Pg. 99: Eline van Ommen's "Nicaragua Must Survive"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War by Eline van Ommen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Nicaragua Must Survive tells the story of the Sandinistas' innovative diplomatic campaign, which captured the imaginations of people around the globe and transformed Nicaraguan history at the tail end of the Cold War. The Sandinistas' diplomacy went far beyond elite politics, as thousands of musicians, politicians, teachers, activists, priests, feminists, and journalists flocked to the country to experience the revolution firsthand. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, Eline van Ommen reveals the role that Western Europe played in Nicaragua's revolutionary diplomacy. Blending grassroots organizing and formal foreign policy, pragmatic guerrillas, creative diplomats, and ambitious activists from Europe and the Americas were able to create an international environment in which the Sandinista Revolution could survive despite the odds. Nicaragua Must Survive argues that this diplomacy was remarkably effective, propelling Nicaragua into the global limelight and allowing the revolutionaries to successfully challenge the United States' role in Central America.

Learn more about Nicaragua Must Survive at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Nicaragua Must Survive.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books coming to TV and film in 2024

Claudia Guthrie is a writer covering culture, entertainment, and lifestyle content. Her work has appeared in ELLE, The Muse, Food52, and more. Originally from Kansas City, she now resides in Denver, where you can find her reading the newest thriller or knitting sweaters for her cats.

At Electric Lit Guthrie tagged ten top upcoming literary adaptations, including:

Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippmann

When a Black woman’s body is found in a lake in 1960s Baltimore, she barely makes headlines. This motivates Maddie, a housewife-turned-newspaper reporter, to dig into the woman’s life and uncover what happened to her. A mini series based on the mystery is coming to Apple TV with Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram leading the project.

Read about another entry on the list.

Lady in the Lake is among Alice Blanchard's five top mysteries set in still waters, Brittany Bunzey's ten books that take you inside their characters’ heads, Kimberly Belle's six novels that show lakes are a perfect setting for a murder mystery, and CrimeReads' ten best crime novels of 2019.

The Page 69 Test: Lady in the Lake.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Raymond Beauchemin's "The Emptiest Quarter"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Emptiest Quarter: Novellas by Raymond Beauchemin.

About the book, from the publisher:

The three novellas in The Emptiest Quarter find their inspiration in the sands and streets of Abu Dhabi, where author Raymond Beauchemin lived for four years, a time that overlapped with the building of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums and the opening of Sorbonne and NYU campuses, the convulsions of the Arab Spring and the eruption of civil war in Syria. The characters who populate The Emptiest Quarter live at both the centre and the fringes of the conflict between preservation and progress, including sheikhs, western oil-and-gas men, burned-out journalists, pearl divers, and Filipina caregivers, all striving to find themselves, to find love, to find balance in ever-shifting sands.

Visit Raymond Beauchemin's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Emptiest Quarter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Keira V. Williams's "Why Any Woman"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Why Any Woman: Feminism and Popular Culture in the Late Twentieth-Century South by Keira V. Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:

Scholars are revisiting the history of feminist activism and organizations, mining it for a revisionist, grassroots gender politics in the South. Why Any Woman advances this line of historical inquiry by focusing on one of the most productive sites of late twentieth-century southern feminisms: popular culture by and about southern women. The nature of popular culture is such that the challenges it poses to the gendered and racial order, for instance, are likely to be consumed―privately, in theaters or at home, alone or with friends or family―by more people than would ever read a feminist manifesto, attend a civil rights demonstration, or lobby a legislator for change. In the cultural desert of the late twentieth-century, pre-internet South, during a time in which there were fewer avenues of activism and organizing, other sources of feminism predominated, and pop culture is where many of us turned for guidance, for role models, and―whether or not we knew it―for consciousness-raising. In a region and during a time of neoconservative backlash in which women’s liberation was under attack, southern women’s pop culture offered a bridge between the second and third “waves” of feminism and a major challenge to contemporary antifeminist forces.

Why Any Woman examines key texts by and about southern women―the play Crimes of the Heart, the novels The Color Purple and Ugly Ways, the films Thelma and Louise and Beloved, the television shows Designing Women and The Oprah Winfrey Show―as a means of understanding the role of regional popular culture in defining and redefining American feminisms as we approached the twenty-first century. Taken as a collective, these texts expand how we think about the whats, wheres, whens, and hows of feminisms in recent U.S. history. "Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me," muses the blueswoman Shug Avery in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Why Any Woman features southerners who, like Shug, rejected and reshaped gender norms, and their stories illustrate some of the ways regional pop culture has been and still is a crucial site of American feminisms.

Learn more about Why Any Woman at the University of Georgia Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Why Any Woman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that effortlessly blend travel and crime

John Marrs is a former journalist and author of ten best-selling novels, including When You Disappeared and Keep It In The Family. His book The One became an eight-part Netflix drama, and What Lies Between Us won an International Thriller Writer’s Award.

[My Book, The Movie: The One; The Page 69 Test: The One; The Page 69 Test: What Lies Between Us]

Marrs's new novel is The Vacation.

At CrimeReads he tagged seven favorite thrillers that effortlessly blend travel and crime, including:

Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch

What must it be like to spend a day in the imagination of Blake Crouch? How did he even begin working out the plot of this thriller? For this pick, we are talking traveling from dimension to dimension instead of country to country. It’s the story of a physicist who finds himself in a parallel universe after being kidnapped. And the universe he ends up in is based on different choices he made when he was fifteen years younger. A truly exceptional sci-fi story.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward M. Lerner's "Life and Death on Mars," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Life and Death on Mars by Edward M. Lerner.

The entry begins:

Let’s start with the novel itself: near-future adventure set mainly—no surprise, given its title—on and near Mars. The action kicks off with a Space Race to make the Sixties competition with the Soviets seem lackadaisical. Making matters more exciting, beyond American and Chinese expeditions is another, bankrolled by a mysterious cabal of Earth’s billionaires.

And then we have …

The face scarcely seemed human. Scarcely seemed a face.

Bloated, purple-mottled flesh, the swollen lips almost black. Oozing pustules. Tissues peeling and flaking, even to scattered glimpses of muscle and bone. The nose little more than naked, pitted cartilage. Eyes, except for anime-sized black pupils, all blood-red. Had it not been for the snaky, sweat-soaked tresses, languidly adrift like some somnolent Medusa, even to speculate at a gender would have been impossible.

Yet there could be no question who, or where, this was.

Those are only the novel’s opening paragraphs! How can this book not become a movie? Think The Martian meets For All Mankind … with...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at his website.

The Page 99 Test: Small Miracles.

The Page 69 Test: Fools’ Experiments.

The Page 69 Test: InterstellarNet: Origins.

My Book, The Movie: InterstellarNet: Origins.

My Book, The Movie: Déjà Doomed.

The Page 69 Test: Déjà Doomed.

Q&A with Edward M. Lerner.

My Book, The Movie: Life and Death on Mars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Russell Blackford's "How We Became Post-Liberal"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration by Russell Blackford.

About the book, from the publisher:

Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this post-liberal climate, Russell Blackford asks whether liberalism is truly over.

How We Became Post-Liberal examines how Western liberal democracies became nations where traditional liberal principles of toleration (religious and otherwise), individual liberty and freedom of speech are frequently dismissed as outdated or twisted to support conservative policies. Blackford traces the lineage of liberalism from problems of toleration that emerged when Christianity triumphed in the late centuries of classical antiquity, with comparison to non-Western civilizations. The political and philosophical story culminates in the recent development – over the past 30 to 50 years – of post-liberal ideologies in the West. At each stage, Blackford discusses arguments for and against liberal principles, identifying why no argument to date has been totally successful in convincing opponents, while maintaining that liberalism's ideas and language are still worth saving.

From campus wars over academic freedom to the Charlie Hebdo attack and the murder of Samuel Paty, this is an indispensable guide for anyone wanting to understand the why, what and how of the post-liberal world.

Learn more about How We Became Post-Liberal at the Bloomsbury Academic website.

The Page 99 Test: How We Became Post-Liberal.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that capture New York City’s many sides

Jonathan Wells is the author of a memoir, The Skinny, and three collections of poems: Debris (2021), The Man with Many Pens (2015), and Train Dance.

The Sterns Are Listening is his first work of fiction.

At Lit Hub he tagged seven books that "do for me and New York City what I think the best writing does: animate, transform and illuminate." One title on the list:

E. L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate

E.L. Doctorow’s 1989 novel was one of the first books that showed me how expansive and textured the first person voice could be. Written through the eyes of a boy who catches the attention of Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz, the opening chapter describes how the boss’s accomplices fashion a pair of concrete shoes for turncoat Bo Weinberg as a tugboat carries them out of New York harbor toward the Atlantic Ocean.

The captain describes the return journey, “You’d come up the East River just before dawn. City fast asleep. First you’d see the sun on the gulls, they’d turn white. Then the top of the Hell Gate turned to gold.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt begins:

In the introduction to his universal history, Diodorus Siculus remarks that “it is an excellent thing…when we confront the varied vicissitudes of life…to be able to imitate the successes which have been achieved in the past.” Khufu’s Wisdom, the first novel in Naguib Mahfouz’s trilogy about ancient Egypt, was first published under the title, Vicissitudes of Fate. Diodorus Siculus, who spent the middle years of the first century B.C. working on his history, visited Egypt and reports that 360,000 men spent twenty years building the Great Pyramid. Mahfouz’s novel begins ten years after the work has started.

Watching tens of thousands of men digging out the base for his pyramid, which he “wanted to make his eternal abode,” the pharaoh, Khufu, asks his architect, Mirabu, why all these men, these tens of thousands, “obey me and withstand the terrors of this arduous work?” Mirabu explains that half of them are slaves and have no choice, but that the others are “Egyptians who believe in their hearts that the hard labor to which they devote their lives is a splendid religious obligation, a duty to the deity to whom they pray, and a form of obedience owed to the title of him who rules on the throne.” Khufu accepts this as a matter of course. It cannot be otherwise, for “what is Egypt but a great work that would not have been undertaken if not for the sacrifice of individuals; and of what value is the life of an individual? It equals not a single dry tear to one who looks to the far future and the grand plan.”

Pharaoh’s grand plan, his vision of the far future, is threatened when a mystic informs him that no one from his “seed shall sit upon the throne of Egypt.” Asked if he knows “whom the gods have reserved to succeed” him, the wizard announces that it is “an infant born that very morning.” When Khufu learns that the wife of Monra, the High Priest of Ra, has given birth to a boy that morning, and that Monra has said that the boy would “rule over the valley of the Nile as the successor to the God Ra-Atum on earth,” he leads a hundred war chariots to end this threat to his dynasty. Learning of the danger, Monra sends his wife and child away. His wife’s handmaiden...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Luke Griffith's "Unraveling the Gray Area Problem"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Unraveling the Gray Area Problem: The United States and the INF Treaty by Luke Griffith.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Unraveling the Gray Area Problem, Luke Griffith examines the US role in why the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty took almost a decade to negotiate and then failed in just thirty years. The INF Treaty enhanced Western security by prohibiting US and Russian ground-based missiles with maximum ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. Significantly, it eliminated hundreds of Soviet SS-20 missiles, which could annihilate targets throughout Eurasia in minutes. Through close scrutiny of US theater nuclear policy from 1977 to 1987, Griffith describes the Carter administration's masterminding of the dual-track decision of December 1979, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) initiative that led to the INF Treaty. The Reagan administration, in turn, overcame bureaucratic infighting, Soviet intransigence, and political obstacles at home and abroad to achieve a satisfactory outcome in the INF negotiations.

Disagreements between the US and Russia undermined the INF Treaty and led to its dissolution in 2019. Meanwhile, the US is developing a new generation of ground-based, INF-type missiles that will have an operational value on the battlefield. Griffith urges policymakers to consider the utility of INF-type missiles in new arms control negotiations. Understanding the scope and consistency of US arms control policy across the Carter and Reagan administrations offers important lessons for policymakers in the twenty-first century.

Learn more about Unraveling the Gray Area Problem at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Unraveling the Gray Area Problem.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best new or recent Texas books

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. For the Austin American-Statesman he tagged ten top new or recent Texas books, including:

A Texas adventure endures in 'The Madstone'

Elizabeth Crook's sixth historical novel, "The Madstone" (Little, Brown and Company), picks up where her brilliant "The Which Way Tree" left off. I shared these remarks in an Oct. 28 column: "For a few pages, I missed Sam from 'The Which Way Tree.' How could I not? She is a once-in-a-lifetime character. Yet resourceful Benjamin, always trying to do the right thing but caught up with all sorts of flawed characters, grows more and more compelling. Especially as he bonds with a woman on the run from her in-laws, a sadistic East Texas crime family that has not accepted the end of the Civil War." The suspense fanned by this chase across the state will make your heart race.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Madstone.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Catriona McPherson's "Hop Scot"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Hop Scot by Catriona McPherson.

About the book, from the publisher:

It's all aboard for a Campbell Clan Christmas! Lexy swaps cinnamon lattes for boiled sprouts when the Last Ditch crew travel from California to an idyllic Scottish village for the holidays, but something very unmerry is lurking below the surface...

Lexy Campbell is long overdue a trip to Scotland to see her parents, and an unexpected death in the extended Last Ditch Motel family makes Christmas in a bungalow in Dundee with nine others seem almost irresistible.

But when Lexy and the Last Ditch crew hop across the Atlantic, there's been a change of plan and they're whisked off to Mistletoe Hall in the pretty village of Yule, where the surprises continue. The news that a man disappeared from the crumbling pile sixty years ago, along with an unsettling discovery in the bricked-up basement, means that Todd, Kathi and Lexy - Trinity for Trouble - must solve another murder.

Deadly secrets, berry rustlers, skeletons and a snowy Christmas Eve in the booze aisle at Tesco: the Last Ditch crew won't forget their Scottish holiday in a hurry!

Visit Catriona McPherson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Go to My Grave.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2018).

My Book, The Movie: The Turning Tide.

The Page 69 Test: The Turning Tide.

My Book, The Movie: A Gingerbread House.

The Page 69 Test: Hop Scot.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Elizabeth Eva Leach's "Medieval Sex Lives"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders by Elizabeth Eva Leach.

About the book, from the publisher:

Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript―a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament―Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of "courtly love" had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book's compilers, owners, and readers.

The manuscript's lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it unusual among Old French songbooks; its arrangement of the lyrics by genre invites inquiry into the relationship between this long musical tradition and the emotional and sexual lives of its readers. Combining an original account of the manuscript's contents and their likely social milieu with in-depth musical and poetic analyses, Leach proposes that lyrics, whether read or heard aloud, provided a fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts in the Middle Ages. Drawing on musicology, literary history, and the sociology and psychology of sexuality, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative hypothesis about the power of courtly songs to model, inspire, and support sexual behaviors and fantasies.

Learn more about Medieval Sex Lives at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Medieval Sex Lives.

--Marshal Zeringue

The five best espionage novels of 2023

The editors at CrimeReads tagged their five top espionage novels of 2023, including:

Alma Katsu, Red London

In this follow-up to Red Widow, Katsu brings back CIA Agent Lyndsey Duncan, this time putting her many skills to use in London, working an operation to sidle up to the wife of a Russian billionaire. Katsu paints a vivid picture of modern London at the intersection of a vast, dangerous game being waged between Russia, its monied exiles, the British upper classes, and American intelligence.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Red London.

The Page 69 Test: Red London.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: W. Jeffrey Tatum's "A Noble Ruin"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Noble Ruin: Mark Antony, Civil War, and the Collapse of the Roman Republic by W. Jeffrey Tatum.

About the book, from the publisher:

A complex and captivating portrait of Mark Antony that offers a fresh perspective on the fall of the Roman Republic

In his lifetime, Mark Antony was a famous man. Ally and avenger of Julius Caesar, rhetorical target of Cicero, lover of Cleopatra, and mortal enemy of Octavian (the future emperor Augustus), Antony played a leading role in the transformation of the Roman world. Ever since his and Cleopatra's demise at the hands of Octavian, he has remained famous, or infamous, a figure of recurring fascination.

His life--variegated, passionate, sensual, bold, and tragic--inspires vigorous reactions. Nearly everyone has a view on Antony. For Cicero, he was a distasteful though talented man. Octavian fashioned him a dangerous failure, a Roman noble corrupted by his appetites and his lust for Cleopatra. Later historians adopted and adapted these themes, delivering their readers an Antony who was irresistibly depraved, startlingly brave, sometimes cunning, but almost always constitutionally incapable of choosing the right side of history. From these, especially Plutarch's compelling portrait, Shakespeare gave us the chivalrous and unstudied Antony of Antony and Cleopatra.

A Noble Ruin, the fullest biography of Antony in English, assimilates the various, often competing, ancient sources to provide a strong and much-needed dose of realism to the caricature we have of this major historical figure. The book gives ample attention to the varied cultural circumstances in which Antony operated, including the social and moral expectations of his republican heritage, as well as the exceptional challenges posed by the convulsion of civil war. In furnishing a complex and captivating portrait of Anthony, A Noble Ruin allows readers to freshly assess his conduct, ambitions, and attainments, as well as the turbulent age in which he lived.

Learn more about A Noble Ruin at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Noble Ruin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top memoirs about addiction by women writers

Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones is a writer from Puerto Rico whose poems and short fiction have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, wildness, Ambit Magazine, Radar Poetry, and other publications. In 2019, she received an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook University, where she also taught poetry to undergraduate students. Her chapbook, Bedroom Pop, was published by dancing girl press in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded a Letras Boricuas Fellowship by the Flamboyán Arts Fund and the Mellon Foundation. Her full-length debut, The Hurricane Book, is published by Rose Metal Press.

At Electric Lit Acevedo-Quiñones tagged seven memoirs by women writers about the struggle with drugs and alcohol and the journey to recovery. One title on the list:

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

“If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” Yes, it’s a celebrity memoir. Yes, maybe it’s one of those things you’d pick up at a Hudson News. But beyond the Princess Leia-Paul Simon-Elizabeth Taylor-Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds of it all, you can’t deny that Carrie Fisher wrote a memoir about painful family dynamics, public life, bipolar disorder, and addiction that can make you laugh (if you have the patience for this kind of thing). It’s voice driven, shiny, and a little indulgent. After years of keeping her battle with substance abuse under wraps, Fisher became an advocate for mental health awareness who spoke openly about her bipolar disorder diagnosis and her addictions, becoming sort of a den mother to unlikely celebrities and a beloved public figure. It’s easy to see why.

Read about another entry on the list.

Wishful Drinking is among Sadie Trombetta's nine memoirs that reveal the dark side of Hollywood and the Barnes & Noble Review's five top Hollywood tell-alls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ryan Kenedy's "The Blameless"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Blameless by Ryan Kenedy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Newly divorced, Virginia Bigelow is struggling with pressing financial debt, the frustration of a stalled teaching career, an increasingly isolated and lonely existence, and the challenges of being a single parent to an autistic child. When she learns that Travis Lee Hilliard, the man who murdered her father in the 1980s, has been released from prison, she drops everything and sets out on an ill-conceived journey to confront him in order to mete out the justice she feels he deserves.

Meanwhile, having spent three decades serving a life sentence for murdering the California preacher who rescued him from the streets, Travis thinks of himself as a reformed man. Traveling from Folsom Prison to his new home in the Mojave Desert, a remote location with minimal temptations, he struggles to reconcile his past and embrace his newfound freedom. But there are more challenges to staying on the straight and narrow than he ever could have imagined.

Virginia’s and Travis’s braided narratives slowly tighten as they approach their inevitable collision. Unflinching, compassionate, and gripping, this bold novel evocatively examines the ambiguities wrought by both violence and redemption.

Visit Ryan Kenedy's website.

Q&A with Ryan Kenedy.

The Page 69 Test: The Blameless.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Barbara D. Savage's "Merze Tate"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar by Barbara D. Savage.

About the book, from the publisher:

A powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate, a trailblazing Black woman scholar and intrepid world traveler

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.

This book revives and critiques Tate’s prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras.

Barbara Savage’s skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.

Learn more about Merze Tate at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Merze Tate.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books to capture the magic of magical realism

Lois Parkinson Zamora is a leader in the comparative study of literature of the Americas. Her books include The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (2006), a comparative study of New World Baroque art, architecture and literature, and Writing the Apocalypse (1989) and The Usable Past (1997), both of which examine the nature of historical imagination and its representations in contemporary U.S. and Latin American fiction.

She is co-editor of Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995).

At Shepherd she tagged five of the best books from Latin America to capture the magic of magical realism, including:

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

This novel is a great way to start enjoying magical realism. It’s about a family—a hard-boiled mother and her three daughters who live on a ranch in northern Mexico during the Mexican Revolution.

The youngest daughter, named Tita, is told that it is an unalterable family tradition for the youngest daughter not to marry but to stay home and take care of her mother. Tita obeys but with very interesting (and magical) consequences.

Food is the source of much of the magic in this novel, and if you love cooking and eating, you’ll love this magic! And because the story is set during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), revolutionary soldiers gallop through the ranch with magical and sometimes disastrous results.

I loved this novel because it combines politics and history, as well as romance and humor.

Read about another entry on the list.

Like Water for Chocolate is among Lindsay Eagar's eight fantasy tales about the joys of bread & baking and Alexandra Silverman's six top foodie novels from around the world.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Robin Stevens

From my Q&A with Robin Stevens, author of Death Sets Sail:

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

I'm very proud of the title of Death Sets Sail - I think it really lets readers know what the book is about! My books are 1930s murder mysteries starring young detectives, and this story is all about a murder on board a Nile cruise ... but death is also pursuing my main characters, with one of them facing a terrifying and potentially tragic end ...

What's in a name?

I think names are extremely important. My favorite name from this book is...[read on]

Visit Robin Stevens's website.

Q&A with Robin Stevens.

--Marshal Zeringue