Eight new titles about trailblazing women

At Publishers Weekly the staff shared a list of eight new books about trailblazing women, including:

A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon

Historian Southon (A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) surveys 1,100 years of Roman history in this expert and wittily conversational narrative. By profiling 21 relatively unknown women, Southon presents a “whole new history” that is “closer to the version the Romans told themselves.” Skillfully parsing sometimes limited and biased sources, Southon depicts her subjects as complex human beings. Hersilia, a Sabine woman kidnapped by the Romans (c. 750 BCE) who became Romulus’s wife, is the first woman to appear by name in a Roman text. She may have prevented a full-scale war between the Romans and Sabines when she spoke publicly about how she and the other kidnapped Sabine women had adjusted to their new lives, which bound the two groups into a familial relationship. Julia Felix, who probably died in the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption in Pompeii, made money as a property owner, demonstrating the possibilities of independence for adult, single, middle-class women of the Roman empire. Claudia Severa’s affectionate letters to Sulpicia Lepidina in 100 CE show life in a Roman military outpost in northern England as more social and familial than depicted in male-centered histories and provide a window into female friendships. Southon’s crisp characterizations, snappy assessments of existing histories, and breezy narrative style will enchant fans of ancient history and women’s history. It’s a delight.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top thrillers featuring the dead/surviving girl trope

Emily Smith is a New Jersey native, who pursued her BFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU and her MFA in Creative Writing at American University.

In her spare time, she enjoys writing novels, gardening, reading, and caring for her rambunctious Greater Swiss Mountain Dog.

Smith's new novel is You Always Come Back.

At CrimeReads she tagged five top thrillers featuring the dead girl and the survivor trope. One title on the list:

Jar of Hearts, by Jennifer Hillier

Jar of Hearts in many ways takes the dead girl and the survivor trope and flips it on its head.

No one was more broken hearted when sixteen-year-old Angela Wong was murdered than her two best friends Georgina Shaw and Kaiser Brody.

Now, fourteen years later, Kaiser is a Seattle PD detective and is the one who has to investigate Angela’s murder when her body is discovered. She is one of many victims of serial killer Calvin James. The twist – Calvin was Georgina’s high school sweetheart and when caught, provides evidence that Georgina helped cover up Angela’s murder.

So begins the twisty tale of whether Georgina was another one of Calvin’s victims or the murderer herself. For those who love an unreliable narrator, full of moral ambiguity, Georgina as the survivor is one you won’t want to miss.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Jar of Hearts is among B. R. Myers's top ten quietly effective suspense novels and Alice Blanchard's ten chilling thrillers to get you through the winter storms.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top books about modern witches

Diana Helmuth writes about urges: to travel, to be in nature, and to feel understood. Her first book, How to Suffer Outside, was a National Outdoor Book Award winner, and her freelance work can be found in various anthologies, travel guides, and humor magazines. She studied anthropology and Arabic at UC Berkeley, and can often be caught moonlighting in Silicon Valley’s start-up land, or producing the occasional podcast. She was born and raised in Northern California.

Helmuth's new book is The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft.

At LitHub she tagged seven notable books on modern witchcraft, including:

Lorraine Monteagut, Brujas: The Power and Magic of Witches of Color

For years, the Witchcraft landscape in the United States was dominated by Wicca and European-sourced magic (at least, that’s what was being written about). Monteagut’s book is a fresh and welcome overview of the burgeoning Brujeria movement in the United States. She offers us interviews and stories from the scene’s movers and shakers: their dreams, their problems, their opinions, what got them to where they are now.

At the same the book acts as a potent, page-turning memoir, where Monteagut dives deep into her own complicated relationships with her ancestors, internal racial tensions, and what it means to be a Witch and an immigrant on colonized land. In a world of shadow work journals, this book is a flashlight for when you get stuck in the dark. It is deeply scholastic and painstakingly researched but remains unwaveringly compassionate and accessible to the average reader. I’m pretty sure I cried at least four times. Whether you are a Witch of color, or not, this book is a life-changing read.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven essential hip-hop books

At Vulture.com Paul Thompson tagged eleven "books on hip-hop that are essential for any fan of the genre, though many of them are just as gripping for someone who couldn’t pick Puff out of a lineup." One title on the list:

The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnas (2011)

In many ways, the emotional core of The Big Payback, Dan Charnas’s exhaustive history of how hip-hop became a billion-dollar industry, is the story of a corporate failure: that of Macola Records, a comparatively tiny vinyl-pressing plant in Los Angeles that issued the debuts of many of that city’s formative rap stars. While the agreements for these pressings promised Macola a share of the profits, they were all done over handshakes; when the real money came knocking, Macola and its founder, Don McMillan, were cut out entirely. Across the rest of the book, no other executives — mostly stemming from the Def Jam family tree — would be so naïve. Charnas, who last year published Dilla Time, a biography of the late J Dilla, draws on his experience as a writer for The Source and employee at Profile Records and Rick Rubin’s American Recordings to render the often ugly truth about the parts of the rap business that never make it onto wax.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles that explore the drawbacks of a superpowered life

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory and the novel Reel.

At Tor.com he writes:

operating as a superhero or supervillain would, in fact, be incredibly hard. Some of that has to do with the logistics of, say, maintaining a secret identity or operating a mysterious island base. And some involve the challenges of living in harsher world than the shared universes depicted in comics from Marvel and DC.

Carroll tagged five "very different books that might make you reconsider the whole 'power fantasy' aspects of superheroing or supervillainy." One title on the list:

The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

Samantha Hunt has been drawn to characters with supernatural talents—or the possibility of them–throughout her career. The protagonist of The Seas is a young woman who may or may not be a mermaid; characters in the book Mr. Splitfoot converse with the dead. Hunt’s fiction juxtaposes the miraculous with the quotidian, and the collection The Dark Dark features a story that neatly encapsulates this, titled “Beast.”

This story’s protagonist develops an intriguing ability: at night, she transforms into a deer. There are some challenges to this, including the fact that she’s indoors when she does so, making getting outside virtually impossible. It’s a metaphorically rich moment, but it’s also a fascinating juxtaposition of the supernatural and the mundane.

Read about the other entries on the list at Tor.com.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top mystery novels set in academe

Stephanie Barron is a graduate of Princeton and Stanford Universities, where she studied history. A former intelligence analyst at the CIA, she is the author of thirty novels, including the critically acclaimed Merry Folger series, which she writes under the name Francine Mathews.

Barron's latest novel is Jane and the Final Mystery.

At CrimeReads she tagged seven favorite mystery novels set in academe, including:

The Lying Game, by Ruth Ware

Four girls tied by schoolgirl murder are also the center of this beautifully-written book, but with an important difference from French’s novel: these girls have grown up, and the violence in their pasts threatens the lives each of them has managed to live in its shadow. The discovery of human remains in the liminal ground between fields and marsh surrounding their old boarding school—a nostalgic place Ware allows us to experience through the girls’ eyes in this dual-timeline novel–causes one of them to summon the others to her home, a deteriorating mill formerly owned by her artist father/school instructor. Her friends rush to support her, ostensibly to attend their school reunion, but in truth to lay the unquiet ghosts of their conflicted pasts. Memory, with its mutable face, is perhaps the strongest character in this world half-sinking into water; it flickers and distorts, betrays and unites, and stridently demands the truth.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Lying Game is among Kathleen Barber's ten unputdownable suspense novels, thrillers, & other creepy books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five scary books to read this Halloween

In 2014 Liz Egan shared for Glamour five scary books to read for Halloween, including:

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood

This is the most uplifting of the bunch, which is saying something since it takes place in a grim dystopia. Maddadam is the conclusion of the trilogy that began with Oryx & Crake and continued with The Year of the Flood. It opens months after a man-made pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. Among the survivors are Toby and Zeb, who become leaders and defenders of their new community, which is strong on scrappiness and cynicism (understandably) but also has an inspiring capacity for self-sacrifice. Atwood's head-spinning survival story consists of equal parts war, adventure, and romance.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight queer historical fiction titles set around the world

Allison Epstein earned her MFA in fiction from Northwestern University and a BA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A Michigan native, she now lives in Chicago, where she works as an editor. When not writing, she enjoys good theater, bad puns, and fancy jackets.

She is the author of historical novels including A Tip for the Hangman, the newly released Let the Dead Bury the Dead, and the forthcoming Our Rotten Hearts.

[My Book, The Movie: A Tip for the Hangman; The Page 69 Test: A Tip for the Hangman; Q&A with Allison Epstein; My Book, The Movie: Let the Dead Bury the Dead; The Page 69 Test: Let the Dead Bury the Dead; Writers Read: Allison Epstein]

At ElectricLit Epstein tagged eight books that "aren’t just gripping historical page-turners, although they’re definitely that. They’re also reminders that every corner of history is queerer than we were taught." One title on the list:

Russia: The Huntress by Kate Quinn

The Huntress follows the fearless WWII fighter pilot Nina Markova as she fights the Nazis as part of the Soviet Union’s all-female bomber regiment, the Night Witches. After the war, Nina joins forces with a British war correspondent to track down the Huntress, a notorious Nazi who may be hiding in the most unexpected of places.

All this is already catnip to a huge swathe of historical fiction readers: women pilots! Nazi hunting! A dual-timeline mystery! But what if I told you it’s also gay? Nina’s relationship with her fellow Night Witch Yelena gives the book some of its tenderest moments, and it’s a joy to see Nina’s foul-mouthed, chaotic personality shift in these romantic interludes.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Huntress.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books about women working together

Sarah Davis-Goff was born and raised in Dublin. Her writing has been published in The Irish Times, The Guardian, and LitHub.

Silent City is her second novel.

At CrimeReads Davis-Goff tagged six books about women working together, including:

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

A group of Mennonite women living in rural Bolivia realize that some of them have been having the same bad dream and then waking up stiff, sore, sometimes bleeding. They then realize they haven’t been dreaming at all; in fact they and some of the children are being attacked at night, drugged and raped by some of the men living in their community. When it becomes clear that the perpetrator’s lives are in danger, only then do the other men act to ensure their safety by allowing the rapists to be arrested and brought away.

The women have a limited time to decide what to do before the men are brought home on bail; should they stay and fight, or try to leave? What do they owe the community, their faith, their children and their souls?

Read about the other entries on the list.

Women Talking is among Amanda Montei's seven novels that explore consent and coercion and Anjanette Delgado's seven books for when your life has radically changed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top comic novels

Monica Heisey is a comedian and writer from Toronto. She has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, The Guardian, Glamour, New York magazine, VICE, and more. She won four Canadian Screen Awards for her work on Baroness von Sketch Show, and has written on shows like Schitt’s Creek, and Workin’ Moms, among others.

Her debut novel, Really Good, Actually, was published around the world in January 2023, and is currently in development for television.

At the Waterstones blog Heisey tagged six favorite comic novels, including:

Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

What’s not to love about a disaster novel loosely based on the messiest period of a charismatic young woman’s life? Ahem. Carrie Fisher is best known for her acting career, most notably for playing Princess Leia, but to me she will always be an incredible writer first, Marie from When Harry Met Sally second, and a space princess on the big slug’s leash third. This novel, her first, has everything: thinly disguised Hollywood gossip, a stylish lead character on the verge of nervous breakdown, and really solid one liners.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 spookiest haunted house novels

Lisa Zhuang is an intern at Electric Literature. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Emory University and currently resides in mid-Missouri.

At Electric Lit she tagged ten of the creepiest haunted house novels, including:

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

An homage to Henry James’ 1898 The Turn of the Screw, Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key kicks off with a nanny’s letter from prison arguing her innocence in a child’s death. It all begins when said nanny signs up for a too-good-to-be-true job at refurbished Victorian smart home, where she gets paid an excessive salary for taking care of three seemingly angelic children and a baby. However, as the days wear on, the smart home begins acting up, playing music at odd hours of the night, and the children—particularly trouble child Maddie—prove to have disturbing agendas of their own. Though modern in setting, the novel’s gothic heritage evokes a familiar spook, complete with creaky floorboards, poisonous gardens, and creepy children that earn it a spot on our top ten list.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Turn of the Key is among Jason Rekulak's six creepy novels involving childcare.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six thrilling reads that blend folklore & horror

Allison Epstein earned her MFA in fiction from Northwestern University and a BA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A Michigan native, she now lives in Chicago, where she works as an editor. When not writing, she enjoys good theater, bad puns, and fancy jackets.

She is the author of historical novels including A Tip for the Hangman, the newly released Let the Dead Bury the Dead, and the forthcoming Our Rotten Hearts.

[My Book, The Movie: A Tip for the Hangman; The Page 69 Test: A Tip for the Hangman; Q&A with Allison Epstein; My Book, The Movie: Let the Dead Bury the Dead; The Page 69 Test: Let the Dead Bury the Dead; Writers Read: Allison Epstein]

At CrimeReads Epstein tagged six of her "favorite books that delve deep into folklore for their twists and turns, with truly terrifying results." One title on the list:

The Witch of Tin Mountain, by Paulette Kennedy

This dual-timeline historical thriller features one of my favorite horror tropes: the rural town has a suave new preacher, and the narrator does not trust him. The book opens in 1931 with Gracelynn Doherty, a woman who provides healing magic and small spells to her Depression-era Arkansas town. But the arrival of the new preacher sends Gracelynn’s grandmother into terror-stricken illness. Because Granny has seen this smooth-talking holy man before, and surely he should have aged by now… Haunting, atmospheric, and fast-paced, this is ideal October reading.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue