A number of novels provide links between risk-assessment, financial speculation, and terrorism. But simultaneously, real life terror in 2016 renders writing about it completely and utterly pointless.
The search for oil was once depicted in movies and books as a boys’ own adventure. But as films such as Deepwater Horizon show, in an age of anxieties over fossil fuels, oil’s story is now a darker one.
The book Red Professor: the Cold War Life of Fred Rose tells of a progressive anthropologist who was stymied by non-Indigenous people in powerful positions. Sadly, it’s a narrative that still resonates today.
Leo Braudy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
All the popular monsters you’ll see out trick-or-treating, from Frankenstein to Dracula, were born out of fear and anxiety about change and technology.
No team in sports has inspired better literature than the hapless Chicago Cubs. The oeuvre includes a little-known tale by W.P. Kinsella: ‘The Last Pennant Before Armageddon.’