Eight thrillers featuring Americans in Europe

Mark Pryor is the author of the Hugo Marston novels The Bookseller, The Crypt Thief, The Blood Promise, The Button Man, The Reluctant Matador, The Paris Librarian, The Sorbonne Affair, The Book Artist and the newly released The French Widow, as well as the novels Hollow Man and Dominic. He has also published the true-crime book As She Lay Sleeping. A native of Hertfordshire, England, he is an assistant district attorney in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children.

At CrimeReads, Pryor tagged eight "fish-out-of-water crime novels [that] drop their American protagonists across the ocean and into hot water," including:

The Expats, Chris Pavone
Setting: Luxembourg

A more modern novel, and this one set in a place not exactly known for thrills and spills: Luxembourg. In fact, I went there not long ago planning to set part of my newest Hugo Marston book there but found it to be so clean, so beautiful, so gosh darned nice that I couldn’t bring myself to sully the place with any murder or mayhem.

Pavone, on the other hand, does so and quite masterfully. His protagonist is an American woman called Kate Moore who is brought overseas by her husband—to lovely Luxembourg—only to find her life boring and unfulfilling. Which, you know, kind of tallies with my experience there. One big difference: I’m a mere writer and prosecutor, this woman used to be a CIA assassin. The book is packed with the contradictions of everyday life running into secrecy and danger. As Goodreads puts it: “a complex web of intrigue where no one is who they claim to be, and the most profound deceptions lurk beneath the most normal-looking of relationships; and a mind-boggling long-play con threatens her family, her marriage, and her life.”

And yes, it’s as good as that sounds.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Expats.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top verse novels

Sarah Crossan has lived in Dublin, London and New York, and now lives in Brighton. She graduated with a degree in philosophy and literature before training as an English and drama teacher at Cambridge University. Crossan has won many international awards for her verse novels, including the CILIP Carnegie Medal, the CBI Book of Year award and the CLiPPA Poetry Award.

Here Is the Beehive is her first novel for adults.

At the Guardian, Crossan tagged ten of her favorite verse novels, including:

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2018, this is a novel I read in one gulp, realising as I did that the verse form I had long used to write for children absolutely could work for adults. I then listened to the audiobook, and hearing the melody of the poet’s voice at work (though read by an actor) left me in awe. It is an overwhelming story, using dialogue to stunning effect, about Walker, a war veteran moving between New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, suffering from PTSD and unable to return to his home, and his lost love, in Nova Scotia. I refer to it when I want to remember how verse novels should be written and how much harder I need to be working.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thirty-three essential fiction titles by Iranian writers

The work of British-born, Iranian-American artist Niloufar Talebi appears in a variety of media, often inspired by Iranian culture while taking great leaps into Western art forms. The vision driving her work is to address the invisibility and erasure of non-dominant voices through projects of cultural translation. Foundational to her projects are literary texts that she authors, translates, curates, and remixes.

Niloufar is the author of Self-Portrait in Bloom (2019).

At Lit Hub she shared a list of 33 essential works of fiction by Iranian writers, including:

Dalia Sofer, Man of My Time
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Set in Iran and New York City, Man of My Time tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who after decades of ambivalent work as an interrogator with the Iranian regime, travels on a diplomatic mission to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father, whose dying wish was to be buried in Iran. This is a novel not only about family and memory but about the interdependence of captor and captive, of citizen and country. Sofer is also the author of Septembers of Shiraz, which was made into a major motion picture.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles to restore hope in humanity

Cathy Rentzenbrink was born in Cornwall, grew up in Yorkshire, lived in London for a couple of decades and has now returned to Cornwall. Her first book, The Last Act of Love, is about the life and death of her brother. Her second book is called A Manual for Heartache; it is a broader look at sorrow, anguish, despair, loss and how to try to live with the knowledge that the world can be a cruel place. Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books is Rentzenbrink's new book.

At the Guardian she tagged six books that confirm her faith in people. Three titles on the list:

I like reading about people who have witnessed the worst of humanity and found a way through. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl has kept me company through many a long night, and The Choice by Edith Eger, who survived Auschwitz and became a therapist, is generous and wise. Maya Angelou lights the way with grace. I love this from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: “She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.”

Read about the other books Rentzenbrink recommends.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven cult books that lost their cool

Hephzibah Anderson memoir Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year without Sex was published by Chatto & Windus in the UK, Penguin Viking in the US, and Editions Michel Lafon in France.

She is currently a columnist at Prospect magazine, feature writer for BBC Culture and Fiction Editor at the Mail on Sunday.

For BBC Culture she tagged eleven previously hip books that have not aged well, including:

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, 1952

Hemingway’s supposed masterpiece of a novella describes a luckless old fisherman who sets sail on a solo fishing expedition and finds himself in a three-day tussle with a gigantic marlin. Lacking the complex plots and satisfying character arcs of his better work, its wisdom includes pearls such as “pain does not matter to a man”. There are alternative readings of this text but so long as ‘Papa’s’ persona as a bullfighting brawler retains its power, it will remain a paean to faltering virility that’s likely to put readers off his entire oeuvre.

Read about the other entries on the list. 

The Old Man and the Sea is among Cynan's Jone's ten top books about the hostile ocean, Ross King's top ten books about old men, Jeff Somers's top ten books to read before traveling to Cuba, four books that changed Angelica Banks, Leo Benedictus's five best books for men who never read, Jung Chang's 6 favorite books, Kathryn Williams's thirteen best stories about pride, Scott Greenstone's twenty best books with fewer than 200 pages, Michael Palin's six favorite books, Robson Green's six best books, and Dave Boling's five best examples of how to structure a novel. N.M. Kelby has suggested that The Old Man and the Sea may be The Great Florida Novel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five fantasy novels featuring self-taught protagonists

At Tor.com James Davis Nicoll tagged five fantasy novels starring self-taught protagonists, including:

The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk (2020)

If she were a man, Beatrice Clayborn would be trained; she possesses strong natural skills and has the potential to be a great magus. But Beatrice is a woman and in Chasland she will be denied magic until she is past menopause. Even then, what magic she can learn will be strictly circumscribed.

Nevertheless, she persists. There are grimoires, by women for women. Beatrice finds one in a bookstore, a text that will teach her to “summon a greater spirit and propose the pact of the great bargain.” She is one purchase away from achieving her dream…except that Ysbeta Lavan beats Beatrice to the coveted tome.

Too bad for Ysbeta that she cannot read the text she just purchased. Beatrice can. Perhaps an alliance is in order…

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven satirical titles about social upheaval

Adam Wilson is the author of three books: the novels Sensation Machines (2020) and Flatescreen (2012), and the collection of short stories What's Important is Feeling (2014).

At Electric Lit he tagged seven "books that push us out of complacency and force us to stare at our ugliest selves," including:

Slumberland by Paul Beatty

Paul Beatty is best known for his Booker Prize-winning 2015 novel, The Sellout, and his cultishly admired 1996 debut, The Whiteboy Shuffle. Both are great, but so are Beatty’s other novels, Tuff and Slumberland. I’m especially fond of the latter. Set in Berlin just after the fall of the Wall, Slumberland chronicles the adventures of a “jukebox sommelier” in search of a lost avant-garde jazz musician. The novel opens with what is certainly the funniest riff on tanning salons ever put to print, and keeps moving with the speed and precision of a NASCAR racer navigating the Autobahn. Beatty’s prose is pyrotechnic, and the joke-to-page ratio is unprecedented, but Slumberland also offers profound insights on expat culture and the end of The Cold War.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten American masterpieces that are actually crime novels

Smith Henderson is the author of Fourth of July Creek and lives in California and Montana. Jon Marc Smith teaches English at Texas State University and lives in San Marcos, Texas. Make Them Cry is their first novel.

At CrimeReads, the authors tagged ten American masterpieces that are actually crime fiction, including:

These Women, by Ivy Pochoda

These Women is another book about misogynistic violence, this time centered on the strippers and prostitutes of Los Angeles. The genius of Pochoda’s book is how well it does away with the murderer—there is little in the way of a manhunt or clue-finding. Instead, the book draws its power and astonishing narrative momentum by focusing on the lived lives of the women killed, nearly killed, and troublingly proximate to this monster. No less riveting than a traditional serial killer story, what emerges from These Women is a more complex portrait of our relationship to horrific violence.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: These Women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about social media

Matthew Sperling's first novel, Astroturf, was published by riverrun in August 2018, and was longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019. His second novel, Viral, is out this month. His writing has also been published in 3:AM, Best British Short Stories 2015, The Guardian, The Junket, The Literateur, the New Statesman, The White Review, and elsewhere.

At the Guardian, Sperling tagged ten books that "trace the development of social media across the last decade, explore its effects in everyday life, and place it in its wider context. They share a sense of its enormous dynamism and power, as well as its vertiginous capacity for harm." One title on the list:

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

If [The Twittering Machine by Richard] Seymour doesn’t convince you to delete, Zuboff just might. Her study of how private experience has been colonised by data-harvesting tech firms (not just social media platforms but also Google), expropriating and monetising every aspect of our thoughts, choices and bodily lives, reveals how easily we as citizens have connived at the process.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about confinement and the need to escape

David Moloney worked in the Hillsborough County Department of Corrections, New Hampshire, from 2007 to 2011. He received a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he now teaches. He lives north of Boston with his family.

He is the author of the novel Barker House.

At Electric Lit, Moloney tagged seven "books that deal with confinement, but also the need to escape," including:

Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt

In a dual narrative set in different timelines, this novel follows Ruth as a young girl, and then older and mute as Aunt Ruth. Her confinement, in the beginning, is physical, trapped in upstate New York on The Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission. Most of the children have deformities, including Ruth, who has scar-like constellations on her face, which The Father wants, because damaged children are easily converted to his church. The Father once prepared for the Apocalypse, his go-to teaching to end each lesson, but now he doesn’t want to survive it at all.

Ruth and Nat channel the dead, and find themselves linked with a salesman, a Comet-sniffing cult, and each other. In the present, Aunt Ruth takes pregnant Cora on a journey through New York state, where, in the end, both timelines converge into a powerful climax. Mr. Splitfoot is a ghost story about motherhood, family, and faith.

Though, right now, we aren’t on a physical journey, we are traveling through something fantastically unique to our timeline and, like Cora, we will learn more about ourselves and our mission.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven medical thrillers set outside the emergency room

Joel Shulkin, MD, is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician and United States Air Force veteran with a master’s in public health. Having been lucky enough to be mentored by the legendary Michael Palmer, his short stories have appeared in various print and online journals, and he has won several national and local writing awards for fiction and poetry. He lives in Florida with his wife and twin daughters.

Shulkin's new medical thriller is Adverse Effects.

At CrimeReads he tagged seven medical thrillers that go beyond the emergency room, including:

Outbreak by Robin Cook

When asked to name a novel by Robin Cook, widely considered the founding father of medical thrillers, most think of his debut Coma. But I chose Outbreak, featuring a pediatrician turned CDC epidemiologist who investigates a devastating Ebola outbreak that may have been deliberate. While there are hundreds of books about plagues and epidemics—and likely many more to come after this year—this is a good example of a how a medical thriller doesn’t have to be only about solving a medical mystery or racing for a cure. The what is clear in this book. It’s the who and why that will leave you in a cold sweat.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books of autofiction

Nina Bouraoui was born in 1967 to a French mother and an Algerian father. She lived in Algiers until the age of fourteen before moving to France and becoming a writer. She is one of France's most renowned living novelists, and has won several prestigious literary prizes, including the Prix Emmanuel Robles, the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Renaudot, and she was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Her novel All Men Want to Know is translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.

Onbe title on her list of ten favorite books of autofiction ("It may not be the absolute truth the author is telling, but it is her truth as she lived and experienced it") as shared at the Guardian:

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Hervé Guibert, translated by Linda Coverdale

Guibert is the father of autofiction, the master of finding that perfect balance of truth and beauty. In this book, he tells the story of his illness, Aids, in the late 1980s. He tells of how life with the virus became an existential adventure, how it affected a generation, how it stole his friends and lovers, and how writing was for him a bulwark against death and destruction. It’s the story of an era, a turning point – when Aids transformed our relationship with desire and sexuality forever.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue