Eight top school reunion titles

Elise Juska’s new novel, Reunion, was named one of People Magazine’s “Best Books to Read in May 2024.” Her previous novels include The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and If We Had Known. Juska’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize from Ploughshares, and her short fiction has been cited by The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

[The Page 69 Test: Reunion; My Book, The Movie: Reunion]

At Lit Hub Juska tagged "eight novels that explore the complexities of reunions—with classmates from college and high school, close friends or near strangers, and former versions of ourselves." One title on the list:

Elizabeth Berg, The Last Time I Saw You

Berg’s Talk Before Sleep is a novel that gutted me when I first read it—a spare, unsentimental story of adult friendship, midlife, and mortality. Here, Berg revisits these themes through a different lens: a fortieth high school reunion in the Midwest told from the points of view of five returning classmates.

For each, the reunion promises something different—escape, salvation, a second chance—but ultimately compels them to look inward.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten gothic and unnerving books

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged ten gothic and unnerving reads, including:

Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia

Razor sharp and disconcerting, Mystery Lights is a collection of speculative short stories with a bite. From the supernatural to the otherworldly and beyond, these ten stories range from the terrifying to the ugly, suspenseful to quietly disquieting. Valencia will make you stare at the sky in wonder and awe.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine titles about haunted motherhood

Clare Beams is the author of novels The Garden and The Illness Lesson, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Randolph College MFA program. She was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

[The Page 69 Test: The Illness Lesson]

At Electric Lit Beams tagged nine stories that capture the near-supernatural feeling of being a mother, including:

The Need by Helen Phillips

In this novel, one of the most terrifying I’ve ever read, a mother is haunted by the worst possibilities of her life with her children: an awareness that no matter the joys or the mundane challenges of her current child-filled moment, in a separate shadow-moment she has lost those children, has lost everything. Home alone with her toddler and baby, trying to find a book her daughter, Viv, is missing, Molly discovers an intruder in a deer mask in the other room: “She gripped her children as though the three of them were poised at the edge of a cliff, wind whipping around them, pebbles giving way between them. She could not move. She did not know how to pass through the next seconds of her life…But Viv was already stepping away from her, was already reaching to retrieve something from the deer’s black-gloved hands: The Why Book.” What if the intruder who’s coming to take our treasure and wreck our lives isn’t a stranger, but someone who knows us as intimately as it’s possible to know another person? This is a novel that bends and multiplies time and selfhood to show us motherhood’s existential threats, and the result is the feeling of the call coming not only from inside the house but from inside one’s own head.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Need is among Chin-Sun Lee's five top gothic novels about distressed women, Ainslie Hogarth's eight novels about monstrous mothers, Amanda Mactas's five top horror novels driven by maternal instinct, Michael J. Seidlinger's top ten terrifying home invasions in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top escapist books

Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and journalist. She is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Innocents (2012) and The Awkward Age (2017), and a memoir of NICU motherhood, Mother Ship (2019). Her writing has won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, a Betty Trask Award, and been longlisted for the Women's Prize.

Her new novel is Welcome to Glorious Tuga.

At the Guardian Segal tagged five favorite escapist books, include:

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Oddly, another novel in which celebrities collide with civilians. Pasquale runs the hotel Adequate View in a tiny Italian village, to which tourists mostly come by accident, thinking it somewhere else. It is “about” this earnest, gentlemanly hotelier and his modest dreams of a cliffside tennis court, but it is also about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, failure and comebacks, writing, success, fatherhood, and second chances.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Beautiful Ruins is among Taylor Jenkins Reid's five top novels about fame.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six mysteries set in luxurious destinations

Jaclyn Goldis is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and NYU School of Law. She practiced estate planning law at a large Chicago firm for seven years before leaving her job to travel the world and write novels. After culling her possessions into only what would fit in a backpack, she traveled for over a year until settling in Tel Aviv, where she can often be found writing from cafés near the beach.

Goldis is the author of The Chateau and The Main Character.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six favorite mysteries set in luxurious destinations, including:

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

This clever thriller takes place at a luxe lodge in the rugged Scottish Highlands. With a classic setup of a group of school friends reuniting for a destination trip, things quickly start to go off the rails. The property in the remote wilderness boasts small cabins, scenic mountain views, lush heather heaths, and a loch—how much more atmospheric can murder get? Add in a snowstorm whipping through the weekend to amp up the isolation and menace, and you have one tense, enjoyable read. I stand by this: Lucy Foley makes murder fun!

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen top books about jazz

Ed Simon is a staff writer for Lit Hub, the editor of Belt Magazine, and the author of numerous books, including most recently Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost, Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, and Relic, part of the Object Lessons series.

In the summer of 2024 Melville House will release his Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, the first comprehensive, popular account of that subject.

At Lit Hub Simon tagged fifteen "literary works with jazz at their center which have given 'special overtones' to words." One title on the list:

Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues

Drawing from the historical “Rhineland Bastards,” mixed race children the result of Black Allied troops stationed in Germany following the Great War, the Ghanese-Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues invents the story of Hieronymus “Hiero” Falk, a brilliant musician who performs swing in Weimar Germany, all of his music being lost when the Nazis come to power. With shades of the great Romani guitarist Django Reinhardt or of the so-called “Swing Kids” who protested fascism through jazz, Edugyan’s novel expresses an inviolate truth about this music.

That truth is that in its cacophony and beauty, its elegance and its joyfulness, jazz is the music of democracy, of liberation, of freedom.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles featuring ghost children

Joel H. Morris is the author of All Our Yesterdays, his debut novel. He has worked most recently as an English teacher and, for the past twenty years, has taught language and literature. Prior to earning a doctorate in comparative literature, he spent several years as a bookseller before joining a small maritime expedition company as a sailor.

At Electric Lit Morris tagged "seven novels involving literal and metaphorical ghost children." One title on the list:

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The child ghost in Ward’s haunting generational novel is Richie, sent to Parchman prison farm for stealing for his family when he was twelve. While 13-year-old Jojo and his mother, Leonie, drive the narrative, it is Richie who haunts the family through its patriarch, Pop. As a youth, Pop was responsible for killing Richie—a mercy to spare the boy a brutal beating and death. Richie has haunted Parchman for decades, an embodiment of injustice and racist cruelty. When he hitches a ride with Jojo and Leonie to find Pop again, Jojo can see him, speak to him. He becomes a haunting figure of generational trauma, the past made present. In his transition to the afterlife, “home,” he joins a multitude of tormented souls, singers of the history of brutality.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is among Sarah Bernstein's top ten grudge holders in fiction, James Yorkston's top ten road novels, Stacey Swann's seven novels about very dysfunctional families, Una Mannion’s top ten books about children fending for themselves, Sahar Mustafah's seven novels about grieving a family member and LitHub's ten books we'll be reading in ten years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six notable books featuring families

Paul Murray was born in 1975 in Dublin. His novels include An Evening of Long Goodbyes, short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award; Skippy Dies, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Mark and the Void, joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the year; and The Bee Sting, one of The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year.

At the Waterstones blog Murray tagged six favorite books featuring families. One title on the list:

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

Smith’s ingenious historical box of tricks refuses to be categorised, but one way to read it is as the story of two families. Set in Victorian England and flipping back and forth between the 1830s and 1870s, it’s mostly seen through the eyes of Eliza Touchet, who lives with her cousin William Ainsworth. Ainsworth in the 1830s is a famous novelist who outsells his good friend Charles Dickens; by the 1870s, though, he’s fallen very much out of fashion. Eliza and Ainsworth have a romance of sorts, but then he marries his maid, much to the dismay of his three grown-up daughters, who see their inheritance disappearing. Smith sets the conventional stuff of the nineteenth-century novel – marriage, servants, finagling over property – against a much darker, less familiar story. Andrew Bogle is an enslaved man born and raised in a sugar plantation in Jamaica. His family life exists – or not – at the whim of his masters. After the death of his wife, he throws in his lot with a fraudster (or is he?) claiming to be an aristocrat long thought drowned. That well-meaning Eliza is herself the beneficiary of a slave plantation is just one of the multiple ironies abounding in this novel, as Smith gleefully upends the Victorian image of family as inherently virtuous, showing it instead as a mechanism for laundering the profits of Empire while whitewashing its horrors.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight dead characters with something to say

Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) is an award-winning screenwriter, director, and author whose films have been selections at major festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, and New York. He is the author of the crime novel Better the Blood and the nonfiction book In Dark Places, both of which won Ngaio Marsh awards, making him the first writer to win the award for both fiction and nonfiction. He is also the author of the young adult graphic novel Helen and the Go-Go Ninjas which, along with Better the Blood, was a finalist for the New Zealand Book Award.

At CrimeReads Bennett tagged eight "favourite dead characters from crime fiction, film and television, who come back through the misty veil, and who have something to say (usually, quite a lot)." One book on the list:

THE TREES (novel) by Percival Everett

This book reads like the most maddening, unsolvable of locked-room crime novels, for a long time. Until it doesn’t. There is a breathtaking moment when we realise, at the heart of this fiction is a very real character: 14-year-old Emmett Till who was lynched in Money, Mississippi in 1955, after he was falsely accused by a young white woman of making salacious comments towards her. The murders happening today are vengeance, the lynched dead rising up and returning to put right the things that history failed to, by killing the descendants of the original lynch mobs who literally got away with murder. As one character says: “Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence.” In this comic-horror metaphor for the historic and ongoing brutality of the African-American experience, the Dead are coming back to say: “Time to pay up”.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books featuring superstitions

Jessie Rosen got her start with the award-winning blog 20-Nothings and has sold original television projects to ABC, CBS, Warner Bros., and Netflix. Her live storytelling show Sunday Night Sex Talks was featured on The Bachelorette. She lives in Los Angeles.

Rosen's new novel is The Heirloom.

At Lit Hub she tagged six books that explore superstitions "from every angle. In some an omen defines the character’s struggle, in others its used as a thematic point, and in one the belief runs so deep it’s presented as fact." One title on the list:

Toni Morrison, Sula

Omens abound for Sula in Toni Morrison’s rich, fictional world, but interestingly only after she returns to her home after a decade away. Here it is as if Sula herself is the manifestation of a superstition about what happens when you break free from the rules of your upbringing to chart a life of your own. Sula is plagued by birds, a harbinger of evil and develops a birthmark that many believe looks like a snake.

Ultimately bad luck follows, as Sula continues to live her life in an uncompromising manner, paving her own way through the consequences.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Sula is among Nikita Lalwani's top ten platonic friendships in fiction, Lucy Jago's five best female friendships, and John Green's six favorite coming-of-age books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books about west African cities

At the Guardian Eromo Egbejule tagged five of the best books about west African cities, including:

Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad by Damilare Kuku

Damilare Kuku’s collection of short stories reads like a flick from Nollywood, the film industry where she has worked as an actor and producer. The book is a hilarious compilation of sappy sex scandals as women in contemporary Lagos end up being shortchanged in matters of love by their romantic interests. Kuku’s second book, Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow – a novel about how family secrets and a woman’s decision to get a Brazilian butt lift upends her life – is out in July.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about Black people who pass as white

Kuchenga Shenjé is a writer, journalist, and speaker with work on media platforms including Stylist, British Vogue, and Netflix. She has contributed short stories and essays to several anthologies, most notably It's Not OK to Feel Blue (And Other Lies), Who's Loving You, and Loud Black Girls. Owing to a lifelong obsession with books and the written word, Kuchenga studied Creative Writing at The Open University. Her work is focused on the perils of loving, being loved, and women living out loud throughout the ages. Her debut The Library Thief, is the ultimate marriage of her passions for history, mystery, and rebels. Kuchenga lives in Manchester, where she is determined to continue living a life worth writing about.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "stories that delve into race and identity in the U.S. and U.K." One title on the list:

We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Things will only get better? Will a skin lightening procedure that’s less dermatologically dangerous than our current skin bleaching practices cause more or less harm? Penning provocative satirical prose in one of the boldest debuts of recent years, Ruffin’s warning of a potential future is nowhere near as ridiculous as one wants it to be. How should one deal with discomfort, desperation and longing? Is a father’s desire to help his biracial son escape the racial reality his own bourgeois accomplishments prove is doggedly inescapable, an act of love or madness? Some readers will feel more lanced than others but unfortunately it’s a story that implicates us all.

Read about the other entries on the list.

We Cast A Shadow is among J.R. Ramakrishnan's seven books set in New Orleans that go beyond Mardi Gras.

--Marshal Zeringue