Four top books based on myths

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, which won all three of the UK's most prestigious prizes for non-fiction - the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award - and the Political Book Awards Biography of the Year. Her other non-fiction books are the acclaimed cultural histories Heroes and Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions. Cleopatra won the Fawcett Prize and the Emily Toth Award. In 2017 she published her first novel Peculiar Ground, which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.

Hughes-Hallett's new book is Fabulous, a collection of short stories.

At the Guardian she tagged some of the best books based on myths, including:

Another free spirit, but a happier one, is Dougal Douglas (or perhaps Douglas Dougal – nothing about him, including his name, is pin-downable) the curly haired charmer who makes his disruptive appearance in a suburban small business in Muriel Spark’s scintillating comic take on the Faust legend, The Ballad of Peckham Rye. On Dougal’s forehead there are two bumps – traces, he explains, of his sawn-off horns. Is he teasing? Impossible to tell. Certainly Spark is. She hints that Dougal is the devil, but what he brings is not damnation, but ridicule. Sleazy office romances, venal crime, and all the absurd trivia of working life are raked over in this modern fable. Spark’s wit is acidic, but her story sets the dreary lives of secretaries and salesmen glittering, touched by the uncanny charisma of an early 60s Pan.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Douglas Dougal from The Ballad of Peckham Rye is among John Mullan's ten best devils in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top seaside thrillers

Janna King is a screenwriter, playwright, and director. She has written TV movies and series for Lifetime and The Hallmark Channel, King World and more. Her two short films, “Mourning Glory” and “The Break Up,” which she wrote, directed and produced, were official selections at several film festivals.

King's debut novel is The Seasonaires; her new novel is the sequel, Malibu Bluff.

One of her nine best seaside thrillers, as shared at CrimeReads:

Until the Day I Die, by Emily Carpenter

This novel also tackles the subject of grief and its devastating effect. When Erin’s husband dies suddenly, she is determined to keep her college-bound daughter Shorie and the family’s thriving tech business on track. But all those around her worry that she’s falling apart, and they stage an intervention that sends her to a luxury rehab retreat on a remote Caribbean island. Alternating points of view from Erin and Shorie offer insight into the two women’s states of mind and their undeniable love for each other, despite mother-daughter thorniness. From the start, Carpenter sets the stage for conspiracies that raise their ugly heads as the pages turn. Shorie investigates those she believes are out to sabotage her mother and the business while Erin ultimately fights for her life at a tropical jungle “wellness sanctuary” that’s hair-raising instead of healing.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about fathers

Sam Miller was born and brought up in London, but has spent much of his adult life in India. His books include Fathers, an account of his own father, the editor, writer, critic and academic Karl Miller.

One of Miller's ten top books about fathers, as shared at the Guardian:

Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo

Fathers are largely absent from Izzo’s brilliant and shamefully neglected Marseille Trilogy, but there’s a fine cameo in the first of the series, Total Chaos. Mouloud is a migrant from Algeria to France, and nervously watched his three motherless children grow up in Marseille. But the eldest, a postgraduate student called Laila, has gone missing and is subsequently found murdered. Mouloud’s desperation is unbearable.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top father figures in literature

Allison Pataki is the New York Times bestselling author of The Traitor's Wife, The Accidental Empress, Sisi: Empress on Her Own, Where the Light Falls, Beauty in the Broken Places, and Nelly Takes New York.

At HuffPost she tagged ten top reads about great father figures in literature, including:

The Book Thief: The relationship between young Liesel and her adopted father, Hans Hubermann, is in many ways the heartbeat that makes this entire book pulse. While Mama addresses Liesel only as saumensch (roughly translated to the highly flattering moniker of “pig-man”), and is quick to offer a slap across the face, Hans, or Papa, adores Liesel, playing his accordion for her and teaching her to read in a series of secret, late-night sessions. Hans Hubermann’s soft and understated brand of strength shines throughout Markus Zusak’s novel as a positive force in the otherwise harrowing and tragic setting of Nazi Germany.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Book Thief also appears among Ryan Graudin's five favorite historical fiction YAs, Sarah Skilton's six most unusual YA narrators, Tracy-Ann Oberman's six best books, Kathryn Williams's top eleven Young Adult books for readers of all ages, Nicole Hill's top seven books with Death as a character, Lenore Appelhans's top ten teen books featuring flashbacks, and Kathryn Erskine's top 10 first person narratives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four "bad dad" memoirs

Andrew G. S. Thurman is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. He is working on a book about his father. At LitHub he tagged four good Bad Dad memoirs, including:

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

In her opening chapter, Alison Bechdel describes her father as “an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of decor” (potentially an alliterative reference to Geoffrey Wolff’s 1979 The Duke of Deception, itself a fantastic Bad Dad memoir). These titles refer to her father’s knack for home restoration, but also to his ability to maintain a double life: despite his marriage and three children, he was a gay man who had a particular interest in teenage boys.

Given these circumstances and her abundant skill, telling a linear, narratively boilerplate story would have made for a great book on its own. Instead, however, Bechdel opts for a delightfully complex structure—one that is self-consciously literary and deeply self-referential, with each narrative recursion adding more metaphorical and emotional nuance. Anyone who came of age in a library will see themselves in Bechdel to some extent, and those who did so due to family circumstances won’t be able to put her down.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels dealing with refugees

Michael Niemann's latest Valentin Vermeulen thriller is No Right Way.

At CrimeReads the author tagged eight "novels of displacement, diaspora, and the traumas of exile," including:

The Foreign Correspondent, Alan Furst

Refugees aren’t just a recent global phenomenon. Historically, every war has generated streams of refugees. It’s not an accident that the original Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted in 1951, to address the complicated refugee situation left by World War II. Alan Furst has made a career of writing spy novels that all take place at the threshold of World War II. But the seeds for all his novels were sown with World War I and the failure to settle the question of global hegemony in 1919. The twenty years of crisis that followed produced its own refugee crisis, and Furst captures the essence of it in 1938 Paris. This novel revolves around Italian refugees who fled the Mussolini regime to Paris and are publishing an underground newspaper that’s smuggled into Italy to give Italians the real news. Carlo Weisz, the new editor, after the Italian secret police agents assassinate the previous one, finds himself the target of pretty much every intelligence agency that’s active in Paris. The refugees in this novel have a professional background, lawyers, journalists, businessmen. They find themselves reduced to working menial jobs to make ends meet. Only Weisz is lucky enough to work in his chosen profession. The secret police agents after them, but the French authorities aren’t yet interested in protecting the refugees because Italy hasn’t officially thrown in its lot with Germany. In a way, this novel represents the flip side of Havana Libre. There’s the same desire to put undermine a regime from the relative safety of exile, although the existence of the Italian refugees in pre-war France seems more precarious than that of the Cuban emigres in Miami. But the story of having one’s life disrupted, of having to take jobs well below one’s qualifications are similar. A quote that stuck with me was “…spies and journalists were fated to go through life together, and it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Their jobs weren’t all that different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 99 Test: The Foreign Correspondent.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten houseguests in fiction

Jessica Francis Kane is the author of This Close, The Report, and Bending Heaven. This Close was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and The Report was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, and Granta.

Kane's new novel is Rules for Visiting.

At the Guardian she tagged ten notable houseguests in fiction, including:

According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

In this brilliant novel, Bainbridge imagines the year 1764, when Samuel Johnson met the Thrale family and became a regular houseguest at their home in then-rural Southwark. In the novel, Hester Thrale gives him his own room, which he often doesn’t leave. The scenes of the household functioning around the resident irascible genius are priceless.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best books about Paris

Whitney Scharer holds a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals including New Flash Fiction Review, Cimarron Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. Her first novel, The Age of Light, based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller, was published by Little, Brown (US) and Picador (UK) in February, 2019, and is forthcoming from over a dozen other countries. She lives with her husband and daughter in Arlington, MA.

At O; The Oprah Magazine Scharer tagged ten of the best books about Paris. One title on the list:

Paris to the Moon

Read Janet Flanner [Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939], and then read Adam Gopnik, her modern-day heir. Gopnik moved to Paris with his wife and infant son, and documented their adventures in the New Yorker with humor and tenderness. The book reads like a love letter to the city, and will leave you yearning to become an ex-pat yourself.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top classic & contemporary spy novels

When Timothy Jay Smith quit an intriguing international career to become a full-time writer, he had a host of real life characters, places and events to inspire his stories. His first novel, Cooper’s Promise, in some ways is still the most autobiographical of his novels, though he was never an American deserter adrift in Africa. But he was in The Mining Pan bar and he did meet Lulay and he did stowaway on a barge that landed him in an African jail.

Now, in his third novel, The Fourth Courier, set in Poland in 1992, Smith looks back at the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, as witnessed through the eyes of an FBI Special Agent on assignment to stop a nuclear smuggling operation out of Russia. Smith’s newest book continues his style of page-turning thrillers steeped with colorful characters.

At CrimeReads he tagged nine notable spy thrillers, including:

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon

During World War II, Istanbul was a center of international espionage. In Istanbul Passage, Joseph Kanon sets the story in the immediate aftermath of the war when the espionage community is beginning to pack up. An American businessman, Leon Bauer, has been drawn into their shadowy world by doing odd jobs to support the Allied effort. He’s asked to make one last exchange, which goes fatally awry. An American diplomat cum spy is killed, and Leon ends up hiding a possible war criminal wanted by both the Americans and Russians. Confronted with shifting loyalties and moral uncertainty, it’s the story of a man swept up in the dawn of the Cold War.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top books on leadership

Eliane Glaser is a writer, a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University, an associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and a BBC radio producer. Her books include Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life and, most recently, Anti-Politics: On the Demonization of Ideology, Authority and the State.

At the Guardian Glaser tagged six top books on leadership, including:

Our discomfort with the notion that a chosen few hold sway makes it easier to find depictions of bad leadership than positive exemplars. Novels, from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote portray leaders as capricious, deranged and, well, quixotic. Likewise, in The Mirror for Magistrates, a Tudor collection of poems, the ghosts of eminent statesmen recount their misdeeds and comeuppances while gazing ruefully at their own reflections. The poems were intended as cautionary tales for others keen to don the mantle of power.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Ling's ten desert island books

Lisa Ling is Executive Producer and Host of This Is Life on CNN.

One of her ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:

The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong

As a journalist, I was so impressed by how extensively Denise Chong researched this work of nonfiction. This is the story of the young girl who was photographed running naked in horror after her village was napalmed during the war, and who came to symbolize for the world its utter disaster and devastating toll. It is a moving story of love, perseverance, and belief.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that inspired Kristen Arnett's new novel

Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter's 2015 Literary Award in Fiction, was runner-up for the 2016 Robert Watson Literary Prize at The Greensboro Review, and was a finalist for Indiana Review's 2016 Fiction Prize. She's a columnist for Literary Hub and her work has appeared or is upcoming at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Literary Hub, Volume 1 Brooklyn, OSU's The Journal, Catapult, Bennington Review, Portland Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award.

Arnett's new novel is Mostly Dead Things.

At The Week magazine she tagged six books that inspired her first novel, including:

My Body Is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta (2014).

This is a deep dive into the body and mind of a singular author who manipulates text on the page to almost tactile effect. She writes powerfully about memory, yes, but she also reminds readers what it's like to inhabit a body. The essays in the book are interspersed with historical material about the Cascade tribe, one of two indigenous tribes in Washuta's heritage.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue