Category: Uncategorized
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PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT for LADY SAFFLOWER and eBOOK SALE!
Hello, my dear readers! I am so pleased to let you know that my (seventh!) novel, Lady Safflower, is coming out THIS FRIDAY, June 26th, 2026! Join me for a brand new historical setting (medieval Heian Japan) and cast of characters (we’ll have emperors, ladies, and Buddhist monks—but also fox spirits, demonic courtesans, and tofu-loving…
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Monks, Masons, and Mozart: Enlightenment Fiction in The Life of Sethos
In my post about Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels, I intimated that the Enlightenment had a bit of a fictional literature problem. In the broad strokes, it’s just very hard to create compelling fiction if you were a serious adherent of the period’s new cult of reason (if not the literal Cult of Reason…) and science. At…
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The World as ‘We’: The 59th Carnegie International
Ooh boy, folks, we are back with another museum entry and it is a doozy! Because it has already(!) been four years, and North America’s longest-running contemporary international art exhibition is back again at CMOA for its fifty-ninth iteration! I actually went at the start of the month during opening week, but as that was…
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Currying Flavor: A Taste of Medieval Cooking
Since it’s been over a year since I taste tested garum for y’all, this week I wanted to do another semi-interactive food entry. But this time around, I wanted to take a peek at some medieval cuisine, and even trying my hand at a recipe reproduction from one of the seminal cookbooks of the era:…
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Guess Who’s Back, Back Again?: Ten More Unusual and Obscure Egyptian Gods (Round 3)
Time flies when you’re having fun(?), so it’s already been two years since we last revisited that endless well that is the Egyptian pantheon, and since the search engines and AI bots can’t get enough of this as a topic, we’re going to dive back in with ten more lesser-known gods and goddesses! 10) Anukis…
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Russian Rashōmon: The Tolstoys’ Kreutzer Sonatas
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “Some families will literally write four different versions of The Kreutzer Sonata rather than go to therapy…” – Me Lev Tolstoy’s 1889 work The Kreutzer Sonata is one of those famous, top-cited short stories that tends…
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War and Werther: Napoleon the Novelist
Like all men, he desired happiness, but he had found only glory.” – Clisson and Eugénie “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” – (probably) misattributed to Cicero Did you know that Napoleon Bonaparte wrote a book? Well, “book” is a bit of an oversell—more of a…
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Full Mantua Alchemist: The Magical Afterlife of Virgil
“In all of the foregoing there has been no room for that other and greater magic of Virgil’s perennially lovely verse. This phenomenon indeed surpasses all feats of mere thaumaturgy, and transports the thoughtful mind to the realms of the purest genius. This learned poet was in sober truth a mage; this ‘wielder of the…
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Preview for LADY SAFFLOWER
I’ve been a bit quiet on the writing front since Daughter of Scorpions came out last year—so quiet that some of you might have thought maybe I was taking a year off book-wise. (Un)fortunately for all of you, that is not the case, and I am eyeballs deep on my copyedit review of my next…
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Alexandria’s Winter Queen: The Untamed Life and Death of Arsinoë IV (Part 2)
Okay, folks, this week we are back with my girl Arsinoë and her insane family for Round Two of their shenanigans! When we last let our Ptolemies, they were standing over the headless remains of Pompey Magnus and awaiting the arrival of his rival/martial antagonist/ex-father-in-law/frenemy—namely, one Gaius Julius Caesar. Now, by this point, roughly 48…
Sarah Holz 