Pg. 99: John K. Brown's "Spanning the Gilded Age"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Spanning the Gilded Age: James Eads and the Great Steel Bridge by John K. Brown.

About the book, from the publisher:

The fascinating history of the St. Louis Bridge, the first steel structure in the world.

In Spanning the Gilded Age, John K. Brown tells the daring, improbable story of the construction of the St. Louis Bridge, known popularly as the Eads Bridge. Completed in 1874, it was the first structure of any kind—anywhere in the world—built of steel. This history details the origins, design, construction, and enduring impact of a unique feat of engineering, and it illustrates how Americans built their urban infrastructure during the nineteenth century.

With three graceful arches spanning the Mississippi River, the Eads Bridge's twin decks carried a broad boulevard above a dual-track railroad. To place its stone piers on bedrock, engineer James Eads pioneered daring innovations that allowed excavators to work one hundred feet beneath the river. With construction scarcely begun, Eads circulated a prospectus—offering a 400 percent return on investment—that attracted wealthy investors, including J. Pierpont Morgan in New York and his father, Junius, in London. This record-breaking design, which employed a novel method to lay its foundations and an untried metal for its arches, was projected by a steamboat man who had never before designed a bridge.

By detailing influential figures such as James Eads, the Morgans, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould, Spanning the Gilded Age offers new perspectives on an era that saw profound changes in business, engineering, governance, and society. Beyond the bridge itself, Brown explores a broader story: how America became urban, industrial, and interconnected. This triumph of engineering reflects the Gilded Age's grand ambitions, and the bridge remains a vital transportation artery today.

Visit the Spanning the Gilded Age website.

The Page 99 Test: Spanning the Gilded Age.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top novels about destructive women

Alana B. Lytle is a screenwriter whose recent credits include Netflix’s Brand New Cherry and Peacock’s A Friend of the Family. Her short fiction has been published in Guernica. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sausage-shaped dog. Man’s Best Friend is her debut novel.

At CrimeReads Lytle tagged eight "excellent novels about destructive women," including:

Luster by Raven Leilani

Some might take issue with Edie’s inclusion in the destructive female protagonist tradition, because Edie is not all that hard to love, ultimately. This is a main character who does graduate to a more mature perspective in the end (literally as well as figuratively—her painting improves over the course of the novel). That said, Edie’s behavior in the early chapters of Luster is problematic and frustrating, and in my view firmly cements her in the transgressive canon. A Black woman in her early twenties, Edie is fired from her publishing job for inappropriate sexual behavior. She’s been involved with so many colleagues, men and women, she’s not even sure who brought her behavior to the attention of HR. Edie compares herself unfavorably to another Black female colleague: “She plays the game well… She is Black and dogged and inoffensive… I’d like to think the reason I’m not more dogged is because I know better, but sometimes I look at her and I wonder if the problem isn’t her but me. Maybe the problem is that I’m weak and overly sensitive. Maybe the problem is that I am an office slut.”

Leilani’s choice to have Edie address us in the first person present makes the narration inherently unreliable, so we don’t know, after this admission of Edie’s, how much we should forgive and how much we should judge. Should we be understanding that Edie is not more dogged? Should we think she’s weak? Both, I think. Most of the novel is the story of Edie’s entanglement with Eric, an older, alcoholic white man, and how she comes to move in with Eric and his wife, Rebecca, and their adoptive daughter Akila. Edie’s sexual relationship with Eric is fine by Rebecca until it is not, at which point Edie carries on with Eric anyway, for a time. More interesting than this, however, is the fact that Edie allows, even encourages, Eric to hurt her, hit her. At a certain point, Eric leaves Edie a remorseful, drunk voicemail saying something about how he knows she’s a human being. It’s not terribly relevant whether Eric knows this or not—the only relevant question is whether Edie knows who she is, what she deserves. Will I continue in this pattern of destruction, or won’t I? These are the worthy stakes of this novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

Luster is among Forsyth Harmon's five top obsessive female relationships in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ash Clifton's "Twice the Trouble"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Twice the Trouble by Ash Clifton.

About the book, from the publisher:

A private investigator follows a trail of blood and bodies to find his latest target–or die trying–in this riveting thriller perfect for fans of Jeffery Deaver and Mick Herron.

Noland Twice, a star athlete turned private investigator, can find anyone, no matter how far they run or how well they hide. He works the Orlando-Tampa corridor, a bizarre land where theme parks and tourists coexist with drug deals and crooked businessmen. When a shady local executive, Valkenburg, goes missing, Noland is the only man for the job.

Within hours of taking the case, Noland realizes nothing about this case is going to be easy, and he recruits his friend Kiril to help him with the dirty work when he finds a dead body. But the corpse isn’t the missing man–it’s the body of one of the partners of his construction firm. There’s only one clue as to Valkenburg’s whereabouts: a set of strange numbers hastily scrawled on the dead man’s arm.

When Noland discovers that the numbers are a set of GPS coordinates, he follows the trail to a construction site. At the exact location inscribed on the body, there’s a box buried in the dirt. Inside, he finds a handwritten journal–and a woman’s severed head.

Propulsive and unpredictable, this gritty P.I. thrill ride races through a criminal world where nothing is ever as it seems.

Visit Ash Clifton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Twice the Trouble.

The Page 69 Test: Twice the Trouble.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles with small-town settings

Carolyn Kuebler was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and for the past ten years she has been the editor of the New England Review. Her stories and essays have been published in The Common and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season,” published in The Massachusetts Review, won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay.

Kuebler’s debut novel is Liquid, Fragile, Perishable.

At Lit Hub she tagged "five books that, with their small-town settings and multiple points of view, could be placed in the tradition of [Sherwood Anderson's] Winesburg, Ohio—and yet, like my own, are nothing like Anderson’s at all." One title on the list:

Linda Legarde Grover, A Song over Miskwaa Rapids

Linda Legarde Grover’s latest novel, set in the fictional Mozhay Point Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota, also bears all the hallmarks of small-town fiction, with its layered interpersonal connections, its inescapably present past, and its multiple points of view—including, briefly, a zoom out to the robin who opens and closes the book with his morning song, opiichii, opiichii niin!, starting the new day with his song of “everything that has ever happened.”

On the surface, the book concerns the legal maneuverings around an allotment of land that the tribal government is hoping to purchase from Margie Robineau, who has become deeply attached to the place over the course of her youthful friendships, loveships, and marriage, and has no interest in selling. Hidden beneath the present but concerning these same people, this same land, is a story from half a century earlier, which occupies the center of the book.

Adding yet another dimension are several deceased ancestors—far more gossipy than ghostly—who pull up their lawn chairs and watch over the place. They bicker over the coffee, offer prayers to the Creator, and devise a simple scheme to uncover an unsolved mystery and disrupt the course of events. A dark history of betrayals and losses is always close at hand, but so are the laughter and pleasure that these characters take in each other and in the land they love.

The past is not past, and it is especially unavoidable at the Miskwaa River and Mozhay Point, places Grover returns to frequently in her stories and novels, working these characters’ stories to the surface one by one, lifting them to the light and then burying them again.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Carola Binder's "Shock Values"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy by Carola Binder.

About the book, from the publisher:

How inflation and deflation fears shape American democracy.

Many foundational moments in American economic history—the establishment of paper money, wartime price controls, the rise of the modern Federal Reserve—occurred during financial panics as prices either inflated or deflated sharply. The government’s decisions in these moments, intended to control price fluctuations, have produced both lasting effects and some of the most contentious debates in the nation’s history.

A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, Shock Values reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.

Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.

Visit Carola Binder's website.

The Page 99 Test: Shock Values.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ash Clifton's "Twice the Trouble," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Twice the Trouble by Ash Clifton.

The entry begins:

I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about this topic. A lot. Like practically everybody else these days, I'm a movie buff, and in my mind I'm a great film director. Specifically, I’m a big fan of Michael Mann's films, to the point that I believe the tone and pacing of movies like Thief, Heat, and Collateral were an influence on my book. Mann would be at the top of my dream list to direct any adaptation of Twice the Trouble. My second choice would be Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed a brilliant little noir thriller called Drive. That movie, also, had a strong influence on me.

(Heck, I believe that Steven Spielberg would be a great choice as director. No, I’m serious. People think he only directs fantasies, but he has a real dark side. Hello? Jaws? Munich? Schindler’s List?)

Regarding casting, my main character, Noland Twice, is a former star athlete who has become a private investigator. Whoever plays him would need to be relatively young (30-ish) and athletic. Also, Noland is smart, funny, and resourceful. He's a bit of a trickster. To top it all off, he's Southern, so...[read on]

Visit Ash Clifton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Twice the Trouble.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Kate Feiffer

From my Q&A with Kate Feiffer, author of Morning Pages:

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

Morning Pages — three pages written every morning, the moment you wake up. This was Julia Cameron's suggestion to help creatives get over their blocks in her beloved book The Artist’s Way. Just write, it doesn't matter what you're writing, what matters is that you’re writing. The story in my novel Morning Pages is revealed through the main character’s morning pages. I titled my novel for the device used to tell the story. I suppose if her story was told through diary entries, I would have titled the book Diary.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

We like to believe that we've evolved since our gnarly teenage years, that we think about different things, that the years behind us have provided us with...[read on]

Visit Kate Feiffer's website.

Writers Read: Kate Feiffer (May 2011).

The Page 69 Test: Morning Pages.

Q&A with Kate Feiffer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven books for "The Three-Body Problem" fans

Neil McRobert is a writer and critic with a Ph.D. in contemporary horror fiction. At Vulture he tagged eleven books for fans of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem. One title on the list:

The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Science fiction is full of multiverses. Many stories follow along the branching paths of the Many Worlds theory, in which a butterfly flapping its wings causes an electro-quake in Orion’s Belt or the death of a god on Proxima Centauri. (Great idea actually, noted down!) The Doors of Eden is a different take on the conceit. Rather than positing the various forked futures ahead, Tchaikovsky peers into the deep past, examining all the potential routes of planetary evolution, had conditions differed just slightly. These musings are presented as interstitial chapters in between the central thrust of the plot, which concerns strange creatures on the English moors and a shadowy governmental conspiracy. It’s all great rollocking stuff, but those evolutionary thought experiments are where the author’s imagination really takes flight. Most fans would recommend Tchaikovsky’s lauded “Children of Time” trilogy, but The Doors of Eden shares more of the niche scientific enthusiasm of The Three-Body Problem.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Victor Manibo's "Escape Velocity"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo.

About the book, from the publisher:

A twisty new near-future genre-bending thriller: Knives Out in space with a Parasite twist.

A decades-old murder looms over the glamorous clientele of a high-end space hotel . . . while an unforeseen threat percolates in the service corridors. The guests are about to experience the hospitality they deserve.

Space Habitat Altaire is the premier luxury resort in low Earth orbit, playground of the privileged and the perfect location to host reunions for the Rochford Institute. Rochford boasts only the best: the wealthiest, most promising students with the most impressive pedigrees. Complete with space walks, these lavish reunions are a prime opportunity for alumni to jockey for power with old friends and rivals—and crucially, to advance their applications to live in an exclusive Mars settlement. Earth is dying, and only the best deserve to save themselves.

Aboard the Altaire for their 25th reunion, finance magnate Ava pursues the truth about her brother’s murder during their senior year, which cast a dark shadow over their time at Rochford. Laz, ambassador and political scion, hopes to finally win Ava’s heart. Sloane, collecting secrets to conceal his family’s decline, angles for a key client. And Henry, heir to a healthcare empire, creates an unorthodox opportunity to get to Mars in a last-ditch effort to outrun a childhood secret.

While these erstwhile friends settle scores and rack up points, they fail to notice that other agendas are afoot at the Space Habitat Altaire, and their own futures aren’t the only ones at stake—“the best” will soon regret underestimating those they would leave behind on Earth.

Visit Victor Manibo's website.

The Page 69 Test: Escape Velocity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Michael A. Cook's "A History of the Muslim World"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity by Michael A. Cook.

About the book, from the publisher:

A panoramic history of the Muslim world from the age of the Prophet Muḥammad to the birth of the modern era

This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

After setting the scene in the Middle East of late antiquity, the book depicts the rise of Islam as one of the great black swan events of history. It continues with the spectacular rise of the Caliphate, an empire that by the time it broke up had nurtured the formation of a new civilization. It then goes on to cover the diverse histories of all the major regions of the Muslim world, providing a wide-ranging account of the key military, political, and cultural developments that accompanied the eastward and westward spread of Islam from the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

At the same time, A History of the Muslim World contains numerous primary-source quotations that expose the reader to a variety of acutely insightful voices from the Muslim past.

Learn more about A History of the Muslim World at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A History of the Muslim World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels set on fictional islands

Elizabeth O'Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes.

O'Connor's new novel is Whale Fall.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight novels that are

set on unnamed or fictional islands; making them not grounded in a specific geography of place, but in the idea of an island. These unnamed islands have a global reach across Europe, Asia, East Africa, and North America, but the islands’ conditions—of isolation, of insularity, of instability—point to similar underlying ideas of disruption, allegory, colonial legacy and environmental care, forming an archipelago of novels mapping their connections to each other.

One title on O'Connor's list:

The Colony by Audrey Magee

I found The Colony greatly inspiring while finishing the edits for Whale Fall. Magee’s unnamed island has some geographical models in the peninsulas around the coastline of West Ireland, such as the Aran islands and Blasket islands, and clear literary heritage in J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Colm Tóibín. Yet as its title suggests, Magee’s island is deliberately unnamed to place its themes ahead of geography; it is a novel about colonialism, culture, and language.

Its drama, as with other titles on this list, concerns the arrival of outsiders: Lloyd is a London artist looking to revitalise his flagging career, and Jean-Pierre, a French linguist, charting and recording the island’s native Irish language. They clash over their mythologising of the islanders, whose numbers dwindle in the double-figures, and overlook their impact on this struggling community. While the story roots itself in an Irish perspective, with radio bulletins about the Troubles in Northern Ireland interspersing the narrative, it dramatises the legacy between colonised and coloniser with a global outlook.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marion McNabb's "Some Doubt About It," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Some Doubt About It: A Novel by Marion McNabb.

The entry begins:

I worked for several years as a screenwriter on a children’s animated preschool program and had an absolute ball. It was amazing to see WRITTEN BY with my name underneath scrolling across my television. My phone’s camera roll will prove just how exciting that felt. Which is to say I have some experience in Hollywood. I spent years toiling away on the craft and in that time wrote three feature films, one was optioned at one point, and several pilots and pitched to, and was working on producing material with, studios all over Los Angeles. Universal, Disney, Apple, Nickelodeon, etc. to name a few. Having honed my skills as a screenwriter I unconsciously perhaps trained myself to write with particular actors in mind.

Writing narrative fiction is a little bit of a different process. I don’t think I fully realize until I’m well into the story exactly who the actor is but once it clicks I see them in my mind’s eye as I continue on and all through edits. This isn’t necessarily the case for all of the characters, sometimes it’s more pronounced for one initially and then a mixture of other actors for the other characters which was the case for my latest.

This novel, Some Doubt About It straddles the Hollywood line in and of itself. Caroline, a self- billed “Success at Life” guru to the stars has a couple of very bad days and must leave the glitz and glamour of LA for stodgy old Cape Cod and in so doing she learns what true success, and love, are really about.

Caroline, our protagonist, is a small town girl who decided she would be rich and famous and she achieved that goal but she felt empty. I think as I wrote she morphed and change from what was in my head to what ended up in the edited final. She is a bit more of an amalgamation of several actors - Jennifer Garner, Reese Witherspoon and maybe a dash of Sandra Bullock and a spritz of Amy...[read on]

Visit Marion McNabb's website.

My Book, The Movie: Some Doubt About It.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg 99: Nadine A. Sinno's "A War of Colors"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut by Nadine A. Sinno.

About the book, from the publisher:

Demonstrates the role of Beirut’s postwar graffiti and street art in transforming the cityscape and animating resistance.

Over the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physical and social spaces. In A War of Colors, Nadine Sinno examines how graffiti and street art have been used in postwar Beirut to comment on the rapidly changing social dynamics of the country and region. Analyzing how graffiti makers can reclaim and transform cityscapes that were damaged or monopolized by militias during the war, Sinno explores graffiti’s other roles, including forging civic engagement, commemorating cultural icons, protesting political corruption and environmental violence, and animating resistance. In addition, she argues that graffiti making can offer voices to those who are often marginalized, especially women and LGBTQ people. Copiously illustrated with images of graffiti and street art, A War of Colors is a visually captivating and thought-provoking journey through Beirut, where local and global discourses intersect on both scarred and polished walls in the city.

Learn more about A War of Colors at the University of Texas Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A War of Colors.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the greatest campus novels ever written

Elise Juska’s new novel, Reunion, was named one of People Magazine’s “Best Books to Read in May 2024.” Her previous novels include The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and If We Had Known. Juska’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize from Ploughshares, and her short fiction has been cited by The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

[The Page 69 Test: Reunion; My Book, The Movie: Reunion]

At CrimeReads Juska tagged eight novels "that interrogate the modern college experience or reflect on the past with a knowing eye." One title on the list:

Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members

This blistering academic satire is composed as a series of letters by Jason Fitger, a writing and literature professor at a meh Midwestern college, contending with drastic budget cuts to the English department and his once-promising writing career. He’s routinely called upon to compose letters for students, colleagues, committees—the very relentlessness of these letters a jab at academic culture—to say nothing of their content, which is scathingly funny and wincingly true. (Schumacher’s sequels, The Shakespeare Experiment and The English Experience, are hilarious/painful too.)

Read about another entry on the list.

Dear Committee Members is among Emily Temple's sixty top campus novels from the last 100 years, Louise Dean's top ten novels about novelists, Emily Temple's fifteen great campus novels published in the last decade, Jenn Ashworth and Richard V. Hirst's ten top modern epistolary novels, Maureen Corrigan's top 12 books of 2014, Kate DiCamillo's 3 favorite books of 2014, and Ellen Wehle's four top novels "in which teachers and students run just a little bit off the rails."

The Page 69 Test: Dear Committee Members.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Catherine Ryan Hyde's "Life, Loss, and Puffins"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Life, Loss, and Puffins: A Novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exhilarating and emotional novel about grief, hope, friendship, and taking life one beautiful and spontaneous day at a time by New York Times bestselling author Catherine Ryan Hyde.

Freakishly smart. That’s the unwelcome box Ru Evans is put into for life. After all, she taught herself euclidean geometry at age seven, has an eidetic memory, and is about to enter college at thirteen years old.

Boarding at a house near campus 150 miles from home, Ru meets seventeen-year-old Gabriel, an outsider himself who, like Ru, has trouble making friends―until they form a fast sibling-like bond. Finding a relatable someone in the world to talk to is a first for both of them.

But when Ru’s mother dies and the threat of living with her miserable aunt looms, Ru hatches an escape. It’s an impulsive road trip that takes Ru and Gabriel from California to Canada, where Ru can fulfill her ultimate dream: to see Atlantic puffins in the glorious wild.

Mile by mile, Ru discovers the joy of friendship, found family, dark night skies, and the aurora borealis, and she basks in going from being a smart person to just a person. Though she knows they’ll be in trouble when they’re caught, for the short time they are navigating twist by twist of an unknown road, the freedom is liberating, and she is living for what feels like the first time.

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.

The Page 69 Test: Boy Underground.

The Page 69 Test: Dreaming of Flight.

The Page 69 Test: So Long, Chester Wheeler.

The Page 69 Test: A Different Kind of Gone.

The Page 69 Test: Life, Loss, and Puffins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Elizabeth Abel's "Odd Affinities"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies by Elizabeth Abel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new reading of Virginia Woolf in the context of “long modernism.”

In recent decades, Virginia Woolf’s contribution to literary history has been located primarily within a female tradition. Elizabeth Abel dislodges Woolf from her iconic place within this tradition to uncover her shadowy presence in other literary genealogies. Abel elicits unexpected echoes of Woolf in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called “odd affinities” that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence. Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and African American studies.

Learn more about Odd Affinities at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Odd Affinities.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top fictional works featuring sisters

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the new novel We Were the Universe and the short story collection Black Light, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.

At Lit Hub she tagged five favorite fictional works featuring sisters, including:

Cecily Wong, Kaleidoscope

Riley and Morgan Brighton—the dynamic, beautifully rendered sisters in Cecily Wong’s Kaleidoscope—are opposites in many ways, but they love each other tremendously. They are close-knit, well adjusted, and supportive (without giving too much away, the opening scene exemplifies the way siblings bond during hard times, showing how resilient they can be when tackling problems together). When a sudden tragedy strikes, Riley is forced to reexamine her relationship with Morgan, with herself, and with the world at large—she sets out on a radiant path of discovery.

Kaleidoscope is impeccably structured and thoroughly researched—it’s about sisterhood, but it’s also part adventure story, part travelogue, and there’s even a little bit of mystery mixed in. Wong’s dry humor and careful observations underpin this moving, ultimately hopeful novel.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elise Juska's "Reunion," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Reunion: A Novel by Elise Juska.

The entry begins:

The main characters in Reunion are three college friends—Polly, Adam, and Hope—who are emerging from the pandemic and returning to their twenty-fifth reunion. They’re bringing with them not only mixed feelings about their college years but concern about their children, particularly Polly’s teenage son Jonah, who’s traveling with her to Maine.

When working on my previous novels I never had actors in mind, but strangely enough, for this one, from the beginning I pictured Polly as Catherine Keener. I am a huge fan of her performances as witty, slightly acerbic, vulnerable women in indie films like Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and Please Give.

Adam is youthful-looking and young at heart—naturally my mind goes to Paul Rudd. Not only is Rudd seemingly age-defying, but I’ve been watching him since the nineties, in classics like Clueless, in which he looked how Adam might have in the novel’s flashbacks to his college years.

For Hope, upbeat and popular, the actor of my dreams is...[read on]

Visit Elise Juska's website.

The Page 69 Test: Reunion.

My Book, The Movie: Reunion.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alex Edmans's "May Contain Lies"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It by Alex Edmans.

About the book, from the publisher:

How our biases cause us to fall for misinformation—and how to combat it.

Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, executives, and authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.

In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples—from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death—Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.

Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics—the science of cause and effect—ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and better decisions.

Visit Alex Edmans's website.

The Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best Alice Munro short stories

Lisa Allardice is the Guardian's chief books writer.

She tagged five of the best Alice Munro short stories, including:

"Dance of the Happy Shades," 1968

Margaret Atwood cried when she first read this story, because “it was so well done”. “Spinster” Miss Marsalles, piano teacher to generations of children in the genteel southern Ontario town of Rosedale, is giving one of her annual piano-recital parties, a source of dread and scorn for the young mothers who feel obliged to attend. The story is narrated by the teenage daughter of one of the mothers, both past students of Miss Marsalles. The teacher and her elder sister (who has had a stroke – “She’s not herself though, poor thing”) no longer live in the smart family house, but have moved to a bungalow in the wrong part of town: “This aspect of Miss Marsalles’ life had passed into that region of painful subjects which it is crude and unmannerly to discuss.”

The Marsalles sisters, with their “kindly and grotesque faces” and insistence on throwing parties despite their reduced circumstances, have committed the female sins of being unmarried, elderly and poor. “It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be so marked in so many ways.” Such is Munro’s attention to detail – the flies buzzing around sandwiches put out too early, the dress that “smells of the cleaners”, the presents tied with silver ribbon, “not real ribbon, the kind that splits and threads” – that the reader squirms as uncomfortably as the mothers on that “hot gritty” afternoon. When a group of children with Down’s syndrome arrive to give recitals, none of the nice ladies of Rosedale know where to look – literally. “For it is a matter of politeness, surely not to look closely at such children, and yet where else can you look during a piano performance, but at the performer?”

In barely 10 pages (Munro’s early work was much shorter), Dance of the Happy Shades is a masterclass in authorial irony. The women’s well-mannered facades sliding like their makeup in the heat to reveal their snobbery and unkindness. A celebration of innocence and unexpected joy – but without a single note of sentimentality – it might make you cry too, and not just because it is so good, which it is, but because it is so sad and strange.

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--Marshal Zeringue