Books Your October 2025 Reads Stories You May Like Here’s the Scoop: Earl Grey-Flavored Ice Cream Wins Annual Contest Reunion ’22 Photo Tour: The Hill Is Alive with Big Red Spirit I’ve Always Been a Generalist—and on ‘Jeopardy!,’ It Paid Off This month’s featured titles include short stories, a fantasy book for tweens, and a scholarly look at Carmen adaptations For more titles by Big Red authors, peruse our previous round-ups. Have you published a book you'd like to submit? Scroll down for details! And did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out! Fools for Love Helen Schulman ’83 “The author’s smart eye for detail and bold characterizations make for an entertaining affair,” says a Publishers Weekly review of this collection of short stories that delve into a variety of relationships and liaisons. The tales were published over the past three decades, with some serving as the basis for longer works by the best-selling novelist, who’s also a tenured professor at The New School. The title story takes its name from the classic Sam Shepard drama Fool for Love, about the doomed romance between two volatile characters who may or may not be half-siblings. Here, Schulman’s narrator is a young playwright who’s forced to face a difficult truth about her marriage when her actor husband appears in an experimental, same-sex version of the play. Other stories in the collection follow the poetry-driven romance between a single mom and an Orthodox rabbi in Paris, and the tale of a widow who pursues sexual adventure after finding her late husband’s explicit diaries. “In multiple stories, people come back from the dead,” Kirkus observes, “and everywhere, there are sentences to make you laugh.” Intersections Amy Wang Manning ’90 Manning (working under the byline Amy Wang) is a coeditor of this compendium, subtitled A Journalistic History of Asian Pacific America. It chronicles the contributions that reporters and editors of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) descent have made to the coverage of such major stories as the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin—the victim of an anti-Asian hate crime—and the 2023 Maui wildfires. It also features profiles of more than a dozen notable journalists, including news anchor Connie Chung and longtime NBC News reporter Ann Curry. The book project was inspired by the 40th anniversary of the Asian American Journalists Association, which was founded in 1981. Manning, a veteran reporter and editor, is a former president of its chapter in Portland, OR, and founding president of its Philadelphia chapter. While the association is known as a force in the industry, Manning notes on its website, less recognized is the role that its members and other AAPI journalists have played in recording Asian Pacific American history. “This book seeks to tell some of those stories,” she says. “It’s the book I wish I’d had during my journalism career.” The New Voice of God Margaret Bender ’85 Bender’s previous works include Signs of Cherokee Culture and Linguistic Diversity in the South. Her latest nonfiction book examines how Christian missionaries translated the Bible into the Cherokee language at the turn of the 18th century—and the religious and cultural impacts of that translation. “While the introduction of Christianity shaped Cherokee communicative practices and culture,” says the publisher, the University of Oklahoma Press, “the Cherokee language also reshaped the Bible to reflect a definitive Native worldview.” An Arts & Sciences alum, Bender is an anthropology professor and department chair at Wake Forest University; her coauthor is a fluent Cherokee speaker. Their volume focuses on three books of the Bible—Genesis, John, and Matthew—demonstrating, the publisher says, “how Christianity, written in and on Cherokee terms, can be uniquely and distinctly Cherokee, while remaining undeniably Christian.” Stories You May Like Here’s the Scoop: Earl Grey-Flavored Ice Cream Wins Annual Contest Reunion ’22 Photo Tour: The Hill Is Alive with Big Red Spirit Into the Wild Magic Michelle Knudsen ’95 Knudsen is the author of more than 50 books for young readers, including Library Lion—a New York Times bestseller that Time magazine called one of the 100 best children’s books of all time. Her latest, aimed at middle-grade readers, follows a lonely, bullied 11-year-old named Bevvy who hopes to make friends with a new girl named Cat. Bevvy is a fan of fantasy novels, escaping into them as a way to forget her troubles. So when Cat responds to a crisis by opening a portal to another world and Bevvy follows her, it might seem like a dream come true—except that the place they enter is facing a war between practitioners of different kinds of magic, and the two girls are trapped there. “In this spirited magical adventure, Knudsen puts a new spin on fantasy elements such as unicorns as well as contemporary ideas around transportation (some characters travel via giant moth),” says Publishers Weekly. “Bevvy is a compassionate, compelling lead across a surprise-packed plot that doesn’t shy away from such heady topics as the ethical use of magic.” Carmen in Diaspora Jennifer Wilks, PhD ’03 Wilks, who earned a doctorate in comparative literature on the Hill, is on the faculty at the University of Texas, Austin. Her scholarly book—subtitled Adaptation, Race, and Opera’s Most Famous Character—is a cultural history of versions of Carmen, the classic work about the passionate and tragic romances of a Romani woman who works in a cigarette factory. The character of Carmen first appeared in an 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée; Georges Bizet’s opera debuted in 1875. Wilks examines adaptations in which she is portrayed as a woman of African descent, such as the movie musical Carmen Jones, for which Dorothy Dandrige earned an Oscar nomination. Other productions that Wilks discusses include the TV movie Carmen: A Hip Hopera, starring Beyoncé Knowles; the film Karmen Geï, which reimagines the character in contemporary Senegal; and the musical Carmen la Cubana, set in Havana just before the Cuban revolution. “The Carmen figure has functioned not only as an object of fascination,” Wilks writes, “but also as a barometer against which to measure identity.” The Kidney and the Cane Alex Nading “As a global reconfiguration of the norms and practices of medical and environmental science, planetary health still remains something of an aspiration,” writes Nading, an associate professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences. “But as a grassroots project, it has already begun, in an unlikely place: on the edge of the sugarcane zone.” Nading’s nonfiction book chronicles his fieldwork in Nicaragua, where he studied the impacts of the cane industry on plantation workers. As he relates, the region has seen an epidemic of what’s known as “chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes,” or CKDnt. “Unknown before the late 1990s, this disease has sickened and killed thousands of sugarcane plantation workers,” states the publisher, Duke University Press. “Scientific studies link the disease to rises in mean average annual temperatures, chronic water scarcity, and the overuse of toxic agrochemicals.” As Nading writes, CKDnt is now understood to be a consequence of a warming planet; in the book, he reports efforts by researchers and activists to understand the disease and protect lives. “What is happening to the kidneys of sugarcane workers is not a result of climate change,” he writes. “It is climate change.” To submit your book for consideration, email cornellians@cornell.edu. Please note that to be included, books must be recently published by a conventional publisher—not self published, pay-to-publish, publish on demand, partner-published, or similar—and be of interest to a general audience. Books not featured will be forwarded to Class Notes. Published October 21, 2025 Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Class Year Email * Save my name, email, and class year in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ Other stories You may like Bear Hugs Alum’s Brand Offers Tasty Treats—Safe from Common Allergens Cornelliana April Fool! ‘Daily Sun’ Parodies Poke Fun at Life on the Hill Students Seal and Serpent Continues its Tradition of Independence