Six legal thrillers with powerful social messages

Chad Zunker studied journalism at the University of Texas, where he was also on the football team. He’s worked for some of the most powerful law firms in the country and invented baby products that are now sold all over the world. He has wanted to write full time since he took his first practice hit as a skinny freshman walk-on from a 6’5, 240 pound senior All-American safety — which crushed both him and his feeble NFL dreams.

Zunker is the author of the David Adams legal thriller, An Equal Justice, as well as The Tracker, Shadow Shepherd, and Hunt the Lion in his Sam Callahan series. He lives in Austin with his wife, Katie, and their three daughters.

At CrimeReads, Zunker tagged six legal thrillers with essential social messages, including:

A Gambler’s Jury by Victor Methos

Victor Methos loves writing thrillers about underdogs taking on powerful opposition. Our hero here is Attorney Dani Rollins, who represents Teddy Thorne, a mentally challenged teen accused of selling drugs. Dani feels like it’s an easy case to settle. But when prosecutors move for an adult felony conviction, she suspects that her client is being used as a pawn in a sinister game. Dani will stop at nothing to protect the innocent boy, including taking on guardianship of Teddy. At the book’s heart is an important message about how far we should go to defend and care for those with mental disabilities.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books of fiction about mathematics

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL, and grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. Writing has been her life-long passion, but as an undergraduate she indulged in a brief, one-sided affair with mathematics at the University of Chicago followed by a few years in Santa Monica working at a think tank by the sea.

Eventually she attended Cornell University for her MFA, and since then she and her books have been given shelter and encouragement from The MacDowell Colony, Jentel, Hedgebrook, SFAI, Camargo, The University of Leipzig, VCCA, UCross, Yaddo, Civitella Ranieri, The Jerome Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. Her brother, Heesoo Chung, has also given her a bed and fed her lots of ice cream at criticał times.

Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was a Granta New Voice, and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, which was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.

Chung's latest novel is The Tenth Muse.

At the Guardian, she tagged ten top books of fiction about mathematics, including:

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ivan’s love for the sticky leaves in spring, his longing for and subsequent rejection of harmony and forgiveness, since it demands he accept the suffering of children, have stayed with me, along with this passage tying those ideas to maths: “If God indeed created the Earth,” he says, “he created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind … Yet there have been geometricians and philosophers [who] even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on Earth, may meet somewhere in infinity.” The year I read this was the same year I learned about hyperbolic space, where – as it turns out – parallel lines can and do meet. I became a maths major: how could I resist?

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Brothers Karamazov made Neil Griffiths's top ten list of novels about God, Becky Ferreira's list of the eight best siblings in literature, Alexandra Silverman's list of four famous writers who spent time in jail, Paul Murray's top ten list of wicked priests in fiction, James Runcie's top ten list of books about brothers, and is one of the top ten works of literature according to Norman Mailer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the best books on the biggest days in sports

Nicholas Wroe is a writer and editor on the Guardian Review.

He tagged six sporting landmarks in literature, including:

There are few one-off sporting events that command more global attention than the Olympic 100m final. But what are the consequences of such intense focus? Richard Moore’s The Dirtiest Race in History is an enthralling investigation of the 1988 men’s final in Seoul, which apparently saw a remarkable world record set by Ben Johnson. However, within 48 hours the sense of wonder had soured as Johnson failed a drugs test, and in the years following, only two of the eight competitors were not associated with doping. A dark reminder that when the stakes are at their highest, sport is not always just a game.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top fantasy books with artists in them

Maggie Stiefvater's new novel is Call Down the Hawk.

At Tor.com, she tagged five fantasy books about artists and the magic of creativity, including:

Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander

This is book four in Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain Books, a high fantasy middle grade series about an assistant pig keeper becoming a hero, for better or for worse. The first three books of the series are traditional adventure tales, but in this one, instead of facing up great battles and comedic banter, Taran instead looks for his origins, hoping to find that he has worthy and noble lineage. When I first read this one as a child, I found it the most dull—why did I have to read about Taran apprenticing with various craftsmen and artists while sulking that he was probably unworthy for a princess? When I reread it as a teen, I loved it the best of all of them. Taran takes away a lesson from every artist and artisan and warrior he meets, and the hero he is in book five is because of the student he was in book four.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about the modern problems of supernatural beings

Meghan Tifft teaches English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She is the author of The Long Fire and From Hell to Breakfast.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "stories about the modern problems of supernatural beings," including:

Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter

This novel about a 19th century aerialiste extraordinaire is fanciful and flamboyant in its attentions to Sophie Fevvers, the part woman-part swan who runs the show of this book. Or so she claims. She’s a self-cultivated spectacle, glitzy and lurid and flaunting an air of greasy hoax, and she wields a raunchy feminine virility that wins everybody’s adulation. For all her audacity, Fevvers is sly and calculating, as she must be, for she exists in a man’s world and must fly torpidly into the swarm. While we cling to her migrations across London with the circus, through St. Petersberg, and into the wilds of Siberia, we experience her great soaring escape, which is always a woman’s dubious triumph, and especially at the end of a restless century—as if it is the natural order of things to slip from gaudy spectacle to the strange tribulations of the unmade self, and finally go out on the truancy of real myth.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the most genuinely terrifying novels

Michael J. Seidlinger is a Filipino American author of My Pet Serial Killer, Dreams of Being, The Fun We’ve Had, and nine other books.

At CrimeReads he tagged eight of the most genuinely terrifying novels ever written, including:

Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson has been a master of horror for quite some time now. With multiple collections and novels that track an impressive range, including the cult classics, Altmann’s Tongue and Last Days, his latest collection is, quite simply, a masterclass in horror. From the first story alone, which (no spoilers) consists of a faceless teenage girl and the terror that permeates the people that know her, Evenson sets the tone for a varied and versatile collection of scares. This is the best primer for scaring yourself to the brink. And it’s so, so good.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stanley Fish's six essential reads

Stanley Fish is a prominent literary theorist and legal scholar whose books include How to Write a Sentence and How Milton Works. His latest book is The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump.

At The Week magazine, Fish shared a list of six essential reads, including:

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915).

A story that's chock-full of monstrous betrayals is narrated by a participant who understands nothing of what has happened. "Empty" is too full a word for him. The maintenance of this personhood-free persona is extraordinary and unmatched in any novel I know.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Good Soldier also appears on Carrie V Mullins's list of eleven of the least reliable narrators in literature, Piers Paul Read's top ten list of novels about unfaithful wives, Jean Hanff Korelitz's top six list of her favorite books about failed marriages, Penelope Lively's six favorite books list, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best spas in literature, ten of the best failed couplings in literature, and ten great novels with terrible original titles, and on the Guardian's list of ten of the best unconsummated passions in fiction and Adam Haslett's list of the five best novelists on grief. One line from the novel appears among Stanley Fish's top five sentences.

The Page 99 Test: The Good Soldier.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top works of fiction about climate disaster

Julie Carrick Dalton's debut novel, Waiting for the Night Song, is forthcoming from Forge (Macmillan) in January 2021, and her second novel, The Last Beekeeper, will follow a year later. She says if you enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing or Barbara Kingsolver novels, her books are for you.

At Electric Lit she recommended ten books "that can motivate policymakers—and voters—by making the disastrous future feel present and real," including:

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

By the end of the first chapter, you will be thirsty. Let the thirst sink in as you enter a future where the American Southwest has dried up, and people routinely drink their own filtered urine to avoid wasting water. Racism and anti-immigrant sentiments are on full display in The Water Knife. Economic inequality manifests in compounds that rise up with lush green vegetation and abundant water—but only if you can buy your way in. Characters jostle for control of water rights along the Colorado River and a mysterious ancient deed could change everything. As the mystery of the deed unfolds, and characters battle over water, we are reminded they are doing so on stolen land. Feeling uncomfortable yet? Good. Sit with the discomfort and ask who in this country, on this planet, is experiencing this reality.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Water Knife is among Jeff Somers's six top sci-fi books about the changing climate.

--Marshal Zeringue

The eight best tales of endurance

Emily Chappell worked as a cycle courier in London for many years, telling her story in What Goes Around. Since then she has explored the world on her bike and committed to supporting others to do the same, as a founder of The Adventure Syndicate.

Her new book is Where There's A Will: Hope, Grief and Endurance in a Cycle Race Across a Continent.

At the Guardian, Chappell tagged the eight best stories of survival, including:

Failure was at the heart of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to Antarctica, his ship Endurance crushed by pack ice. The journey, as recounted in his book South, was remarkable not only because the entire 28-man crew survived their estrangement from the world for 22 months, but also for the relative good humour Shackleton reports.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best debut novels of the decade

Emily Temple is a senior editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, will be published by William Morrow in 2020.

Temple and the Literary Hub staff picked the ten best debut novels of the decade. One title on the list:

Nicole Dennis-Benn, Here Comes the Sun (2016)

There’s no shortage of brilliant, hilarious, incisive Jamaican novels—to say nothing of the Caribbean as a whole. Caribbean literature is sometimes reduced by American critics and book blurbs to Jamaica—and this reflects, too, the way that many Americans tell me they’ve never heard of my island, Dominica, and if they know anywhere at all, it is probably Jamaica. (Ironically, it’s not Puerto Rico, which actually is an American territory.) Still, our literature would be very different without Jamaican fiction and poetry, and the Jamaican novel, in particular, like the Trinidadian novel, is critical to understanding our region’s artistic, social, and political conditions. Writing a memorable, meaningful novel is one thing; writing a memorable, meaningful debut is another, and Nicole Dennis-Benn managed to do both with her debut, Here Comes the Sun. Her novel is wide-ranging, telling a tale that examines colorism, homophobia, social mobility, women’s bodies, and the debilitating overreach of tourism, all while delivering a gripping story in softly luminous prose. I was excited to read it when I heard that it was coming out, particularly as Dennis-Benn has written movingly about many of these themes before in her essays, and her novel has stuck with me since then as a beautiful addition to the Jamaican canon of literature. In some ways, it’s conventional, particularly when set against the stylistic and representational subversiveness of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, published two years earlier, but Dennis-Benn’s novel is subversive in its own ways, joining a long history of talking about queerness in the Caribbean and its diaspora that includes Bernadine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman, novels by Shani Mootoo, and more, and I especially appreciated that we have queer women here experiencing love and loss. And the setting of a Jamaica being overtaken by tourism is important; it echoes the warnings and plaints of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and the many writers who have reflected on the danger of the commercialization of the islands at the expense of their inhabitants. Here Comes the Sun is a debut that stuck with me, and will be with me, I suspect, for a long time. –Gabrielle Bellot, Staff Writer

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine mind-bending books about parallel universes

At Electric Lit, intern McKayla Coyle tagged nine mind-bending novels about parallel universes, including:

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade is the nickname for shell-shocked soldiers of the war with Mars. But what’s actually happening to these soldiers? When Dietz joins the war and begins to experience lapses in reality—memories that don’t line up with the platoon’s, orders that lead to nothing—the new recruit is forced to wonder what this war is really about.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best memoirs of the decade

Emily Temple is a senior editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, will be published by William Morrow in 2020.

Temple and the Literary Hub staff picked the ten best memoirs of the decade. One title on the list:

Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House (2019)

Before I picked it up, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House was intriguing to me precisely because it blends memoir with so many other forms. In her review of the books, Angela Flournoy describes it as “part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life.”

The oral history component is drawn from Broom’s interviews with her mother and her 12 siblings about their lives in New Orleans East, an area of the city once vaunted as “a ‘new frontier,’ ripe for development,” which by the time Broom was coming of age there had been largely abandoned by the city. Her brothers and mother tell their stories of Katrina, “the Water,” which Broom experienced from New York, in one of the most wrenching sections of the book. The hurricane destroys the titular Yellow House and scatters the Broom family across the country. Broom herself lives for some months in Burundi before returning to New Orleans to work as a speechwriter for the mayor, then back to New York, then to New Orleans once more.

Broom is a master of sentences, but she also knows precisely when to hand over the floor. The result is a gorgeous pastiche of histories that is at once deeply personal and incredibly wide-ranging. Home—both the physical and the intangible sorts—are at the center of the story. The question of who gets to have a home in America, in the face of vast income inequality, institutional racism, and climate change, is ever-present. In his review, Dwight Garner predicts that The Yellow House “will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade.” I couldn’t agree more. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue