Top ten books about the apocalypse

Michelle Tea is the author of five memoirs: The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, Valencia (now a film), The Chelsea Whistle, Rent Girl (illustrated) and How to Grow Up, currently in development with Amazon Studios. Her novels include Mermaid in Chelsea Creek and Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, part of a Young Adult fantasy trilogy published by McSweeneys, and Rose of No Man’s Land. Black Wave is a dystopic memoir-fiction hybrid. One of her top ten books about the apocalypse, as shared at the Guardian:

Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

Amid the counterculture of a war-drunk America on the verge of collapse we meet Della, a vegan cafe worker who calls in bomb threats in her downtime. When bombs actually explode at Della’s targets, things get heavier and more confusing. This Philip K Dick-ish novel takes place in subcultures familiar to many, within a heavily mediated America that is all too recognisable.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Zazen.

The Page 69 Test: Zazen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lindy Grant's "Blanche of Castile, Queen of France"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Blanche of Castile, Queen of France by Lindy Grant.

About the book, from the publisher:

This is the first modern scholarly biography of Blanche of Castile, whose identity has until now been subsumed in that of her son, the saintly Louis IX. A central figure in the politics of medieval Europe, Blanche was a sophisticated patron of religion and culture. Through Lindy Grant’s engaging account, based on a close analysis of Blanche’s household accounts and of the social and religious networks on which her power and agency depended, Blanche is revealed as a vibrant and intellectually questioning personality.

Learn more about Blanche of Castile, Queen of France at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Blanche of Castile, Queen of France.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Patricia Harman's "The Runaway Midwife"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Runaway Midwife: A Novel by Patricia Harman.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the USA Today bestselling author of the Hope River series comes a new contemporary midwife novel.

Say “goodbye” to your old life, and “hello” to the life you’ve been waiting for…

Midwife Clara Perry is accustomed to comforting her pregnant patients…calming fathers-to-be as they anxiously await the birth of their children…ensuring the babies she delivers come safely into the world.

But when Clara’s life takes a nosedive, she realizes she hasn’t been tending to her own needs and does something drastic: she runs away and starts over again in a place where no one knows her or the mess she’s left behind in West Virginia. Heading to Sea Gull Island—a tiny, remote Canadian island—Clara is ready for anything. Well, almost. She left her passport back home, and the only way she can enter Canada is by hitching a ride on a snowmobile and illegally crossing the border.

Deciding to reinvent herself, Clara takes a new identity—Sara Livingston, a writer seeking solitude. But there’s no avoiding the outside world. The residents are friendly, and draw “Sara” into their lives and confidences. She volunteers at the local medical clinic, using her midwifery skills, and forms a tentative relationship with a local police officer.

But what will happen if she lets down her guard and reveals the real reason why she left her old life? One lesson soon becomes clear: no matter how far you run, you can never really hide from your past.

Visit Patricia Harman's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Runaway Midwife.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Nancy Peacock reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Nancy Peacock, author of The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

Her entry begins:

I usually keep a memoir or novel going while also reading a nonfiction book.

Recently I finished Barefoot to Avalon, David Payne’s amazing memoir about his relationship to his brother, George A., and his relationship to his brother’s death. George A. died in a car crash while helping David move from Vermont to North Carolina.

I can’t give this book a glowing-enough review. The emotional work Payne had to have done in order to write the story is...[read on]

About The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson, from the publisher:

For fans of Cold Mountain and The Invention of Wings comes “a tour de force of historical fiction” (Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain) that follows the epic journey of a slave-turned-Comanche warrior who travels from the brutality of a New Orleans sugar cane plantation to the indomitable frontier of an untamed Texas, searching not only for the woman he loves but so too for his own identity.

I have been to hangings before, but never my own.

Sitting in a jail cell on the eve of his hanging, April 1, 1875, freedman Persimmon “Persy” Wilson wants nothing more than to leave some record of the truth—his truth. He may be guilty, but not of what he stands accused: the kidnapping and rape of his former master’s wife.

In 1860, Persy had been sold to Sweetmore, a Louisiana sugar plantation, alongside a striking, light-skinned house slave named Chloe. Their deep and instant connection fueled a love affair and inspired plans to escape their owner, Master Wilson, who claimed Chloe as his concubine. But on the eve of the Union Army’s attack on New Orleans, Wilson shot Persy, leaving him for dead, and fled with Chloe and his other slaves to Texas. So began Persy’s journey across the frontier, determined to reunite with his lost love. Along the way, he would be captured by the Comanche, his only chance of survival to prove himself fierce and unbreakable enough to become a warrior. His odyssey of warfare, heartbreak, unlikely friendships, and newfound family would change the very core of his identity and teach him the meaning and the price of freedom.

Visit Nancy Peacock's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

The Page 69 Test: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

Writers Read: Nancy Peacock.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kayla Rae Whitaker's "The Animators," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker.

The entry begins:

Casting The Animators as a movie: I have this reoccurring, impossible fantasy of placing Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as the cartoonists Sharon and Mel, respectively. Can you imagine Bette smoking a joint in her bathrobe and cramming Cheetos into her mouth, or Joan doing the Axl Rose dance, pointing to someone, cigarette clamped in her mouth, yelling, “Because it’s rad, that’s why”? I can. And it’s awesome.

Sharon’s a weird mix of misanthropy and deep vulnerability – she is a difficult character to come to know, but you are glad to know her once you have. Rocky-era Talia Shire would be a good fit. The obvious, golden choice, however:...[read on]

Visit Kayla Rae Whitaker's website.

Writers Read: Kayla Rae Whitaker.

My Book, The Movie: The Animators.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top YA books about crime families

Rachel Paxton is a freelance writer and semi-professional nerd.

At the B & N Teen Blog she tagged five of the best YA books about crime families, including:

Mafia Girl, by Deborah Blumenthal

Filled with romance, decadent meals, and fabulous clothes, Mafia Girl offers a safe alternative to actually living out your lawless dreams, so you can avoid sleeping with the fishes. Gia might attend an exclusive Manhattan high school, but life’s not easy when your dad is a mafia boss. Those who don’t want to be her, fear her, and Gia herself lives in constant fear of her father going to jail. She longs to be more than her infamous name…and when she falls head over heels for a police officer, her loyalty to her family is tested.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Cat Urbigkit's "Brave & Loyal"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Brave and Loyal: An Illustrated Celebration of Livestock Guardian Dogs by Cat Urbigkit.

About the book, from the publisher:

Learn about the brave dogs who help guard livestock around the world!

Wolf populations in the Rocky Mountains have reached recovery goals due in large part to an environmentally friendly method of predator control now in use on western ranches: livestock protection dogs (also called livestock guardian dogs). Although these dogs have been used around the world for thousands of years in primitive systems of livestock production, it’s only in the past four decades that they have been put to work in America in a systematic manner. Guardian dogs were imported to the United States, and their use has allowed the expansion of predator populations into areas where the animals were previously subject to lethal control. The use of guardian dogs is typical wherever livestock may encounter predators—from fox and coyotes, to wolves and grizzly bears.

In Brave and Loyal, Cat Urbigkit tracks her journeys from a Wyoming sheep ranch to learn about working livestock protection dogs around the globe. Using historic accounts, published research, personal interviews on four continents, and her own experience on western rangelands, she provides the reader an intimate look into the everyday lives of working livestock protection dogs. Brave and Loyal includes details on raising successful guardians, their behaviors, a discussion of breeds and historic use, an assessment of numbers for various predator challenges, the adoption and spread of programs to place guardians on American farms and ranches, problems and benefits associated with guardian dogs, predator ploys, and matching the dog to the predator challenge. Urbigkit’s work provides the best information on working livestock guardian dogs around the globe, accompanied by more than one hundred beautiful color photos.

Learn more about Brave and Loyal: An Illustrated Celebration of Livestock Guardian Dogs and visit Cat Urbigkit’s Paradise Sheep website.

Coffee with a Canine: Cat Urbigkit & Rena.

Coffee with a Canine: Cat Urbigkit & Hud.

The Page 99 Test: Brave and Loyal.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ingrid Thoft's "Duplicity"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Duplicity by Ingrid Thoft.

About the book, from the publisher:

Gutsy Boston P.I. Fina Ludlow returns with a case that puts her faith to the test—in the latest addition to the critically acclaimed series by Ingrid Thoft.

When Ceci Renard hires Ludlow and Associates to sue the hip new church that she believes has brainwashed her daughter, Fina Ludlow is assigned to the case. Covenant Rising Church has all the trappings of a less-than-holy organization: a slick young pastor and his comely wife; fancy houses and luxury cars; and devoted congregants who seem eager to part with their money. Fina wonders if Ceci disapproves of Covenant Rising’s theology or the pastor’s ability to solicit generous donations—until a prominent church member dies unexpectedly. Fina’s investigation requires her to delve into the woman’s life—both in and out of Covenant Rising—and ask a host of difficult questions. Is the pastor leading his flock astray? Did the church have a hand in the death or were there less savory elements in the woman’s life outside the parish?

The case proves to be a complicated morass of misplaced loyalties and questionable motivations, rivaled only by the current state of the Ludlow family. The return of eldest brother Rand sets in motion an explosive showdown that threatens the very fabric that holds the family together, forcing Fina to confront the true meaning of faith.

Visit Ingrid Thoft's website.

The Page 69 Test: Brutality.

The Page 69 Test: Duplicity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best contemporary novels by and about Muslims

At LitHub Emily Temple tagged ten top contemporary novels by and about Muslims, including:

Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon

Ahmed’s epic swords & sorcery fantasy novel which follows a ghul hunter and his apprentice on a quest to save their city, was a finalist for pretty much every fantasy prize, but won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. In an interview with Alyssa Rosenberg, Ahmed referred to it as a “sadly radical gesture,” explaining that just as feminism is “the radical notion that women are people, a lot of my work is about the fact that Muslims and Arabs and people who look Arabic are heroes.”

Read about another entry on the list.

Throne of the Crescent Moon is among Rachel Hartman's top five theological fantasies for ecstatic atheists.

The Page 69 Test: Throne of the Crescent Moon.

My Book, The Movie: Throne of The Crescent Moon.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Kayla Rae Whitaker reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Kayla Rae Whitaker, author of The Animators.

Her entry begins:

One night, while eating dinner in a restaurant with my husband, I saw a guy come in with a copy of my favorite novel from the past year, The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan, which explores class and race in Kentucky horse country. I wanted to stop and ask the guy how he was liking it, but I chickened out. Which I regret. I would have loved to have heard what he thought. It’s nice to connect with strangers over books.

I just finished Someone Please Have Sex with Me by Gina Wynbrandt and loved it. I was scratching around for a new graphic novel and one of the book’s blurbs was provided by one of the producers of Bojack Horseman, a show I adore, and that drew me in to this collection of comics. The writing is fantastic, the visuals are incredible – so many weird renderings of Justin Bieber’s face. There, too, was...[read on]

About The Animators, from the publisher:

She was the first person to see me as I had always wanted to be seen. It was enough to indebt me to her forever.

In the male-dominated field of animation, Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses are a dynamic duo, the friction of their differences driving them: Sharon, quietly ambitious but self-doubting; Mel, brash and unapologetic, always the life of the party. Best friends and artistic partners since the first week of college, where they bonded over their working-class roots and obvious talent, they spent their twenties ensconced in a gritty Brooklyn studio. Working, drinking, laughing. Drawing: Mel, to understand her tumultuous past, and Sharon, to lose herself altogether.

Now, after a decade of striving, the two are finally celebrating the release of their first full-length feature, which transforms Mel’s difficult childhood into a provocative and visually daring work of art. The toast of the indie film scene, they stand at the cusp of making it big. But with their success come doubt and destruction, cracks in their relationship threatening the delicate balance of their partnership. Sharon begins to feel expendable, suspecting that the ever-more raucous Mel is the real artist. During a trip to Sharon’s home state of Kentucky, the only other partner she has ever truly known—her troubled, charismatic childhood best friend, Teddy—reenters her life, and long-buried resentments rise to the surface, hastening a reckoning no one sees coming.

A funny, heartbreaking novel of friendship, art, and trauma, The Animators is about the secrets we keep and the burdens we shed on the road to adulthood.

Visit Kayla Rae Whitaker's website.

Writers Read: Kayla Rae Whitaker.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Cleese's 6 favorite books

John Cleese is an actor, producer, writer, one of the co-founders of Monty Python, and the author of a memoir, So Anyway. One of his six favorite books, as shared at The Week magazine:

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

I met Amis once and liked him very much. He was rather sour, but he wrote beautifully, and he did really manage to describe certain personalities. His first novel is about a fellow called Dixon, a history lecturer at a minor university. Dixon has wonderfully funny fantasies, and Margaret, his sometime girlfriend, is one of the most awful human beings in fiction. I remember reading this by the side of a swimming pool in Spain, and I was really quite bothering the people around me because I kept bursting into hysterical laughter.

Read about another entry on the list.

Lucky Jim also appears on Christian Rudder's six favorite books list, Jess Dukes's top ten list of brain-expanding books for the college-bound teen, Andy Borowitz's list of five top comic novels, Sean O'Hagan's list of the ten best fictional hangovers, Roger Rosenblatt's list of the five best satires of academic life, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best lectures in literature, ten of the best professors in literature, and ten of the best beards in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Joshua Kurlantzick's "A Great Place to Have a War"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA by Joshua Kurlantzick.

About the book, from the publisher:

The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy.

In 1960, President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces in Laos. While remaining largely hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war, which continued under Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, lasted nearly two decades, killed one-tenth of Laos’s total population, left thousands of unexploded bombs in the ground, and changed the nature of the CIA forever.

Joshua Kurlantzick gives us the definitive account of the Laos war and its central characters, including the four key people who led the operation—the CIA operative who came up with the idea, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew.

The Laos war created a CIA that fights with real soldiers and weapons as much as it gathers secrets. Laos became a template for CIA proxy wars all over the world, from Central America in the 1980s to today’s war on terrorism, where the CIA has taken control with little oversight. Based on extensive interviews and CIA records only recently declassified, A Great Place to Have a War is a riveting, thought-provoking look at how Operation Momentum changed American foreign policy forever.

Learn more about A Great Place to have a War.

The Page 69 Test: Charm Offensive.

The Page 99 Test: A Great Place to Have a War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Tracy Weber's "A Fatal Twist"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: A Fatal Twist by Tracy Weber.

About the book, from the publisher:

Yoga instructor Kate Davidson’s life takes a chaotic turn once she agrees to not only be the doula for her pregnant best friend, but also play foster mother to two puppies. The chaos gets worse when Kate finds the dead body of a philandering fertility doctor and sees Rachel, one of her yoga students, fleeing the scene.

Kate is convinced her student is innocent, and she sets out to find the real killer before her testimony condemns Rachel to a life behind bars. But her hands are full with caring for three dogs, teaching yoga classes, and gaining an unexpected crime-solving partner. If she’s not careful, Kate’s next yoga pose may be a fatal one.

Visit Tracy Weber's website, blog, and Facebook page.

Coffee with a Canine: Tracy Weber and Tasha.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Strikes a Pose.

The Page 69 Test: A Killer Retreat.

The Page 69 Test: Karma's a Killer.

My Book, The Movie: Karma's a Killer.

The Page 69 Test: A Fatal Twist.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Hrach's "The Riot Report and the News," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Riot Report and the News: How the Kerner Commission Changed Media Coverage of Black America by Thomas J. Hrach.

About the book, from the publisher:

When I wrote The Riot Report and the News, I tried to focus on the characters that made the history of the Kerner Commission. The commission was an 11-member group appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to study the causes of the riots in American cities. While there many people involved in the story of the commission, no one character stood out more than Otto Kerner, the namesake of the commission and governor of Illinois. The goal of the book was to give some love and credit to Kerner for being a major figure in the history of journalism even though he was never a reporter, editor, TV executive nor had anything to do with the news media.

Kerner never got his due in history mostly because his time in public office was marred by a scandal that ultimately led him into prison. But as history now shows, the prosecution likely was politically motivated and Kerner was punished for a crime that was later determined to be unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. He was his own worst enemy for sure by never acknowledging any wrongdoing, refusing to accept any blame and ultimately failing to mount a proper defense.

But my story about Kerner covers the period before he got into legal trouble. It was the time in his life when he rose to great fame and respect, even though he likely had already sowed the seeds of demise. So who would play this complicated character in a film? He was sometimes portrayed as having movie star good looks. He was once voted by the news media as the nation’s most handsome governor. He was always impeccably dressed in a suit and tie. His former press secretary said he dressed like a banker, often much more formally than the situation dictated. George Clooney, Paul...[read on]

Learn more about The Riot Report and the News at the University of Massachusetts Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Riot Report and the News.

My Book, The Movie: The Riot Report and the News.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top SFF books that take on Norse mythology

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Jeff Somers tagged ten sci-fi & fantasy books that take on norse mythology. One title on the list:

Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton

Crichton always surprised; in this 1975 novel (which served as the inspiration for the film The 13th Warrior) a civilized, educated Arab courtier falls in with a group of Viking warriors. He finds them gross and brutal—and slowly realizes they have taken him in order to assist in a battle against the beasts that emerge from the darkness to consume them (think Grendel). While Crichton offers a pseudo-scientific explanation for these events, the old myths loom large in what is a pretty scary story.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Elliot Ackerman reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing.

His entry begins:

I’ve been meaning to buy some new bookshelves for a while now, as mine are full. So for about the past nine months I’ve been placing everything that I read on the side of my desk into these perilous stacks. Glancing over to the books balanced on the top, the first title that catches my eye is the American edition of Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías. Set in Madrid in 1980, it is a novel centered around a broken, even contemptuous marriage between Eduardo Muriel a once successful filmmaker and his wife Beatrice. When Muriel takes on a young assistant, Juan de Vere, to help him with his latest project, the central conflict within the marriage is slowly revealed. It’s a...[read on]

About Dark at the Crossing, from the publisher:

From the author of the acclaimed Green on Blue, a timely new novel of stunning humanity and tension: a contemporary love story set on the Turkish border with Syria.

Haris Abadi is a man in search of a cause. An Arab American with a conflicted past, he is now in Turkey, attempting to cross into Syria and join the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But he is robbed before he can make it, and is taken in by Amir, a charismatic Syrian refugee and former revolutionary, and Amir’s wife, Daphne, a sophisticated beauty haunted by grief. As it becomes clear that Daphne is also desperate to return to Syria, Haris’s choices become ever more wrenching: Whose side is he really on? Is he a true radical or simply an idealist? And will he be able to bring meaning to a life of increasing frustration and helplessness? Told with compassion and a deft hand, Dark at the Crossing is an exploration of loss, of second chances, and of why we choose to believe–a trenchantly observed novel of raw urgency and power.

Visit Elliot Ackerman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Green on Blue.

My Book, The Movie: Green on Blue.

My Book, The Movie: Dark at the Crossing.

The Page 69 Test: Dark at the Crossing.

Writers Read: Elliot Ackerman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bettany Hughes's 6 best books

Bettany Hughes is a historian and broadcaster. Her latest book is Istanbul: A Tale Of Three Cities. One of the author's six best books, as shared at the Daily Express:

THE AMAZONS by Adrienne Mayor

A comprehensive guide to the myth and reality of Amazon women. Mayor is a very accessible author but backs it up with acute scholarship. Ferocious warrior women really did exist in the Caucasus area and she reminds us that truth can be stranger than fiction.

Read about another book on the list.

The Amazons is among Nicole Hill's five top books about actual badass women who ruled kingdoms.

The Page 99 Test: The Amazons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Cat Urbigkit & Hud

Featured at Coffee with a Canine: Cat Urbigkit & Hud.

The author, on how she and Hud were united:

We already had one bearded collie, Abe, and as he began to age, we were able to obtain a pup from the same working dog lineage. It was a stressful time in my life, and when I talked to the breeder, I told her I didn’t need to select a puppy from the litter, but asked her to give me the pup that no one else wanted. Of course that meant that I would end up with the pup that was...[read on]

About Urbigkit's Brave and Loyal: An Illustrated Celebration of Livestock Guardian Dogs, from the publisher:

Learn about the brave dogs who help guard livestock around the world!

Wolf populations in the Rocky Mountains have reached recovery goals due in large part to an environmentally friendly method of predator control now in use on western ranches: livestock protection dogs (also called livestock guardian dogs). Although these dogs have been used around the world for thousands of years in primitive systems of livestock production, it’s only in the past four decades that they have been put to work in America in a systematic manner. Guardian dogs were imported to the United States, and their use has allowed the expansion of predator populations into areas where the animals were previously subject to lethal control. The use of guardian dogs is typical wherever livestock may encounter predators—from fox and coyotes, to wolves and grizzly bears.

In Brave and Loyal, Cat Urbigkit tracks her journeys from a Wyoming sheep ranch to learn about working livestock protection dogs around the globe. Using historic accounts, published research, personal interviews on four continents, and her own experience on western rangelands, she provides the reader an intimate look into the everyday lives of working livestock protection dogs. Brave and Loyal includes details on raising successful guardians, their behaviors, a discussion of breeds and historic use, an assessment of numbers for various predator challenges, the adoption and spread of programs to place guardians on American farms and ranches, problems and benefits associated with guardian dogs, predator ploys, and matching the dog to the predator challenge. Urbigkit’s work provides the best information on working livestock guardian dogs around the globe, accompanied by more than one hundred beautiful color photos.

Learn more about Brave and Loyal: An Illustrated Celebration of Livestock Guardian Dogs and visit Cat Urbigkit’s Paradise Sheep website.

Coffee with a Canine: Cat Urbigkit & Rena.

Coffee with a Canine: Cat Urbigkit & Hud.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve SFF updates of 19th century classics

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Ceridwen Christensen tagged twelve sci-fi & fantasy updates of 19th century classics. One title on the list:

Heartstone, by Elle Katharine White

There’s something like a cottage industry in updating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It has been rewritten from several different points of view, or continued from after Darcy and Elizabeth’s marriage, or followed the lives of their children. In Heartstone, Elle Katharine White repeats the plot of Austen’s novel nearly beat for beat, but this time, the events take place in a world with dragons. I was impressed by the way White shifted some of the more thorny characters in Austen, changing their motivations to match the parameters of the world, and therefore rendering them understandable. That’s an altogether dry way of saying: you should read Pride and Prejudice plus Dragons, because that’s awesome.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Steven Parfitt reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Steven Parfitt, author of Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland.

His entry begins:

Over the Christmas break I’ve been reading two books, both of them non-fiction and both, not by any conscious design, dealing with quite similar subjects. The first is Barry Gustafson’s His Way: A Biography of Robert Muldoon. It’s about one of my native New Zealand’s longest-serving Prime Ministers (1975-1984), Robert Muldoon, who dominated the political lives of my parents. I already knew Muldoon as the man who called an election drunk in 1984 when his slim parliamentary majority seemed in danger. I knew him as a conservative bullyboy who intimidated journalists and other politicians with his quick memory and sharp tongue. This was someone who did not shrink from depicting the Labour Party as dancing Cossacks in thrall to the Soviet Union, or from publicly outing an opposition MP as gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal.

Gustafson points to another side of Muldoon’s character. He remained a conservative but was also a Keynesian. His commitment to full employment and the welfare state – and to what he called “the ordinary bloke” – is no longer matched by most conservatives, and even by many who claim to be on the left. His ill-fated, alcohol-fuelled decision to call an election in 1984, which he lost, put a Labour Government in power. It might surprise people outside New Zealand to learn that it was Labour, and not the conservative National Party, which launched a wave of deregulation and privatisation even...[read on]

About Knights Across the Atlantic, from the publisher:

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, the first national movement of the American working class, began in Philadelphia in 1869. Millions of Americans, white and black, men and women, became Knights between that date and 1917. But the Knights also spread beyond the borders of the United States and even beyond North America. Knights Across the Atlantic tells for the first time the full story of the Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland, where they operated between 1883 and the end of the century. British and Irish Knights drew on the resources of their vast Order to establish a chain of branches through England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland that numbered more than 10,000 members at its peak. They drew on the fraternal ritual, industrial tactics, organisational models, and political concerns of their American Order and interpreted them in British and Irish conditions. They faced many of the same enemies, including hostile employers and rival trade unions. Unlike their American counterparts they organised only a handful of women at most. But British and Irish Knights left a profound imprint on subsequent British labour history. They helped inspire the British "New Unionists" of the 1890s. They influenced the movement for working-class politics, independent of Liberals and Conservatives alike, that soon led to the British Labour Party. Knights Across the Atlantic brings all these themes together. It provides new insights into relationships between class and gender, and places the Knights of Labor squarely at the heart of British and Irish as well as American history at the end of the nineteenth century.

Learn more about Knights Across the Atlantic at the Liverpool University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Knights Across the Atlantic.

Writers Read: Steven Parfitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Nancy Peacock's "The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson by Nancy Peacock.

About the book, from the publisher:

For fans of Cold Mountain and The Invention of Wings comes “a tour de force of historical fiction” (Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain) that follows the epic journey of a slave-turned-Comanche warrior who travels from the brutality of a New Orleans sugar cane plantation to the indomitable frontier of an untamed Texas, searching not only for the woman he loves but so too for his own identity.

I have been to hangings before, but never my own.

Sitting in a jail cell on the eve of his hanging, April 1, 1875, freedman Persimmon “Persy” Wilson wants nothing more than to leave some record of the truth—his truth. He may be guilty, but not of what he stands accused: the kidnapping and rape of his former master’s wife.

In 1860, Persy had been sold to Sweetmore, a Louisiana sugar plantation, alongside a striking, light-skinned house slave named Chloe. Their deep and instant connection fueled a love affair and inspired plans to escape their owner, Master Wilson, who claimed Chloe as his concubine. But on the eve of the Union Army’s attack on New Orleans, Wilson shot Persy, leaving him for dead, and fled with Chloe and his other slaves to Texas. So began Persy’s journey across the frontier, determined to reunite with his lost love. Along the way, he would be captured by the Comanche, his only chance of survival to prove himself fierce and unbreakable enough to become a warrior. His odyssey of warfare, heartbreak, unlikely friendships, and newfound family would change the very core of his identity and teach him the meaning and the price of freedom.

Visit Nancy Peacock's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

The Page 69 Test: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Nina Sylvanus's "Patterns in Circulation"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa by Nina Sylvanus.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women—through the making and circulation of wax cloth—became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production.

Sylvanus brings wax cloth’s unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women’s identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics, and labor—it is a form of archive where intimate and national memories are stored, always ready to be reanimated by human touch. By uncovering this crucial aspect of West African material culture, she enriches our understanding of global trade, the mutual negotiations that drive it, and the how these create different forms of agency and subjectivity.

Learn more about Patterns in Circulation at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Patterns in Circulation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Sixsmith's 6 best books

Martin Sixsmith is a former BBC foreign correspondent. His book The Lost Child Of Philomena Lee was made into the award winning film Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. Sixsmith's latest book is Ayesha's Gift: A Daughter's Search for the Truth About Her Father. One of the author's six best books, as shared at the Daily Express:

TOM JONES by Henry Fielding

A cracker of a book. I’m in awe of the way Fielding creates such a complex, tightly wrought plot. Tom is an orphan, which is the central mystery, and it follows his travels. It’s good rollicking fun.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Teresa Messineo reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Teresa Messineo, author of The Fire by Night: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

While attending language school in Tuscany last summer, I stumbled across The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in their tiny, English-language lending library and my life was forever changed. Written by the much lesser known sister Anne Bronte (using the male pseudonym of Acton Bell, thus retaining her initials), this book was revolutionary and 100, 150 years before its time. After years of manipulation and misuse, a free-thinking woman escapes from her villainous husband, with her young son in tow. Instead of focusing solely upon this abusive relationship (as other novels from this time period would have done), and far from praising the long-suffering female archetype for remaining in bondage, Wildfell Hall is unique in that it opens ‘after the fact.’ The woman has already escaped, and we know nothing of the mysterious new tenant, Helen Graham, other than that she has moved into a provincial neighborhood and prefers to keep to herself. Only later in the novel - after the townspeople have accepted, rejected, befriended, fallen in love with and ultimately ostracized Helen for refusing to divulge her secrets or her reasons for remaining aloof - do we finally...[read on]

About The Fire by Night, from the publisher:

A powerful and evocative debut novel about two American military nurses during World War II that illuminates the unsung heroism of women who risked their lives in the fight—a riveting saga of friendship, valor, sacrifice, and survival combining the grit and selflessness of Band of Brothers with the emotional resonance of The Nightingale.

In war-torn France, Jo McMahon, an Italian-Irish girl from the tenements of Brooklyn, tends to six seriously wounded soldiers in a makeshift medical unit. Enemy bombs have destroyed her hospital convoy, and now Jo singlehandedly struggles to keep her patients and herself alive in a cramped and freezing tent close to German troops. There is a growing tenderness between her and one of her patients, a Scottish officer, but Jo’s heart is seared by the pain of all she has lost and seen. Nearing her breaking point, she fights to hold on to joyful memories of the past, to the times she shared with her best friend, Kay, whom she met in nursing school.

Half a world away in the Pacific, Kay is trapped in a squalid Japanese POW camp in Manila, one of thousands of Allied men, women, and children whose fates rest in the hands of a sadistic enemy. Far from the familiar safety of the small Pennsylvania coal town of her childhood, Kay clings to memories of her happy days posted in Hawaii, and the handsome flyer who swept her off her feet in the weeks before Pearl Harbor. Surrounded by cruelty and death, Kay battles to maintain her sanity and save lives as best she can . . . and live to see her beloved friend Jo once more.

When the conflict at last comes to an end, Jo and Kay discover that to achieve their own peace, they must find their place—and the hope of love—in a world that’s forever changed. With rich, superbly researched detail, Teresa Messineo’s thrilling novel brings to life the pain and uncertainty of war and the sustaining power of love and friendship, and illuminates the lives of the women who risked everything to save others during a horrifying time.

Follow Teresa Messineo on Facebook.

My Book, The Movie: The Fire by Night.

The Page 69 Test: The Fire by Night.

Writers Read: Teresa Messineo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lydia Reeder's "Dust Bowl Girls," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory by Lydia Reeder.

The entry begins:

Dust Bowl Girls is an epic sports story about a struggling women’s college basketball team called the Oklahoma Presbyterian College Cardinals. In the fall of 1931, they unexpectedly start winning game after game, and against all odds, become inspirational heroes. Their tough, visionary coach, Sam Babb, was my great uncle. Since it's about real people, I didn't write it with any actors in mind. But many times after I have described the book, those listening comment that it would make a great movie. It’s Hoosiers and A League of Their Own rolled into one.

My great Uncle Sam, the coach, was my grandmother’s favorite brother. He died long before I was born, but his charisma had left a strong impression on those who had known him. Both my grandmother, her sister, and other relatives said that Sam reminded them of Spencer Tracy, especially his Academy Award winning performance as Father Flanagan in Boys Town. Like Flanagan, Sam was always looking out for the underdog.

Dust Bowl Girls is very cinematic. The team of teenage farm girls, all expert athletes, traveled across country in a creaky, old crank-start bus competing against other women’s teams. Their fiercest opponent was the famous athlete Babe Didrikson, who played for the national champion Dallas Golden Cyclones. The fabulous Lori...[read on]

Visit Lydia Reeder's website.

My Book, The Movie: Dust Bowl Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six great novels you can read in one day

At the B&N Reads blog Jeff Somers tagged six great novels you can read in one day. One title on the list:

To Get Into a Speculative Mindframe: The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Time to Read: About three hours.

If you’re looking for mind-blowing speculative fiction, Le Guin’s classic is the ideal way to challenge yourself. How she managed to come up with something as intriguing and mind-expanding as this story of a man who discovers that his dreams can alter reality, and do it in less than 200 pages, is anyone’s guess. To say the story doesn’t go anywhere near what you might expect is an understatement, to say the least.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Lathe of Heaven is among Ellen Wehle's five can’t-miss classics of dystopian fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas Hrach's "The Riot Report and the News"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Riot Report and the News: How the Kerner Commission Changed Media Coverage of Black America by Thomas J. Hrach.

About the book, from the publisher:

On July 28, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of unrest in urban black communities during the 1960s. Chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr., the commission ominously warned, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” And it aimed its sharpest criticism at the mainstream media, concluding: “The press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective.” Major news media responded by expanding and diversifying their coverage of black communities and increasing the number of African Americans in their newsrooms.

Although much has been written about the Kerner Commission, the analysis has focused primarily on its affect on the American press. In The Riot Report and the News, Thomas J. Hrach instead explores how the commission came to its conclusions, in order to understand why and how its report served as a catalyst for change. Hrach finds that such government criticism of the media can have a long-term and positive influence on the nation, an insight that remains important as the news continues to struggle with how to cover issues of race.

Learn more about The Riot Report and the News at the University of Massachusetts Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Riot Report and the News.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Janie Chang reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Janie Chang, author of Dragon Springs Road: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

For the past couple of years I’ve read mostly non-fiction about China: memoirs, journals, biographies, academic papers, and studies. Now that my second novel is released and there’s a lull of a couple of weeks, I’m making a small dent in the TBR stack on my bookshelf. It must a backlash against all that non-fiction and history because the books I was in the mood to read had nothing to do with history or China.

Invisible Dead by Sam Wiebe. Full disclosure, Sam is a friend. But I only made friends with him after becoming a total fan-girl of his writing. Call the style Vancouver Noir. Like Wiebe’s debut, Last of the Independents, Invisible Dead is set in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada where there is (really is) a very high number of missing and murdered indigenous women whose cases remain unsolved. Through private investigator Dave Wakeland, we follow the 11-year old case of one Chelsea Loam. It’s a complex, clever story but what really gets me is...[read on]

About Dragon Springs Road, from the publisher:

That night I dreamed that I had wandered out to Dragon Springs Road all on my own, when a dreadful knowledge seized me that my mother had gone away never to return...

In 1908, Jialing is only seven years old when she finds herself abandoned in the courtyard of a once-lavish estate near Shanghai. Jialing is zazhong—Eurasian—and faces a lifetime of contempt from both Chinese and Europeans. Without her mother’s protection, she can survive only if the estate’s new owners, the Yang family, agree to take her in.

Jialing's allies are Anjuin, the eldest Yang daughter, and Fox, an animal spirit who has lived in the haunted courtyard for centuries. But Jialing’s life as the Yangs’ bondservant changes unexpectedly when she befriends a young English girl who then mysteriously vanishes.

Always hopeful of reuniting with her long-lost mother, Jialing grows into womanhood during the tumultuous early years of the Chinese republic, guided by Fox and by her own strength of spirit, away from the shadows of her past. But then she is drawn into a murder at the periphery of political intrigue, a relationship that jeopardizes her friendship with Anjuin and a forbidden affair that brings danger to the man she loves.

Learn more about the book and author at Janie Chang's website.

The Page 69 Test: Three Souls.

Writers Read: Janie Chang.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Elliot Ackerman's "Dark at the Crossing"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of the acclaimed Green on Blue, a timely new novel of stunning humanity and tension: a contemporary love story set on the Turkish border with Syria.

Haris Abadi is a man in search of a cause. An Arab American with a conflicted past, he is now in Turkey, attempting to cross into Syria and join the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But he is robbed before he can make it, and is taken in by Amir, a charismatic Syrian refugee and former revolutionary, and Amir’s wife, Daphne, a sophisticated beauty haunted by grief. As it becomes clear that Daphne is also desperate to return to Syria, Haris’s choices become ever more wrenching: Whose side is he really on? Is he a true radical or simply an idealist? And will he be able to bring meaning to a life of increasing frustration and helplessness? Told with compassion and a deft hand, Dark at the Crossing is an exploration of loss, of second chances, and of why we choose to believe–a trenchantly observed novel of raw urgency and power.

Visit Elliot Ackerman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Green on Blue.

My Book, The Movie: Green on Blue.

My Book, The Movie: Dark at the Crossing.

The Page 69 Test: Dark at the Crossing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top authentic romances

Born in 1969 in the Aveyron region of southern France, Emmanuelle Pagano studied fine art and the aesthetics of cinema. She has written more than a dozen works of fiction, and in France is primarily published by P.O.L. She has won the EU Prize for Literature and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music. Her latest book is Trysting.

One of Pagano's top ten stories that give a genuine sense of how passion is lived and often lost in the real world, as shared at the Guardian:

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (translated by Joachim Neugroschel)

In search of beauty, an ageing writer falls in love with a teenage boy. As he tracks the boy’s movements through the streets of Venice, the writer is only extrapolating his artistic research. But his goal is as ineffable as it is ephemeral and only death will be there to greet him when he reaches it. When I read this beautiful text for the first time I too was a teenager, but the book’s spell remains just as powerful now.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew Lange's "Killing Others"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Killing Others: A Natural History of Ethnic Violence by Matthew Lange.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Killing Others, Matthew Lange explores why humans ruthlessly attack and kill people from other ethnic communities. Drawing on an array of cases from around the world and insight from a variety of disciplines, Lange provides a simple yet powerful explanation that pinpoints the influential role of modernity in the growing global prevalence of ethnic violence over the past two hundred years. He offers evidence that a modern ethnic mind-set is the ultimate and most influential cause of ethnic violence.

Throughout most of human history, people perceived and valued small sets of known acquaintances and did not identify with ethnicities. Through education, state policy, and other means, modernity ultimately created broad ethnic consciousnesses that led to emotional prejudice, whereby people focus negative emotions on entire ethnic categories, and ethnic obligation, which pushes people to attack Others for the sake of their ethnicity. Modern social transformations also provided a variety of organizational resources that put these motives into action, thereby allowing ethnic violence to emerge as a modern menace. Yet modernity takes many forms and is not constant, and past trends in ethnic violence are presently transforming. Over the past seventy years, the earliest modernizers have transformed from champions of ethnic violence into leaders of intercommunal peace, and Killing Others offers evidence that the emergence of robust rights-based democracy—in combination with effective states and economic development—weakened the motives and resources that commonly promote ethnic violence.

Learn more about Killing Others at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Killing Others.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Laurie Frankel reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is.

Her entry begins:

I read serially. Almost all novels. I finish one and start the next immediately. It is my greatest pleasure and has been since I learned to read in the first place.

Right now I am reading an advanced copy of the almost-out-but-not-yet new one from Lauren Grodstein called Our Short History. It’s heartbreaking and brilliant and hysterical, and I’m only on page 25. Her first novel, Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love, is one of my...[read on]

About This Is How It Always Is, from the publisher:

This is how a family keeps a secret…and how that secret ends up keeping them.

This is how a family lives happily ever after…until happily ever after becomes complicated.

This is how children change…and then change the world.

This is Claude. He’s five years old, the youngest of five brothers, and loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess.

When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl.

Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They’re just not sure they’re ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret. Until one day it explodes.

Laurie Frankel's This Is How It Always Is is a novel about revelations, transformations, fairy tales, and family. And it’s about the ways this is how it always is: Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again, parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts, children grow but not always according to plan. And families with secrets don’t get to keep them forever.

Learn more about the book and author at Laurie Frankel's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Laurie Frankel and Calli.

The Page 69 Test: The Atlas of Love.

My Book, The Movie: Goodbye for Now.

The Page 69 Test: Goodbye for Now.

My Book, The Movie: This Is How It Always Is.

The Page 69 Test: This Is How It Always Is.

Writers Read: Laurie Frankel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top western novels you may have never read

Andrew Hilleman was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1982. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English at Creighton University, in Omaha, and his M.F.A. in fiction from Northern Michigan University. He has been published by The Fiddlehead and was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award.

Hilleman's new novel is World, Chase Me Down.

At Publishers Weekly he tagged ten great western novels you've probably never read, including:

Deadwood by Pete Dexter

Forget the HBO show of the same name. No, really, forget it. I’ve tried to despite loving it, mainly because of the unfinished ending after it was cancelled following season three. This novel takes place in the same famous South Dakota town and features many of the same historical players including Wild Bill, Charlie Utter, and my personal favorite Calamity Jane. But that’s where the similarities stop. Dexter’s novel was published in 1986, so it’s got dibs anyway. Plus, it’s just a lot damn better and has an actual ending to boot! It’s also as bizarre as a Western novel gets. And that’s a good thing.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nancy Peacock’s "The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson by Nancy Peacock.

The entry begins:

When my first novel was published, I chose all the actors for a movie that never happened. Those actors have aged out ten-fold now. Because of that I have a little fear that choosing actors for a movie made out of my book just might be a bit of jinx. Because of that belief I am working with a counter jinx by putting age and gender off the table as I cast the story.

For the main character, Persimmon Wilson, a freed slave who rides with the Comanche in 1800s Texas, I’d love to see young Denzel Washington. He has a range of depth and emotion that makes me believe this part was made for his younger self.

For the role of Chloe, a much-abused, light-skinned house slave, whom Persy is in love with, and ultimately rescues I’d cast...[read on]

Visit Nancy Peacock's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

--Marshal Zeringue