths about their characters. One title on the list:

Duma Key by Stephen King (2008)

After a physically devastating freak accident at a construction site and the collapse of his marriage, Edgar Freemantle moves from Minnesota to Florida in an attempt to heal. Part of his recovery process involves taking up a passion long set aside— sketching and painting. As Edgar gets more into his art, it becomes clear that something else is getting into his art as well—something dark, and dangerous—maybe even deadly.

An evil spirit on Duma Key has infiltrated his works, spurred on by the traumatic past and memories of one of Duma’s other residents, Elizabeth Eastlake. Edgar soon realizes that through this haunting of his works by the entity Persephone, anyone who is in possession of one of his paintings either dies or kills someone close to him, and it becomes the fight of his life to exorcise this demon from Duma and his work.

At first, Edgar thinks his unique, hard-to-explain paintings are showing premonitions of a reality to come, but soon he realizes that the paintings might be influencing reality itself. Edgar’s works both anticipate and precipitate dark events, his art at times the tipping point between life and death. Instead of capturing a fleeting moment in time, like Lily Briscoe, Edgar is given an incredible power: a kind of mastery over a form of fate and legacy, his works able to manifest what comes next. Who lives, who dies, and what will remain.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven funny novels about the internal politics of working at a newspaper

Katherine Ashenburg is the prize-winning author of two novels, four non-fiction books and hundreds of articles on subjects that range from travel to mourning customs to architecture. She describes herself as a lapsed Dickensian and as someone who has had a different career every decade. Her work life began with a Ph.D. dissertation about Dickens and Christmas, but she quickly left the academic world for successive careers at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer; at the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail as the arts and books editor; and most recently as a full-time writer.

[ Q&A with Katherine Ashenburg]

Ashenburg's new novel is Her Turn. In it, Liz, a divorced newspaper editor, finds her tidy life overturned when the woman now married to Liz’s ex-husband submits a personal essay to the column Liz edits. Wife #2 has no idea that she is sending her essay to Wife #1, and Liz decides to keep that a secret, with surprising results. Elizabeth Renzetti writes of it, “It is infused with the joyful spirit of Nora Ephron and lit with a charm all its own.”

At Electric Lit Ashenburg tagged seven funny novels about journalists chasing stories and uncovering intrigue, including:

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

Mohun Biswas works for the Trinidad Sentinel for a third of his life, evolving as a journalist in tandem with the paper’s transformations. At first, Biswas fits in easily at an unambitious paper that aims to shock and frighten, writing stories about dead babies in brown paper packages and a series about the tallest, shortest, fattest, thinnest, and wickedest Trinidadians. When the Sentinel pivots to greater seriousness (their new motto: “Don’t be bright, just get it right”), so does Mr. Biswas. His vocabulary and the length of his sentences grow, and he becomes a feature writer and later, as the Sentinel’s colonial optimism wanes, the paper’s expert on social welfare. When he dies, he hopes the headline will be “Roving Reporter Passes On.” But fittingly, the Sentinel writes finis to a life of many disappointments and some joys with the bald “Journalist Dies Suddenly.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Emily Katz Anhalt's "Embattled"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny by Emily Katz Anhalt.

About the book, from the publisher:

An incisive exploration of the way Greek myths empower us to defeat tyranny.

As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation.

Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us—as they encouraged the ancient Greeks—to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves.

In an era of political polarization, Embattled demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way.

Visit Emily Katz Anhalt's website.

The Page 99 Test: Enraged.

The Page 99 Test: Embattled.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: David R. Slayton's "Trailer Park Trickster"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Trailer Park Trickster by David R. Slayton.

About the book, from the publisher:

They are my harvest, and I will reap them all. Returning to Guthrie, Oklahoma, for the funeral of his mysterious and beloved aunt Sue, Adam Binder once again finds himself in the path of deadly magic when a dark druid begins to prey on members of Adam’s family. It all seems linked to the death of Adam’s father many years ago—a man who may have somehow survived as a warlock.

Watched by the police, separated from the man who may be the love of his life, compelled to seek the truth about his connection to the druid, Adam learns more about his family and its troubled history than he ever bargained for, and finally comes face-to-face with the warlock he has vowed to stop.

Meanwhile, beyond the Veil of the mortal world, Argent the Queen of Swords and Vic the Reaper undertake a dangerous journey to a secret meeting of the Council of Races . . . where the sea elves are calling for the destruction of humanity.

Visit David R. Slayton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Trailer Park Trickster.

The Page 69 Test: Trailer Park Trickster.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top literary works that might be horror novels

James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in North Dakota. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received grants from the Copernicus Society of America and Humanities North Dakota. He has been a featured storyteller on The Moth, and has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Cape Town, the University of Maryland, the George Washington University, Murray State University, and the University of California – Berkeley. In 2009, he moved to Korea and reunited with his birth family after 30 years of separation.

He is the author of two novels: The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves (2017) and Reprieve (2021). He is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen Magazine.

At CrimeReads he tagged "six books that are widely classified as literary but could have easily made their way over to the horror shelf," including:

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Most people wouldn’t categorize this novel as horror, but really, any frank and brutal depiction of war can and should be categorized as such. What, exactly, is more horrific than mass slaughter dictated and encouraged by idealogue politicians who publicly feign compassion while ordering more of their own youth to kill and be killed? In war, the monster isn’t a vampire or werewolf or disfigured clown, it’s not a singular knife-wielding shadow lurking outside in the woods—no, it’s more horrifying than that. In war, the monster is the invisible force of murderous dogma, the tenets of which always lead to evisceration of some sort. So yeah: This book is rollicking, smart, and often funny, but it’s also terrifying. Its explicit depictions of murder and torture, especially in its last third, have been seared into my brain, and those images have stayed with me for a very long time.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Sympathizer is among Rebecca Starford's six top literary thrillers about espionage, spies, & double agents, Siobhan Adcock's six crime books that explore the experience of veterans, and Shelley Wood's five top epistolary novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: James McGrath Morris's "Tony Hillerman: A Life"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Tony Hillerman: A Life by James McGrath Morris.

About the book, from the publisher:

The author of eighteen spellbinding detective novels set on the Navajo Nation, Tony Hillerman simultaneously transformed a traditional genre and unlocked the mysteries of the Navajo culture to an audience of millions. His best-selling novels added Navajo Tribal Police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee to the pantheon of American fictional detectives.

Morris offers a balanced portrait of Hillerman’s personal and professional life and provides a timely appreciation of his work. In intimate detail, Morris captures the author’s early years in Depression-era Oklahoma; his near-death experience in World War II; his sixty-year marriage to Marie; his family life, including six children, five of them adopted; his work in the trenches of journalism; his affliction with PTSD and its connection to his enchantment with Navajo spirituality; and his ascension as one of America’s best-known authors of mysteries. Further, Morris uncovers the almost accidental invention of Hillerman’s iconic detective Joe Leaphorn and the circumstances that led to the addition of Jim Chee as his partner.

Hillerman’s novels were not without controversy. Morris examines the charges of cultural appropriation leveled at the author toward the end of his life. Yet, for many readers, including many Native Americans, Hillerman deserves critical acclaim for his knowledgeable and sensitive portrayal of Diné (Navajo) history, culture, and identity.

At the time of Hillerman’s death, more than 20 million copies of his books were in print, and his novels inspired Robert Redford to adapt several of them to film. In weaving together all the elements of the author’s life, Morris drew on the untapped collection of the author’s papers, extensive archival research, interviews with friends, colleagues, and family, as well as travel in the Navajo Nation. Filled with never-before-told anecdotes and fresh insights, Tony Hillerman will thrill the author’s fans and awaken new interest in his life and literary legacy.

Learn more about the book and author at the official James McGrath Morris website.

The Page 99 Test: Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power.

The Page 99 Test: Eye on the Struggle.

The Page 99 Test: The Ambulance Drivers.

The Page 99 Test: Tony Hillerman: A Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Bethany Ball

From my Q&A with Bethany Ball, author of The Pessimists:

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

Unconsciously I was probably thinking of titles like The Corrections, The Sympathizer, The Immortalists etc. I love how a title like that seems to stand tall and wide with hands on hips and takes a stance. I felt like I was attempting to sum up at least a small portion and a snapshot in time of a generation—Gen X. And it is indeed descriptive of the book. Many Americans have felt increasingly pessimistic since at least the Great Recession in 2008. And I myself fought pessimism every day that Donald Trump was president. On the other hand, I like to end novels with hope. In my last novel, I quote an Arabic aphorism: one day of honey, one day of onion. I try to end a book with a little honey if possible.

What's in a name?

I was really influenced by the time my father became Karl Malden’s Sekulovich in a movie filmed in...[read on]

Visit Bethany Ball's website.

The Page 69 Test: What To Do About The Solomons.

Q&A with Bethany Ball.

--Marshal Zeringue

The seven weirdest high schools in literature

Bethany Ball was born in Detroit and now lives in New York with her family.

She is the author of What To Do About The Solomons and the newly released, The Pessimists.

[The Page 69 Test: What To Do About The Solomons.]

At Electic Lit Ball tagged seven "books set in schools where things aren't quite what they seem," including:

Hailsham Boarding School in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I love books where the slow reveal of the reality of a place is the central mystery. Indoctrination is the central theme of Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go where young students reside unwittingly at a boarding school for future organ donors. The writing is gorgeous and gripping and as both a love story and a mystery, it also manages to explore questions of science decoupled from ethics.

Read about another entry on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Zak Salih's eight books about childhood pals—and the adults they become, Rachel Donohue's list of seven coming-of-age novels with elements of mystery or the supernatural, Chris Mooney's list of six top intelligent, page-turning, genre-bending classics, James Scudamore's top ten list of books about boarding school, Caroline Zancan's list of eight novels about students and teachers behaving badly, LitHub's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Meg Wolitzer's ten favorite books list, Jeff Somers's lists of nine science fiction novels that imagine the future of healthcare and "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas's "Unfree"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas.

About the book, from the publisher:

A stirring account of the experiences of migrant domestic workers, and what freedom, abuse, and power mean within a vast contract labor system.

In the United Arab Emirates, there is an employment sponsorship system known as the kafala. Migrant domestic workers within it must solely work for their employer, secure their approval to leave the country, and obtain their consent to terminate a job. In Unfree, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas examines the labor of women from the Philippines, who represent the largest domestic workforce in the country. She challenges presiding ideas about the kafala, arguing that its reduction to human trafficking is, at best, unproductive, and at worst damaging to genuine efforts to regulate this system that impacts tens of millions of domestic workers across the globe.

The kafala system technically renders migrant workers unfree as they are made subject to the arbitrary authority of their employer. Not surprisingly, it has been the focus of intense scrutiny and criticism from human rights advocates and scholars. Yet, contrary to their claims, Parreñas argues that most employers do not abuse domestic workers or maximize the extraction of their labor. Still, the outrage elicited by this possibility dominates much of public discourse and overshadows the more mundane reality of domestic work in the region. Drawing on unparalleled data collected over 4 years,this book diverges from previous studies as it establishes that the kafala system does not necessarily result in abuse, but instead leads to the absence of labor standards. This absence is reflected in the diversity of work conditions across households, ranging from dehumanizing treatment, infantilization, to respect and recognition of domestic workers.

Unfree shows how various stakeholders, including sending and receiving states, NGOs, inter-governmental organizations, employers and domestic workers, project moral standards to guide the unregulated labor of domestic work. They can mitigate or aggravate the arbitrary authority of employers. Parreñas offers a deft and rich portrait of how morals mediate work on the ground, warning against the dangers of reducing unfreedom to structural violence.

Visit Rhacel Salazar Parreñas's website.

The Page 99 Test: Unfree.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Georgie Blalock's "The Last Debutantes"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Last Debutantes: A Novel by Georgie Blalock.

About the book, from the publisher:

They danced the night away, knowing their world was about to change forever. They were the debutantes of 1939, laughing on the outside, but knowing tragedy— and a war—was just around the corner.

When Valerie de Vere Cole, the niece of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, makes her deep curtsey to the King and Queen of England, she knows she’s part of a world about to end. The daughter of a debt-ridden father and a neglectful mother, Valerie sees firsthand that war is imminent.

Nevertheless, Valerie reinvents herself as a carefree and glittering young society woman, befriending other debutantes from England’s aristocracy as well as the vivacious Eunice Kennedy, daughter of the U.S. Ambassador. Despite her social success, the world’s troubles and Valerie’s fear of loss and loneliness prove impossible to ignore.

How will she navigate her new life when everything in her past has taught her that happiness and stability are as fragile as peace in our time? For the moment she will forget her cares in too much champagne and waltzes. Because very soon, Valerie knows that she must find the inner strength to stand strong and carry on through the challenges of life and love and war.

Visit Georgie Blalock's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Other Windsor Girl.

The Page 69 Test: The Other Windsor Girl.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Debutantes.

Q&A with Georgie Blalock.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Debutantes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top books in magic and covens and spells

For more than ten years, Fire Lyte has interviewed self-identified witches, fairy experts, goblin hunters, paranormal investigators, and even a werewolf on his podcast Inciting A Riot. His thousands of listeners worldwide tune in as he examines magic, witchcraft, Paganism, and spiritual seekership through a diverse, inclusive lens with a balance of modern science, critical thought, and pop culture. He lives in the Chicago suburbs with his husband and vast array of fur children.

Fire Lyte's new book is The Dabbler's Guide to Witchcraft: Seeking an Intentional Magical Path.

At Lit Hub he tagged nine "stories of witches, a coven of stories if you will, that encompass the history of the witch through time and how these stories are thriving in the modern era." One title on the list:

Signe Pike, The Lost Queen

The Lost Queen puts a magical spin on a nearly forgotten story of a very real queen from history, Languoureth, who ruled in sixth-century Scotland. She is the twin sister of the man who went on to inspire the legend of Merlin, but that isn’t the only magical tie in the book. Languoureth allies herself with a woman whose strength and magic forever change the course of her life. If you have been pining to go back to Camelot but want a fresh take on the legend, this trilogy will hit all the right spots.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Audrey Watters's "Teaching Machines"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning by Audrey Watters.

About the book, from the publisher:

How ed tech was born: Twentieth-century teaching machines—from Sidney Pressey's mechanized test-giver to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box.

Contrary to popular belief, ed tech did not begin with videos on the internet. The idea of technology that would allow students to “go at their own pace” did not originate in Silicon Valley. In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas—bite-sized content, individualized instruction—that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning.

Watters pays particular attention to the role of the media—newspapers, magazines, television, and film—in shaping people's perceptions of teaching machines as well as the psychological theories underpinning them. She considers these machines in the context of education reform, the political reverberations of Sputnik, and the rise of the testing and textbook industries. She chronicles Skinner's attempts to bring his teaching machines to market, culminating in the famous behaviorist's efforts to launch Didak 101, the “pre-verbal” machine that taught spelling. (Alternate names proposed by Skinner include “Autodidak,” “Instructomat,” and “Autostructor.”) Telling these somewhat cautionary tales, Watters challenges what she calls “the teleology of ed tech”—the idea that not only is computerized education inevitable, but technological progress is the sole driver of events.

Visit Audrey Watters's website.

The Page 99 Test: Teaching Machines.

--Marshal Zeringue

David R. Slayton's "Trailer Park Trickster," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Trailer Park Trickster by David R. Slayton.

The entry begins:

In White Trash Warlock we meet Adam Binder, a working class witch living in Guthrie, Oklahoma. The complex and shifting relationships between the characters is the core of the book in my opinion, so it would take talented actors to coax that onto the screen.

Setting-wise, the books shift back and forth between the normal world and the Spirit Realm, so it would need a director or a showrunner like Noah Hawley, who made Legion to capture that sometimes subtle, sometimes jarring, differences.

The main character, Adam, has a lot of innocence and a dash of cockiness that hides his insecurities, which mostly come from his rural background. He knows he doesn’t have a lot of magic and that makes him cautious when dealing with the beings and threats he sometimes has to. I’d love to see somebody play him who could show those sides, someone like Ross Lynch (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) or Sean Grandillio (Youth or Consequences, MTV’s Scream series).

Vic Martinez is a rookie cop whose whole world gets turned upside down when Adam saves him from a Grim Reaper, an intervention with...[read on]

Visit David R. Slayton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Trailer Park Trickster.

--Marshal Zeringue