Five of the best titles about literary threesomes

Costanza Casati was born in Texas in 1995 and grew up in a village in Northern Italy, where she studied Ancient Greek, and Ancient Greek literature, under one of the country’s most rigorous academic programmes. She is a graduate of the prestigious Warwick Writing MA in the UK, and worked as a screenwriter and journalist.

Clytemnestra is her debut novel. It has sold into 18 territories worldwide, is a Saturday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Award.

Casati's new novel is Babylonia.

At the Guardian she tagged "five novels featuring some of my favourite literary threesomes." One title on the list:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

In an alternate England where humans are cloned to become organ donors, Kathy H remembers her time at Hailsham boarding school, where she developed a close relationship with two other students: Ruth C and Tommy D. The novel is a heartbreaking exploration of lost chances in love, and how hard it is to let go of those we care for.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Sadi Muktadir's seven novels that give you hope before devastating you, Scott Alexander Howard's list of eight titles from across the world about isolation, Kat Sarfas's list of thirteen top dark academia titles, Raul Palma's list of seven stories about falling into debt, Akemi C. Brodsky's list of five academic novels that won’t make you want to return to school, Claire Fuller's list of seven top dystopian mysteries, Elizabeth Brooks's list of ten great novels with unreliable narrators, Lincoln Michel's top ten list of strange sci-fi dystopias, Amelia Morris's lits of ten of the most captivating fictional frenemies, Edward Ashton's eight titles about what it means to be human, Bethany Ball's list of the seven weirdest high schools in literature, Zak Salih's eight books about childhood pals—and the adults they become, Rachel Donohue's list of seven coming-of-age novels with elements of mystery or the supernatural, Chris Mooney's list of six top intelligent, page-turning, genre-bending classics, James Scudamore's top ten list of books about boarding school, Caroline Zancan's list of eight novels about students and teachers behaving badly, LitHub's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Meg Wolitzer's ten favorite books list, Jeff Somers's lists of nine science fiction novels that imagine the future of healthcare and "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill

Camille Bordas is a novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels in English, The Material (2024) and How to Behave in a Crowd (2017). Her earlier two books, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French.

Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

Bordas has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill, including:

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

This contemporary classic might not need introduction, but I’ll go for it anyway: narrated in turn by Sibylla and her young son Ludo (an absolute prodigy capable of reading ancient Greek and doing advanced calculus at age 5), it is perhaps the most fun novel ever written about the nature of intelligence. Sibylla is extremely smart herself, but can’t always keep up with her son, who’s constantly asking her to teach him something new. Yet her lessons are like magic tricks: when Sibylla teaches her son to read ancient Greek, we learn alongside him, and are entertained the whole way through. The book is smart and hilarious (Sibylla is very judgmental) without ever condescending to its reader. It assumes we are as smart as it is.

In its second half, Ludo goes on a quest to find a suitable father for himself, and the volume of lessons drops, but other types of learning come into play. Namely, he starts hearing a lot about games (chess, bridge), and there is this line that I find absolutely gorgeous in its simplicity when it comes to explaining what teaching is, and what its limits might be:

“When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rule to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you’d had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you’d have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.”

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top toxic-wellness fiction titles

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged seven top "toxic-wellness fiction [titles] to keep you glowing from the inside," including:

Natural Beauty: A Novel by Ling Ling Huang

A musician’s life takes a sharp, devastating turn that leads her to a sales representative job at a luxury beauty and wellness store. Enter the world of creams, lotions, potions and more in Natural Beauty, a story that examines the dark underbelly of what it means to be beautiful and the steep price of aesthetics.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Natural Beauty is among Olivie Blake's five top titles about regretting that cult you joined.

Also see Jamie Lee Sogn's eight top mysteries & thrillers set in the wellness industry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top novels of subtle espionage

Flynn Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of Under the Harrow, winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; A Double Life, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Northern Spy, a Reese’s Book Club pick that was named one of the ten best thrillers of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Northern Spy is being adapted for film by Netflix.

Berry's new novel is Trust Her.

At CrimeReads she tagged four

favorite novels about amateur spies. These characters go undercover, without extensive training, an extraction team, expensive equipment, or any idea of what damage might lie ahead.

One title on the list:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Two men sit over cups of tea in Old Anarkali, a district in Lahore. They are, seemingly, strangers. One has the “short-cropped” hair and broad chest “typical of a certain type of American; but then again, sportsmen and soldiers of all nationalities tend to look alike.” The other man, Changez, has returned to Pakistan after studying at Princeton and working as an analyst in New York. Is one of the men a spy, or both? If so, what might they do to each other? I started reading this absorbing, brilliant novel on a train, and then sat on a bench at my station, reading until the last page.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is among Abir Mukherjee's five top thrillers about terrorism, Ryan Lee Wong's ten best novels about Asian American politics, Maris Kreizman's top twenty-three short books, Colleen Kinder's ten books about chance encounters with strangers, Maris Kreizman's nineteen top short books and stories, Ian MacKenzie's ten top books about Americans abroad, Emily Temple's ten top contemporary novels by and about Muslims, Laila Lalami's eight top books about Muslim life for a nation that knows little about Islam, Porochista Khakpour's top ten novels about 9/11, Jimmy So's five best 9/11 novels, and Ahmede Hussain's five top books in recent South Asian literature.

The Page 69 Test: The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that unpack a complicated family inheritance

Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. She has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University.

Takacs's debut novel, Pearce Oysters, is a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Electric Lit Takacs tagged seven titles "about the ways our family leave their mark on us," including:

Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie

On the heels of a breakup, Kathleen Cheng leaves her psychology PhD program, moves back in with her mom, and takes a job as a professional cuddler. When Kathleen returns home, though, she finds her mother has emerged from a decades-long holding pattern of her own. Her mother transformed her life and is engaged to Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur. After years of grief, longing to return to China, and alcoholism, Kathleen’s mother is now sober, social climbing, and sporting athleisure wear. Kathleen’s cuddling gig begins as an ironic curiosity, but it has an apt emotional resonance in her life. Snuggling safely with strangers seems a natural tendency after a childhood spent caretaking for her mother. This novel delights with humor and heart as it parses the mother-daughter relationship in the run-up to the mother’s wedding day.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about Turkey

Sami Kent is a Turkish-British writer and radio producer based between London and Istanbul, and has reported on Turkey for The Guardian, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, From Our Own Correspondent, Al Jazeera, The London Review of Books, Vice and many others.

His new book is The Endless Country: A Personal Journey Through Turkey’s First Hundred Years.

At the Guardian Kent tagged "five of the best books to understand [Turkey]’s first 100 years." One title on the list:

Portrait of a Turkish Family by Irfan Orga

Reflecting on his childhood, Orga remembers eating melon, on ice, on a silver plate when he first heard the drums of war – those that announced, all over Istanbul, that the first world war had begun. For him and others in Turkey, nearly a decade of violence would follow. This memoir captures the founding years of the Turkish republic and the pain of those who lived through it, as Orga describes his wealthy Ottoman family’s descent into poverty and humiliation. It is intimately and beautifully written, though make sure to read the epilogue for the twist about who the author really was …

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top Neo-Westerns

Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans and raised in Pensacola, Florida. His first novel, The Blood of Heaven, was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and NPR. It was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Award for First Fiction. Wascom was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for Fiction and selected as one of Gambit‘s 40 Under 40. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he directs the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.

Wascom's new novel is The Great State of West Florida.

At Lit Hub he tagged five favorite Neo-Westerns, including:

Anna Burns, Little Constructions

“There are no differences between men and women. No differences. Except one. Men want to know what sort of gun it is. Women just want the gun.” So opens the funniest book I’ve read this side of Charles Portis’ Norwood or the stories of Helen DeWitt.

But Anna Burns’ second novel is also one of the nastiest, most upsetting revenge stories in contemporary fiction. And with its archetypal figures, themselves influenced by the depictions of the violent American West, and an iconoclastic spirit, this is a Neo-Western to me, even if it’s set in Ireland.

The Western revenge story, by rights, tends to build to a showdown, and from the moment Jetty Doe, scion of a criminal family, bursts into a local gunshop and carries off an AK-74, Little Constructions goes from one showdown to the next at furious speed, borne along by some of my favorite sentences anywhere. There are showdowns not only with the brutal men who’ve warped generations of a Northern Irish family, but with the past of the entire country and the nature of male violence.

More than anything, or at least most exciting to me, this book is a showdown with the English language itself. Burns builds rhythmic and rhetorical structures that sometimes puzzle before they explode into dazzling perfection. Character names repeat and refract until we have Does such as Johnjoe and JanineJoshuatine bouncing off the page.

I could see the latter move striking some readers as cute or ridiculous, but as a member of a formerly criminal family (though no way near as lousy as the Does) with six siblings all of whose first names start with the same letter, my credulity remained unstrained.

I love Milkman, which won Anna Burns the acclaim she so rightfully deserves, but I adore Little Constructions. It’s hilarious, frequently horrifying, and utterly humiliates the very macho gun culture that the Western often embraces.

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top workplace thrillers

Mary Keliikoa is the author of Hidden Pieces, a Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Finalist and Ippy Silver Award Winning mystery, and Deadly Tides, the first two books in the Misty Pines Series featuring small-town Sheriff Jax Turner, and the Shamus Finalist and Lefty, Agatha & Anthony nominated PI Kelly Pruett mystery series.

Keliikoa's new book is Don't Ask, Don't Follow, is her first domestic suspense novel.

At CrimeReads she tagged eight novels "in an office and workplace setting that will have you side-eying your own colleagues," including:

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books so is thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. But when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, Nella is left in the dust. Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk telling her to leave. Now as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career. A smart and dynamic thriller, this one is not to be missed!

Read about the other books on the list.

The Other Black Girl is among Tania Malik's five unconventional office novels, Stephanie Feldman's seven novels featuring ambitious women, Caitlin Barasch’s seven novels set in the literary world, and Ashley Winstead's seven titles that explore collective guilt & individual complicity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about math

Matt Parker is a stand-up comedian and a YouTuber with over one hundred million views. He is the author of the international bestseller Humble Pi and Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension. Parker is also frequently seen, heard, and read on the Science Channel, on BBC radio, and in The Guardian, in that order. He has previously held world records for both the Rubik’s Cube and Space Invaders. In the pursuit of math, Parker has: flipped a coin 10,000 times, traveled to Antarctica, memorized π to hundreds of digits, and been bitten by a bullet ant in the Amazon rainforest. He has given math lectures at Cambridge University, Oxford University, Harvard University, and Lake Monger Primary School.

Parker's new book is Love Triangle: How Trigonometry Shapes the World.

At the Guardian he tagged five of the best books about maths (or math, as Americans call it). One title on the list:

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

The other side of the AI coin is big data. Caroline Criado Perez’s book is about two different modern aspects of data. Its primary thesis is that, much like algorithms, data sets are not some objective reservoir of potential insight but rather they can have massive oversights: notably in the case of women, half the population. Moreover Perez shows the power of data by backing up every step of her argument with facts and stats. It’s both a cautionary tale and a field guide to using data.

Read about the other books on Parker's list.

Also see: Ian Stewart's top ten popular mathematics books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine experimental works that break narrative norms

Alana Saab is a literary writer and screenwriter. She holds a master of fine arts in fiction from The New School, a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia University, and her bachelor’s from New York University in the phenomenology of storytelling. She lives in New York with her partner.

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Saab tagged "nine literary works [that] show how talented writers break narrative norms in service to something greater." One title on the list:

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes

Fiction that highlights the tension between author, narrator, and character.

Like [Calvino's] Invisible Cities, you may be scared to dive into this classic, especially since it’s a long one, but I see Don Quixote as a critical forefather to the canon of experimental literature. Don Quixote is split into two parts. Part One follows a man who has read too many tales of knights, and he’s trying, much to the reader’s humor, to play the part alongside Sancho Panza. He calls himself Don Quixote de La Mancha. Part Two gets even more interesting when characters in the novel have read Part One of the story. They see the wanna-be knight as famous, and each character messes with the plot, hoping to become part of the novel, which infuriates and frustrates the wanna-be knight.

But Miguel de Cervantes adds another layer of experimentation: there’s a character in the novel named Cide Hamete, the Arab historian responsible for writing the original biography of Don Quixote. There’s also another author, the narrator of this book, which is, one guesses, Cervantes. The two authors have different ways of telling the knight’s story, and the second author often comments on the first’s improper narration of events. But I remind you: they’re just characters! I know, it gets confusing, but it’s so good.

If you start reading, just promise me you’ll stick it out until Part Two which is where I think the magic of this book is most palpable.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Don Quixote is Declan Burke's favorite funny novel. It was the second most popular book among prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. It is on Jeff Tweedy's list of six favorite books, Ben Okri's six best books list, Bruce Wagner's six favorite books list, Panayiota Kuvetakis's top ten list of fictional best friends we'd like to have as nonfictional best friends, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best literary women dressed as men and ten of the best books written in prison.

Paul Auster always returns to Don Quixote; Claire Messud hasn't read it.

--Marshal Zeringue

The five best books to better understand and enjoy sport history

Gerald Gems is professor emeritus at North Central College and past president of the North American Society for Sport History.

His new book is Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport. It argues that in the latter nineteenth century

Sports such as baseball, boxing, cycling, and football offered psychological relief from the stresses of a rapidly changing economic and social order. Cycling, in particular, provided women with the means to challenge the prescribed gender order of female domesticity, male hegemony, and the dictates of physically restrictive fashion. In the process, sport became a key component in the rise of feminism and a prescription for the epidemics that followed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

At Shepherd Gems tagged five top books to better understand and enjoy sport history, including:

From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports by Allen Guttmann

This book is the classic and foundational book in which the author designates the requisite characteristics of modern sports: secularization, equality, specialization, rationalization, and bureaucracy.

Secularization distanced sport from the association with religious rituals such as the ancient Olympic Games. Distinct rules and regulations relative to participants designated equal opportunities for success. The sport's perceived physical, social, and moral benefits provided a rational reason for their practice. Specialized events required specialized practice, furthering the advent of professionalism.

The greater profusion and practice of sport led to the creation of associations to administer and regulate the activities. Melvin Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-70, later added commercialization and urbanization as a feature of modernity.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top stories of folk horror

Lucy Foley studied English literature at Durham University and University College London and worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry. She is the author of five novels including The Paris Apartment and The Guest List. She lives in London.

Foley's newest novel is The Midnight Feast.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six favorite stories of folk horror, including:

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

For me there’s a True Detective-esque feel to the atmosphere of this small-town-America set thriller. There’s much made of a local “Woman in White” folktale: supposedly this witchlike figure is responsible for the deaths of a couple of Wind Gap’s children. As Gillian Flynn said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, this was inspired by “the original Slender Man sort of idea, how that came to be”. There’s a horrifying hunting shack in the woods, the source of much of the protagonist Camille’s past trauma (this trauma being far worse than anything supernaturally-inflicted) and a very folk horror sense of tradition and the fear of breaking tradition, alongside a creeping dread and unease throughout in which nothing and no-one is really what they seem.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Sharp Objects is among Katherine Higgs-Coulthard's top six crime-in-the-family thrillers, Zach Vasquez's seven dark novels about motherhood, Christina Dalcher's seven crime books that challenge the idea of inherent female goodness, Nicole Trope's six domestic suspense novels where nothing is really ever what it seems, Heather Gudenkauf's ten great thrillers centered on psychology, and Peter Swanson's ten top thrillers that explore mental health.

--Marshal Zeringue