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The Best Historical Fiction Set in the 1700s

The 18th century marked a historical period in which rapid changes occurred, especially in the rise and fall of empires as revolutions and Enlightenment ideals spread throughout the second half of the century. At the beginning of the century, Saint Petersburg was founded under Peter the Great, the Asante Empire rose in what is now […]

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Book Reviews

The Broken Whistle by Pedro Israel Orta

When telling the truth is a career-ending act, who protects the whistleblower? There are few workplaces where the consequences of speaking out could be more serious than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In The Broken Whistle: A Deep State Run Amok, Pedro Israel Orta offers a personal account of what happened when he did precisely […]

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📚 A big impact on the genre

October 14, 2026View Online | Join All Access | Listen The adaptation pipeline just got more interesting. The Black List has added unadapted titles from Spiegel & Grau to its discovery database, making it easier for film, TV, and theater industry professionals to identify adaptable properties. Spiegel & Grau is the first independent publisher to […]

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Links: Nature, Beverly Jenkins, & More

Welcome back! Thank you all for the batch cooking suggestions from last week. We plan to do a freezer clean-out soon to take inventory and free up some space. Things are also cooling off in New England, so it’s getting ready to be soup season anyway. I always anticipate my first batch of slow cooker […]

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Book Reviews

America and Americans by John Steinbeck: A Book Club Review

Early in America and Americans by John Steinbeck a man named Jimmy, chief of a Piute band summering near Lake Tahoe, turns up at a trout hatchery in the snow and asks for a fish. He is given one. He puts it in a snowbank, strips, washes himself in the freezing stream, dresses, picks the […]

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Book Reviews

Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck

The closing dispatch of Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck sends a lieutenant up a hill on an Italian island in December 1943 carrying a white flag, and his white flag is a bath towel. There are forty-three American paratroopers behind him and eighty-seven heavily armed Germans dug in ahead. He has memorised […]

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Watch the First Trailer for NARNIA: THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW

The trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew has arrived. Greta Gerwig’s highly-anticipated Netflix film premieres in theaters on February 12, and the trailer reveals more than we’ve seen yet of her spin on the first story in the Narnia chronology. Watch it here: Here are my first impressions: “Stairway to Heaven”? Tell me it’s rock […]

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A Mystery, Historical Fiction, & More

A Tempest of Desire A Tempest of Desire by Lorraine Heath is $2.99! This released December 2024 and we’ve heard good things about the crazysauce plot. Did any of you pick this one up? New York Times bestselling author Lorraine Heath returns to the fan favorite series, The Scandalous Gentlemen of St. James, with the story of […]

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Book Reviews

A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck

Near the end of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck, the travellers are handed a sealed cardboard box and told not to open it until their plane has left Soviet airspace. Inside are four thousand negatives, less whatever the censors kept. They kept very little: some shots that showed landscape too clearly, some pictures of […]

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Book Reviews

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

A woman gets on a bus in The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck and is asked her name. She glances at a cigarette advertisement on the wall and then out of the window at a tree, and says she is Camille Oaks. She also tells everyone she is a dental nurse, which she is not. […]