Eight titles for every era of Barbie

Claudia Guthrie is a writer covering culture, entertainment, and lifestyle content. Her work has appeared in ELLE, The Muse, Food52, and more. Originally from Kansas City, she now resides in Denver, where you can find her reading the newest thriller or knitting sweaters for her cats.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight "books for the different eras of Barbie," including:

CEO Barbie: Under the Influence by Noelle Crooks

A woman of many professions, Barbie has worked more than 250 careers, including astronaut, journalist, and firefighter. And in 1985, CEO Barbie conquered the business world. So what career would 2023 #GirlBoss Barbie be waltzing into in her high heels? The answer is obvious: an influencer, duhhh!

In Under the Influence, Harper Cruz is broke—like might be evicted soon broke—after being laid off from her publishing job. When she stumbles upon a lucrative job listing for “Visionary Support Strategist” to famous influencer/self-help guru Charlotte Greene, she goes for it and trades New York City for Tennessee. At The Greenhouse, it’s all “we’re not colleagues, we’re a family,” which is, of course, code for toxic workplace where there’s motivational messages on tap (literally in the bathroom) and mandatory Katy Perry dance parties. As She.E.O Barbie would say: “If you can dream it, you can be it!”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books on the independence of women and self-discovery

At B&N Reads Brittany Bunzey tagged eight "books of the independence of women and self-discovery in all its messy glory," including:

Your Driver Is Waiting: A Novel by Priya Guns

Your Driver is Waiting pays homage to the 1970s film Taxi Driver with a queer feminist spin. Damani is drowning in debt and driving for a ride-share app to make ends meet, when her crush sets off an explosive chain of events. Fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride of darkly comic prose that takes on performative allyship, racism and classicism. 

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles featuring female psycho serial killers

Molly Odintz is the Senior Editor for CrimeReads and the editor of Austin Noir, forthcoming from Akashic Books. She grew up in Austin and worked as a bookseller at BookPeople, and recently returned to Central Texas after five years in NYC. She likes cats, crime novels, and coffee.

At CrimeReads Odintz tagged six new or recent novels featuring psycho female serial killers. One title on the list:

C. J. Skuse, Sweetpea

This one might be the most misanthropic on the list. The narrator of Sweetpea is anything but; she hates her partner, barely tolerates her friends, and labors meticulously over a kill list of everyone who’s ever annoyed her, from the grocery clerk who mishandles her orders to the skinny 20-something sleeping with her husband. From bruised vegetables, to butchered humans, the violence in this one escalates quickly. Very Serial Mom vibes.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles that reveal librarians behind the shelves

Laura Sims is the author of the novels How Can I Help You and Looker, now in development for television with eOne and Emily Mortimer’s King Bee Productions. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Electric Lit, Gulf Coast, and more. She and her family live in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a reference librarian and hosts the library’s lecture series.

At Electric Lit Sims tagged seven "novels that showcase librarian characters in all of their complex human glory," including:

The Librarianist by Patrick DeWitt

The protagonist of Patrick DeWitt’s latest novel both upholds and belies the image of the quiet librarian. When Bob Comet, retired librarian, begins volunteering at a local senior center to fill the void he’s felt since retirement, we start to learn more about his colorful, complex past. As he gathers a coterie of interesting new acquaintances around him, these mingle and mix with characters from his past to create an engaging read about a seeming introvert’s far-from-ordinary life.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten titles with good sex scenes

Cleo Watson has worked in politics and campaigning of one kind or another for over a decade. She worked on President Barack Obama's re-election in 2012, the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections and the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 EU Referendum. In government, she served in 10 Downing Street as Theresa May's Political Adviser then Boris Johnson's co-Deputy Chief of Staff. She has had a front row seat - and, occasionally, one at the table - for some of the most decisive moments in British politics of the last few years. Whips is her first novel.

At the Guardian Watson tagged ten books that "show how incredibly varied good sex in fiction can be," including:

Forever by Judy Blume

As this brilliant piece for the Guardian explained, this book feels so very modern and ought to be essential reading for everyone. I read it aged about 13 and longed, in due course, to deal with my own virginity – a subject Blume handles perfectly. There is plenty in Forever for a young person to learn, practically speaking. It’s like sex in literature with training wheels. The ideas of naming genitals (hello to the Ralphs out there) and “what to do” with a penis were genuine revelations to me and the book felt like a kind way to learn about it.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top thrillers with beach settings

British-born Allie Reynolds is a former freestyle snowboarder who swapped her snowboard for a surfboard and moved to the Gold Coast in Australia, where she taught English as a foreign language for fifteen years. She still lives in Australia with her family. Reynolds’s short fiction has been published in women’s magazines in the UK, Australia, Sweden, and South Africa.

Reynolds's novels include Shiver and The Swell.

[Q&A with Allie Reynolds; Writers Read: Allie Reynolds (July 2022); The Page 69 Test: The Swell]

At CrimeReads the author tagged eight thrillers set on beaches, including:

Jane Harper set her fourth novel, The Survivors in a rugged coastal community on the small Australian island of Tasmania, saying the beauty and brutality of the Tasmanian coast was the ideal setting for a story. The beach in this story is a cold and inhospitable place. It has sea caves accessible only at low tide and sinister statues on the cliff above in memorial of a ship lost at sea. The novel begins as a body is discovered on the sand, bringing back echoes of a tragedy years earlier. Harper sets up a terrifying scene, gathering a small group of characters, making each of them seem as suspicious as possible, then sending them diving in the treacherous cold waters to see a shipwreck. A memorable and vividly described mystery.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight titles with narrators who defy our expectations

Nathan Go's new novel is Forgiving Imelda Marcos.

He was born and raised in the southern Philippines. He was the 2017–2018 David T. K. Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Zell Writers’ Program, he was a 2012 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. He has received scholarships to attend Tin House, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, Sewanee, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among others. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Ninth Letter, The Massachusetts Review, The Bare Life Review, and the Des Moines Register. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Mindanao.

At Electric Lit Go tagged eight novels with "narrators that defy our expectations of how they 'should sound' given their societal, racial or other preconceived backgrounds." One title on the list:

A Tiny Upward Shove by Melissa Chadburn

This fantastical novel employs an aswang, or a dark spirit, to tell us about Marina, a teenager who was brutally murdered. While aswangs come from traditional Filipino folklore and are ageless, Chadburn’s version sometimes sounds more like a vengeful Filipino-American relative who’s unafraid to cuss and reference pop culture while delving deep into history: “This man who strangled Marina was a pakshet trick who didn’t know how to be a trick — always fell in love with the wrong girl. Pure PoCo trash, drove around Vancouver in his van loaded with possibilities…”

But what if comedy or satire isn’t the novel’s genre? Can a more subtle narrator within the realm of realism still defy our expectations? Readers do seem to wholeheartedly accept a narrator who can tell stories with precise prose, even if it might strain some disbelief. Language, after all, is one of the things we enjoy in literature.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven thrillers in which friendships are tested

Megan Collins is the author of Thicker Than Water, The Family Plot, Behind the Red Door, and The Winter Sister.

[The Page 69 Test: The Family Plot]

She received her B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and she holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was a teaching fellow. She has taught creative writing at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts and Central Connecticut State University, and she is Managing Editor of 3Elements Review. A Pushcart Prize and two-time Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared in many print and online journals, including Compose, Linebreak, Off the Coast, Spillway, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Rattle. She lives in Connecticut.

At CrimeReads Collins tagged seven "thrillers where friendships are tested—by old secrets, dark truths, and a few dead bodies." One title on the list:

Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

Emily and Kristen are having the time of their life in Chile when Emily returns to their hotel to find that Kristen has killed a backpacker in self-defense—an act that’s eerily similar to what happened on their trip the previous year in Cambodia. Now, as they return to their homes on opposite sides of the world, Emily gets to work trying to process the horror of their latest trip. But when Kristen shows up unexpectedly, inserting herself into every corner of Emily’s life, Emily wonders what really happened in Chile—and who Kristen really is. While this book is a ton of page-turning fun from start to finish, it’s also a deeply sobering look at gaslighting and toxic relationships, imbued with Bartz’s trademark vivid writing that powerfully examines complicated female friendships.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on the high finance culture of the last 40 years

Andrew Lipstein is the author of Last Resort (2022), a novel “you’ll think about ... for weeks after you read the last pages” (Los Angeles Times). He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and son.

Lipstein's new novel is The Vegan.

At Lit Hub he tagged five books that "give us a window into not only the financial preoccupations of different eras, but the larger moral issues their unique cultures wrestled with.... Together they trace the history of high finance culture over the past 40 years, from the barbarous heyday of the eighties to the tech-obsessed venture capitalists of today." One title on the list:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Yes, Elizabeth Holmes is a grifter nonpareil. Yes, along with Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, she made a fool of investors and the government, showing a company valued at $9 billion to be more or less a house of cards. But the most amazing part of this story isn’t Holmes’ duplicity—it’s the complicity of everyone around her. Bad Blood is a vivid document, capturing the tech bubble in all of its frothy, fraudulent glory, with valuations based on shaky projections and all parties involved incentivized to intensify the hype. Carreyrou deftly shows how money can mold morals in the modern age, and how easily a company can wield “virtue” for its own profitable means. (Lest we forget, Theranos’ mission statement included the goal to “empower people everywhere to live their best possible lives.”)

Read about the other entries on the list.

Bad Blood is among Kathy Wang's six non-fiction titles about crime & general bad behavior in Silicon Valley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best unexpected Jane Austen homages

Julia Seales is a writer and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. She earned an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA, and a BA in English from Vanderbilt University. She is a lifelong Anglophile with a passion for both murder mysteries and Jane Austen. Seales is originally from Kentucky, where she learned about manners (and bourbon).

Her new novel is A Most Agreeable Murder.

At Publishers Weekly Seales tagged ten brilliantly unexpected Jane Austen homages, including:

The Emma Project by Sonali Dev

Vansh Raje, Dev’s gender-swapped take on Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, is clever, handsome, and rich, a bachelor on top of the world. Knightlina has been in a fake relationship with Vansh’s brother, but now she wants to find her distance and work on her microfinance foundation. The duo collide when Vansh has an idea for his own nonprofit, leaving them both vying for funding. This Indian American rom-com retelling of Emma, part of Dev’s wonderful series of Jane Austen retellings, serves up Woodhouse with a twist.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books about awakenings

Anna Metcalfe was born in Germany. Her short fiction has been published in The Best British Short Stories, The Dublin Review, and Lighthouse Journal,among other places, and has been shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize and the Sunday Times Short Story Award. She is the author of a story collection, Blind Water Pass, which was published in the UK. She teaches creative writing at the University of Birmingham. Chrysalis is her first novel.

At the Guardian Metcalfe tagged ten books that "contain both literal and metaphorical awakenings. As well as the disparate states of dreaming and wakefulness, they also illuminate what connects the two." One title on the list:

Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir

In one of the most enlivening works of non-fiction I’ve ever read, Alsadir presents laughter as a disruptive, spontaneous moment of revolution – a ludicrous, unstoppable bid for freedom. Animal Joy is a big-hearted book that makes light work of eclectic material, weaving psychoanalytic theory and literary criticism with autographical writing on motherhood and Alsadir’s experiences of clown school. Through the fragments, a bold and joyful argument emerges: a reclamation of authenticity, aliveness and contingency. It’s a book of small and vital awakenings; a book that might just inspire you to be yourself.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best thrillers with supernatural elements

Philip Fracassi is the author of the award-winning story collection, Beneath a Pale Sky, which received a starred review from Library Journal, was named “Best Collection of the Year” by Rue Morgue Magazine, and was a finalist for the Bram Stoker award.

His previous story collection, Behold the Void, was named “Best Collection of the Year” from both This Is Horror and Strange Aeons Magazine.

His novels include Don’t Let Them Get You Down, A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, and Boys in the Valley.

At CrimeReads Fracassi tagged ten of his "favorite novels that meld supernatural horror with awesome mysteries and breakneck thrillers," including:

Riley Sager, Home Before Dark

Sager is another modern master of blending classic horror tropes with plot-driven mysteries. In Home Before Dark, he tosses haunted houses into the thriller blender to create a unique tale that keeps the reader guessing at what’s real and what’s from realms beyond our normal, every-day experience. Much like Malfi, you could throw multiple titles by Sager into this spot, but Dark is the one that leans the heaviest on supernatural elements playing into a classic murder mystery.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Home Before Dark is among Ana Reyes's six top books with embedded narratives, James S. Murray's five top books about women fighting their way out and Karen Dionne's eight top thrillers that turn home into a place of mortal danger.

The Page 69 Test: Home Before Dark.

--Marshal Zeringue