Where is your nonfiction section please.
Have you read anything spooky scary this month for Molly's Frighteningly Good Reads? My second book for the event this year quickly became one of my favorite frightening reads: Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search For the Truth About Ghosts. British journalist Will Storr begins this undertaking into supernatural research with the idea... Continue Reading →
Reading New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv's debut, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (September 13, 2022, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), I realized I had an unintentional trend this year of reading about selfhood in some form. It started with the first book I read in the year, Will Storr's... Continue Reading →
Another exciting bookish event to announce, and this one's happening right now: Frighteningly Good Reads! The wonderful Molly @ Silver Button Books hosts this ultra-relaxed read-a-thon every October, and it is truly my favorite reading event (it's also the only one I participate in besides Nonfiction November, so that should tell you everything you need... Continue Reading →
I love history that digs into something that was absolutely massive during its day and now is essentially unknown and forgotten. It always makes me wonder what the same things will be from our era. Sarah Horowitz's The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind it All (September 6, Sourcebooks) does... Continue Reading →
British-American art history writer Kirsty Bell relocated from New York to Berlin, where she and her German husband later bought an apartment on the Tempelhofer Ufer along the Landwehr Canal to raise their two sons. The significance of this location is impressive: "The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its... Continue Reading →
Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World, by Sinclair McKayUsed or new @SecondSale.com Throughout the twentieth century, Berlin stood at the centre of a convulsing world. It alternately seduced and haunted the international imagination. The essence of the city seemed to be its sharp duality: the radiant boulevards, the... Continue Reading →
The podcast Appalachian Mysteria kicked off a few years ago by covering the 1970 murders of West Virginia University coeds Mared Malarik and Karen Ferrell. The two had hitchhiked back to their dorms after seeing Oliver! in the college town of Morgantown, West Virginia, and disappeared. Their headless bodies were found later in a nearby... Continue Reading →
Sadly, Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine just passed its 100th day. Although Russia is forever one of my favorite reading topics, I had been pretty measured about it in recent years. Wanting more information about what's going on led me to push a few titles off my backlist, plus some in-translation new releases. I'm... Continue Reading →
Melissa Febos' Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative is both memoir and guidebook, and a meditation on what life writing does for us and the importance of it to women and underrepresented groups. Febos is the author of several works of memoir and autobiographical fiction, and although I haven't read her before, she's... Continue Reading →
Given my obsession with Indian food and curries of all kinds it only seemed fitting to learn more about them. Madhushree Ghosh's memoir-in-essays Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family (April 4, University Of Iowa Press) weaves together fragments of her life, both brighter and darker ones, loosely linked through food. It includes... Continue Reading →
Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties, by David de Jong (published April 19, 2022 by Mariner Books) In the newly released and fairly jaw-dropping Nazi Billionaires, Dutch journalist David de Jong, a Bloomberg News reporter on wealth and finance, profiles five German-Austrian families (the Quandts, Flicks, von Fincks, Porsche-Piëchs, and Oetkers) whose... Continue Reading →
Sometimes you learn of some bit of history you've never heard of that's so monumental, it's hard to believe. Incredible how some major events slip by without notice on the world stage of history while others, even more minor, become common knowledge. The Great Bhola Cyclone of 1970 is one such event that I think... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 