Top ten books about postwar Britain

Orange Prize winning and Booker Prize shortlisted author Linda Grant's new novel is The Dark Circle. One of Grant's ten top books about postwar Britain, as shared at the Guardian:

The Virgin in the Garden by AS Byatt

The optimism about the new Elizabethan age – anticipated after the Queen was crowned in 1953 – is reflected in Byatt’s novel about a group of young people in Yorkshire putting on a pageant to commemorate the coming coronation. In another part of the landscape a new university is planned, part of the concrete and plate-glass expansion of higher education that would arrive in the 60s. Byatt would follow her characters through to late middle age in subsequent novels.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five sci-fi & fantasy books that treat mental illness with compassion

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Ardi Alspach tagged five works of speculative fiction that address mental illness with compassion, including:

Planetfall, Emma Newman

Emma Newman is known for her Split Worlds urban fantasy series, the first of which was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society’s Best Novel and Best Newcomer awards. She also hosts the Hugo-nominated podcast “Tea and Jeopardy.” Planetfall is her first science-fiction novel, and is absolutely stunning. Newman has been open about her own struggle with anxiety, and it clearly informed the direction of this novel, which follows a new colony of humans inhabiting a seemingly empty alien world. The setting is littered with the remnants of ancient alien architecture that prove key to solving the mystery surrounding the death of the colony’s founder and visionary, but the most fascinating element of the narrative is that we experience everything through the eyes of the deeply troubled Ren, who is coping successfully and not-so-successfully with isolationism, loss, and the burden of carrying secrets in a small, hermetically sealed society. When an impossible stranger enters their midst, the careful balance Ren has struck between herself and the other colonists is threatened. I hesitate to reveal more about the plot, as the shattering beauty of the book hinges so much on the journey of discovery for both the narrator and the reader. I’m very much looking forward to the companion volume, After Atlas, in November.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven underappreciated literary masterpieces

Kim Church's short stories and poetry have appeared in Shenandoah, Mississippi Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prime Number Magazine, the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has received fiction fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center.

Born and raised in Lexington, North Carolina, Church earned her B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her J.D. degree from UNC School of Law. She has taught writing workshops in a variety of settings, from college classrooms to death row. She lives with her husband, artist Anthony Ulinski, in Raleigh, where she divides her time between writing and law.

Church's first novel, Byrd, won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize and the Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal for Literary Fiction; was a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize and the Balcones Fiction Prize; and was longlisted for the SIBA Book Award and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction.

One title on the author's list of eleven underappreciated literary masterpieces, as shared at the Huffington Post:

The Brothers K by David James Duncan (1992)

A quintessentially American, gather-you-in-its-arms and-hold-you-close-to-its-big-beating-heart novel about the Chance family of Camas, Washington—a mill-working father trying to stage a return to minor league baseball, a mother distracted by religion, twin sisters conducting peculiar science experiments, and brothers divided by the Vietnam war. Everyone will love this book. Everyone will want to adopt this family.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marina Abramovic's six favorite books

Marina Abramovic's new memoir is Walk Through Walls. One of her six favorite books, as shared at The Week magazine:

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Kafka's unfinished novel features so many lives and so many different moments from the development of our society. Its lessons can be applied to the cultural and political moment we live in right now.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Castle is among Gabe Habash's top twelve books that end mid-sentence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five real disasters that writers have used to generate fantastical stories

Sam Reader is a writer and conventions editor for The Geek Initiative. He also writes literary criticism and reviews at strangelibrary.com. One of five alternate histories featuring actual natural disasters that he tagged at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:

The Black Plague, The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history that explores what would happen if the Black Plague really did wipe out most of Europe, instead of just laying waste to large swaths of the population. Without the European migration and progress, the Middle East and China emerge as the major superpowers in the world, with their philosophy and culture informing progress for years to come. Eventually, of course, this also erupts into massive war, as fewer world superpowers in no way mean fewer wars. Robinson keeps most of his fiction well within the plausible, though the novel does speculate on the afterlives of some of the characters, and takes minor liberties with tech advancement.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Twelve books that totally get female friendship

At Cosmopolitan Julie Buntin tagged twelve books that totally get female friendship, including:

Megan Abbott's Dare Me is the magnetic story of what happens to Addy and Beth's friendship when the cheerleading squad they're used to running gets a new coach. Abbott understands girls — she gets their sweetness, their complexity, and their ability to be completely vicious.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Dare Me is among L.S. Hilton's top ten female-fronted thrillers, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Anna Fitzpatrick's four top horror stories set in the real universe of girlhood and Adam Sternbergh's six notable crime novels that double as great literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that celebrate the joys of being alone

At B&N Reads Jenny Shank tagged seven books that celebrate the joys of solitude, including:

The Turquoise Ledge by Leslie Marmon Silko

In The Turquoise Ledge, Silko writes with love about her desert home near Tucson, where she lives in perfect solitude except for her pets and the desert creatures who visit her. She respects rattlesnakes, freeing them when they are trapped in her house. This book is a meandering narrative, part naturalist’s journal, part memoir. Silko writes about her Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, Mexican, and European heritage, and about an annoying neighbor she calls “machine man,” who uses construction vehicles to dislodge boulders from their desert surroundings in public land so he can use them on his private property. But much of the book details Silko’s joyous walks in nature, where she might spot a beautiful cloud and declare, “Ah what a beauty you are. Just look at you!”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books by indigenous authors

At LitHub, Emily Temple tagged ten top books by indigenous authors, including:

Louise Erdrich, The Round House

Erdrich has become a literary mainstay, though she’s probably still most famous for her debut novel Love Medicine. However, 2012’s The Round House—which won the National Book Award that year—is my favorite. It follows a teenage boy on a reservation in North Dakota who seeks revenge for the rape of his mother by a white man—a crime that seems will slip through the cracks of the complex Federal and tribal laws. Seriously unputdownable.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about women in the British empire

Stephen Taylor is a writer of biography, history and travel. He has an enduring connection with Africa, where he was born and which provided the setting for his first four book, but in recent years he has turned to people and events from the Georgian age. These themes come together in his latest book, the first comprehensive life of Lady Anne Barnard.

One of Taylor's ten top books about women in the British empire, as shared at the Guardian:

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

An Australian novel, born in the outback to a writer who was a teenager when she set down her dream of escaping Possum Gully for a more refined world. So she did, while retaining the independence an upbringing in the bush inspired: “To me,” she wrote (in 1895), “the Prince of Wales will be no more than a shearer, unless when I meet him he displays some personality apart from his princeship – otherwise he can go hang.”

Read about the other books on the list.

My Brilliant Career is among Cal Flyn's ten top books about the Australian bush.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven trippy works of metaphysical science fiction

Sam Reader is a writer and conventions editor for The Geek Initiative. He also writes literary criticism and reviews at strangelibrary.com. One of seven surreal works of metaphysical science fiction that he tagged at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:

Vicious, by V.E. Schwab

Vicious might seem like an outlier on a list full of bizarre, new-wave concepts, but Schwab’s novel of superheroes and villains is a strangely beautiful and yet horrifyingly brutal deconstruction of the mythological struggle between the forces of good and evil. In this world, two scientists, Victor and Eli, discover that a near-death experience will grant people superpowers. Ten years after an experiment gone wrong destroys their friendship and lands Victor in prison, he escapes to exact revenge on his former friend and research partner, even as Eli puts his own ambitious plans into action. While the novel certainly carries the signifiers of a classic tale of good and evil, Schwab adds a staggering complexity to her heroes and villains, while at the same time flipping the classic iconography of “light is good, dark is evil.” The result is a fascinating and heady noir where two flawed people try to out-gambit one another in the hopes of resolving their inner pain.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine radical books about motherhood

Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth (2015), The Book of Dahlia (2008), How This Night is Different (2006), and the editor of the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot (2010). At The Huffington Post she tagged nine radical books about motherhood, including:

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I first read Steinbeck in Mr. Bellon’s 11th grade AP English class. It was a joy unlike anything else I’d experienced (though that’s not saying much circa 11th grade). It awoke in me a new understanding of literature, history, nature, the scope of human experience. I felt, for the first time, plugged into something bigger than my sad-ass adolescent problems. When I think of Steinbeck I imagine sunlight, and see my seventeen-year-old self as a waterlogged plant. Rose of Sharon is pregnant with the only real hope in the novel, and when she gives birth at the end, it’s to a dead baby. I choke on the sorrow of it even still. And when they come upon the starving man, she offers him her full breasts, and he drinks, and is saved. I am now crying in a coffee shop.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Grapes of Wrath also appears on Susan Shillinglaw's list of the thirteen best John Steinbeck books, Jill Boyd's list of five of the worst fictional characters to invite to Thanksgiving, a list of three of Ali Khamenei's favorite novels, Segun Afolabi's top 10 list of "on the move" books, Mark O'Connell's list of the ten best songs based on books, John Kerry's list of five books on progressivism, Stephen King's five best list of books on globalization, John Mullan's list of ten of the best pieces of fruit in literature, and Honor Blackman's six best books list. It is one of Frederic Raphael's top ten talkative novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight stories of technology run amok

Jeff Somers is the author of the Avery Cates series, The Ustari Cycle, Lifers, and Chum (among many other books) and numerous short stories.

At the B&N Reads blog he tagged eight accounts of technology run amok, including:

Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut is a master at presenting horrific, dystopian, and disturbing premises with so much cranky humor, you almost forget how awful his imagined worlds were. In Player Piano, automation has made human labor in almost any form obsolete. While that sounds pretty good on a Monday morning when the alarm goes off, what it means in practice is billions of people all over the world living on welfare and bored out of their minds. In a world where self-driving trucks are delivering our beer, we’d all best start making plans for how to fill our spare time when all we have is spare time.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Player Piano is among Luke Rhinehart's five favorite sci-fi satires.

--Marshal Zeringue