Fifteen essential books about climate change

Adrienne Westenfeld is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.

At Esquire she tagged fifteen essential books about climate change, including:

The Case for the Green New Deal, by Ann Pettifor

You’ve likely heard a lot about the Green New Deal, but you’d be forgiven if you’re not up to snuff on all the ins and outs of the meticulously-crafted policy. Pettifor, a British economist and a co-author of the Green New Deal, inspires and informs in this succinct book debunking claims that we can’t afford the legislation—in fact, she argues, we can’t afford not to pass it. Though the Green New Deal will require a complete overhaul of the international monetary system, Pettifor lays out a clear road map for the way forward, crafting a persuasive case for why we must act now. At just over two hundred pages, you could read this in an afternoon, then emerged a changed thinker.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top thrillers about thrillers

David Bell is a USA Today bestselling, award-winning author whose work has been translated into multiple foreign languages. He’s currently a professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he directs the MFA program. He received an MA in creative writing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a PhD in American literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. His novels include The Request, Layover, Somebody’s Daughter, Bring Her Home, Since She Went Away, Somebody I Used to Know, The Forgotten Girl, Never Come Back, The Hiding Place, and Cemetery Girl.

His new novel is Kill All Your Darlings.

At CrimeReads Bell tagged seven thrillers about writing a thriller, including:

Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

Is there anything David Morell, one of the greatest thriller writers alive, can’t write? Spy, western, suspense, horror, he’s done it all and done it masterfully. So why not a historical mystery about an opium addict who writes an essay about murder…and then becomes a suspect himself. And engages in a cat-and-mouse battle of wits with the real murderer in the foggy streets of London. And it’s just the first in the series.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the best books on Venice

Orsola Casagrande is a Havana-based journalist and film-maker. As a journalist, she worked for 25 years for the Italian daily newspaper il manifesto, and is currently co-editor of the web magazine Global Rights.

She writes in Italian, English, Spanish and Turkish and also speaks Basque and Catalan. She writes regularly on Spanish, Catalan and Basque politics and culture, and has covered Turkey and Kurdistan as a special correspondent.

Casagrande is the editor of The Book of Venice, an anthology of contemporary city stories.

At Lit Hub she tagged eight books "on the enchanting, hopelessly beautiful splendor and history of Venice," including:

Ernest Hemingway, Across the Rivers and into the Trees

Ernest Hemingway often visited Venice, and the city features in one of his lesser-known novels Across the Rivers and into the Trees, first published in 1950. I discovered and read this book while living in Havana, Cuba; Hemingway’s former house there, now a beautiful museum, was one of my favourite places to go when I needed a space of my own. One Sunday morning I went to the museum with my friend, Cuban intellectual Félix Julio Alfonso López, who told me about Across the Rivers and into the Trees. In this book, the city is the setting for Hemingway as he explores some of his classic themes: a soldier’s recovery from war and the function of love in the bloody 20th century.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven “coming-of-age” novels with elements of mystery or the supernatural

Rachel Donohue lives in Dublin, Ireland, where she works in communication and media relations.

In 2017 she won the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award for her short fiction.

The Temple House Vanishing, her first novel, explores "the dynamics of desire in an oppressive, conservative catholic boarding school in Ireland in the early 1990s."

At CrimeReads Donohue tagged seven favorite “coming-of-age” novels that have elements of mystery or the supernatural, including:

Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

Questions of identity, race and family thread through this extremely thoughtful excavation of a teenager’s death in the 1970s. It’s a book about absences and failure, both real and imagined, and of the gulf between people, even those who live under the same roof.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 platonic friendships in fiction

Nikita Lalwani is a contemporary British novelist whose work has been translated into sixteen languages. Her first novel, Gifted—the story of a child prodigy of Indian origin growing up in Wales—was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and won the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize for Fiction. Her second, The Village, was modeled on a real-life “prison village” in northern India, and won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Lalwani wrote the opening essay for AIDS Sutra, an anthology exploring the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS in India and is a trustee of the Civil Liberties Trust, a human rights organization.

Her new novel is You People.

At the Guardian Lalwani tagged ten books in which there is "'intense feeling' in fictional friendships where there is no carnal activity," including:

Sula by Toni Morrison

Long before the fever and dream of Lila and Lenu in Elena Ferrante’s epic Neapolitan novel series, and the haunting “imaginative empathy” of female friendship in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, we had Sula and Nel busy dancing all over societal notions of class, race and marriage. Set in a black community in the Ohio hills between 1919 and 1965, where white gentrification is encroaching fast, the book circles around the bond between the pair as they become women. Hurt each other they do and must, but the power they exhibit together comes from their difference and the paradigm-altering questions they bring to the table. The ending, calamitous yet liberating, is a masterful study of regret.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Sula is among Lucy Jago's five best female friendships and John Green's six favorite coming-of-age books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that will make you happy to be sad

Emily R. Austin was born in Ontario, Canada, and received a writing grant from the Canadian Council for the Arts in 2020. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is her first novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven books

for people who feel like crying but are having trouble determining whether the cathartic release they seek should involve tears of laughter or sadness. These books will break your heart and have you in stitches. You will feel like you would sitting in the audience of a depressed comedian whose poignant wit will have you cackling, blubbering, and feeling alive.

One title on the list:

Vacuum in the Dark by Jen Beagin

This sequel to Pretend I’m Dead follows Mona at 26. She is cleaning houses, having affairs, grappling with trauma, still making us sad, and still tickling us pink. This novel, like the one before, manages to touch on heavy topics while also being laugh out loud funny.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven mysteries where the crimes are motivated by books

Kate Carlisle is the New York Times bestselling author of the Bibliophile Mysteries, including The Book Supremacy and Buried in Books, as well as the Fixer-Upper Mysteries, including A Wrench in the Works and Eaves of Destruction.

The new installment of the Bibliophile Mysteries is Little Black Book.

At CrimeReads Carlisle tagged seven "stories that will take you on fun and twisty journeys into the mysterious world of crimes motivated by books," including:

Elementary, She Read by Vicki Delany

Englishwoman Gemma Doyle is a bit of a fish out of water in the quaint Cape Cod village of West London, where she has taken over her great-uncle’s Sherlock Holmes Bookshop. Gemma and her best friend Jayne stumble across a dead body when trying to track down the owner of an 1887 magazine containing the first Sherlock Holmes story ever written. While the magazine may or may not be authentic—if it is, it’s practically priceless—the victim is authentically dead. And the police are eying Gemma for the crime. To clear her name, she’ll have to put her Holmesian eye for detail to work to find the bibliophile who craved the rare story enough to kill for it. Sprinkled with fun literary references to the Great Detective, Elementary, She Read is a lighthearted read that will satisfy lovers of classic mysteries.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine books about being unemployed & underemployed

Before becoming a writer Elizabeth Gonzalez James was a waitress, a pollster, an Avon lady, and an opera singer. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, The Rumpus, StorySouth, PANK, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She’s an alum of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Writers Workshop, and Lit Camp. In 2021 she is a regular contributor to Ploughshares Blog. Her first novel, Mona At Sea, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is out now from Santa Fe Writers Project.

At Electric Lit Gonzalez James tagged nine stories about struggling under capitalism, including:

Temporary by Hilary Leichter

Temporary is a funny and surreal novel about a temp who finds herself in increasingly bizarre job placements: pirate, witch, ghost, human barnacle. As we watch the unnamed protagonist try to do her best in her rapidly changing work environment, it becomes clear that the novel is a razor-tipped critique of the modern gig economy, and lays bare all the costs of living a temporary and precarious life.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels in which murder victims tell their own stories

Hilary Davidson is the bestselling author of seven crime novels, including One Small Sacrifice, Blood Always Tells, and The Damage Done.

[The Page 69 Test: The Damage Done; The Page 69 Test: Blood Always Tells; The Page 69 Test: One Small Sacrifice; The Page 69 Test: Don't Look Down]

Davidson's fiction has won two Anthony Awards and a Derringer Award, and her short stories have appeared in Thuglit, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, and Beat to a Pulp.

Her latest novel is Her Last Breath.

At CrimeReads Davidson tagged seven she loves "for the way they allow the murder victim to 'speak' for themselves and to affect the course of the investigation of their own murder." One title on the list:

Dead Certain by Adam Mitzner

Is everyone living a double life in this crime novel? Yes, starting with the main character, Ella Broden. By day, she was an overworked attorney working on intense cases; by night, she’s a singer in some seedy clubs. The same is true of her sister, Charlotte, a writer who is very secretly juggling multiple affairs. When Charlotte vanishes after selling her first novel, Ella discovers that her sister’s book is in large part a diary, in which her real-life experiences are chronicled behind pseudonyms. Little as she knew about her sister’s life, Ella is the only person who can crack the code.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four SF works featuring a far-future U.S.A.

At Tor.com James Davis Nicoll tagged four sci-fi works featuring a far-future U.S.A., including:

In Joe and Jack C. Haldeman’s There Is No Darkness, English is an obscure language, spoken only on backwater worlds and a few places on Earth. We don’t know exactly when the book takes place, as year zero has been set to the founding of the (future) Confederacion. We are told the year is A.C. 354.

What we see of a future Texas suggests that it’s still as recognizably American as Justinian’s Constantinople would have been recognizably Roman. While the region seems a bit down at heel, it’s also one of the more optimistic takes on a future America.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about dark desires that will crush you

Heather Levy is a born and bred Oklahoman and graduate of Oklahoma City University's Red Earth MFA program for creative writing. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including NAILED Magazine, Crab Fat Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, and Dragon Poet Review.

She authored a nonfiction series on human sexuality, including “Welcome to the Dungeon: BDSM in the Bible Belt,” for Literati Press.

Levy's debut novel is Walking Through Needles.

[My Book, The Movie: Walking Through Needles; The Page 69 Test: Walking Through Needles.]

At CrimeReads she tagged eight books "on those darkest guilty pleasures we love to devour," including:

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

In Abbott’s first venture into the fierce world of teen girls, she perfectly captures the trapped feelings of 13-year-old Lizzie Hood as she pursues the truth of her best friend’s disappearance. Steeped in voyeurism, fear, longing, and disillusion, Abbott allows us to relive those turbulent teen years as Lizzie realizes the desire to look in places you’re not supposed to can lead to even darker revelations about the people you idolize.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The End of Everything is among Lisa Levy's eight most toxic friendships in crime fiction and Hallie Ephron's top ten mysteries that harness unreliable narrators.

The Page 69 Test: The End of Everything.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about circuses & spectacle

Born in Scotland, Elizabeth Macneal is a writer and potter based in London. The Doll Factory, Macneal’s debut novel, was an international bestseller, has been translated into twenty-nine languages and has been optioned for a major television series. It won the Caledonia Novel Award 2018.

Circus of Wonders, available now in the UK and out in the US in early 2022, is her second novel.

At the Guardian Mcneal tagged ten top books about circuses and spectacle, including:

Patient by Bettina Judd

Joice Heth. Sarah Baartman. Betsey Harris. These are just three of the names of the black women who have been exploited and assaulted through history, their bodies violated as sites of curiosity and science, and whom Bettina Judd takes as the core of her unforgettable poetry collection. Like many narratives about showmanship that explore how the voices of the performers or the patients have been lost and overwritten, this collection returns the power of storytelling to those who were denied it, imagining their voices in conversation with a modern speaker.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue