The original version of this newsletter was sent out on Tuesday, June 9.
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Hello, fellow bookworms!
With the S.B. Writers’ Conference approaching (June 21-26) and UCSB Arts & Lectures unveiling the lineup for their 2026-2027 season, the rest of the year is shaping up to be full of events to satiate any bookworm’s hunger.
Speaking of, this week, our intrepid reporter Christina McDermott brings us a collection of books that heavily feature hunger as a theme. Take a taste of these books to go with your lemonade, watermelon, corn on the cob, or any other summer deliciousness you may be enjoying. (June gloom notwithstanding — it’s summer in my book!)
Happy reading!
—Tessa, allbooked@independent.com
Lately, I’ve been thinking about hunger, both literally and metaphorically. Maybe, inevitably, news stories are seeping into my reflections. I spent the better part of the last two weeks covering the changes to SNAP, the country’s largest federal food assistance program, that risk leaving hundreds of thousands of people across the country hungry. At the same time, I followed primary election coverage, both locally and nationally, as politicians clamored for power or change (or both). And, as a reprieve from the news, I spent my commutes listening to vampire novels, which somehow still brought me back to hunger.
Before writing this review, I looked at a list of the books I have read in the last six months. Three titles caught my eye: three works of fiction where hunger functions as the major motif.
Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb
Sanora Babb wrote Whose Names Are Unknown in the 1930s, as millions of people across the country struggled to eat. The novel starts in the Oklahoma panhandle, where unrelenting dust storms destroy small farmers’ crops again and again, year over year. The reader meets the Dunnes, who live in a dugout. Farmer Milt Dunne struggles to grow corn or wheat with his father-in-law, Konkie. Milt’s wife, Julia Dunne, labors to keep the home, with its dirt floor, clean. Their daughters Lonnie and Myra cycle through bouts of illness, periods of chores, and spans of schooling.
Eventually, the family, like tens of thousands of families, heads west to California on the promise of steady work and meals. They’re greeted with abusive farm conglomerates and widespread distrust. And still, while they pick the food their bosses eat, they are hungry, so hungry that some of them grow too weak to move.
The novel criticizes big businesses and predatory banks while showing the organizing power of the working class (unsurprising, perhaps, for Babb, who was a member of the communist party for 11 years). Hunger becomes a metaphor for greed and the instability it risks creating.
“I hope you blow up and bust with your gluttony,” one character tells a bank representative, later adding, “I hope all the banks in America eat themselves to death. We poor people will then have to eat the corpse. We’ll be good and hungry by then. Understand? Good and hungry.”
Whose Names Are Unknown may sound like a copycat of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Actually, scholars believe Steinbeck used Babb’s research forhis work. Babb traveled to migrant camps in 1938 as part of her work with the government’s Farm Security Administration. She documented the lives and stories of people she met there. Without her knowledge, her supervisor, a man named Tom Collins, shared her journals and notes with already well-known writer John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. Whose Names Are Unknown was shelved, and not published until 2004.
I listened to the audiobook version of this novel. While occasionally pedantic, it is full of moments so intimate, tender, and sad that they made me cry over the dishes I washed from my own dinner.
The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
“In fifteen days, there will be no food in Aymar Castle.”
So starts Caitlin Starling’s 2025 horror-fantasy novel, The Starving Saints. The novel follows three people trapped in the besieged castle walls of a fantasy land — a celebrated knight, a scientist-witch, and a peasant girl. Hope has shriveled as the castle’s people, “packed in, one atop the other,” struggle to survive on increasingly meager rations. Disquiet and civil unrest threatens the castle’s inert king. Death is imminent. That is, until strange and luminous beings, looking like the people’s deities suddenly appear and provide, for their allegiance, banquets of unending food, seemingly from nothing.
Except it’s not from nothing. The strange creatures (they are far from human) are consuming the castle as its people descend into blind allegiance and mayhem. The glut of the desperate in Aymar Castle (and every character is desperate) threatens total destruction. Our three protagonists must decide whether to flee or fight.
The Starving Saints sits firmly in the world of fantasy, but its wider metaphor — that people hungry for hope will back a ruler so terrible she may destroy them — gave me pause. The physical hunger of the characters does not read like the grounded realism of Babb’s novel, but it does show the reader how that hunger is weaponized through deceit.
Never in Hungerstone is anyone truly hungry for food. Lenore Crowther, a wealthy aristocrat in 19th-century England, contends with a constant churn of anxiety and ennui, punctuated by bouts of mysterious illness. Her husband, Henry, is a wealthy mogul who buys a decrepit mansion and surrounding grounds in the moorland south of Sheffield. The estate is called Hungerstone.
There, seemingly by accident, the pair take on an unexpected houseguest: Carmilla Kerstein.
This novel, which takes the famous lesbian-coded vampire and places her as the principle supporting character, uses hunger as a metaphor for desire and liberty. Lenore is starving for company, for autonomy, for love and health. And, ever the dutiful wife, she is willing to let herself go hungry, to fade into the background.
At one point in the book, Carmilla brings Lenore to a Hungerstone, a stone in the river. Hungerstones, used in central Europe from the 15th to 19th century, warn of famine. A line on the stone shows when the river is too low, warning of drought.
But when Carmilla and Lenore stand by the stone, the river runs high — “unleashed,” Carmilla says.
And so Lenore begins to feed her hunger.
Vampires often serve to comment on hunger and desire, whether it’s for human blood, lust, or chaos. In Hungerstone, Carmilla is an agent of change, asking the reader to understand all the hunger that self-denial brings Lenore. Rather than the undead, Carmilla is the voice advocating for Lenore to live. There is food here, Carmilla seems to say, so why do you choose to starve?
—Christina McDermott
FROM OUR PAGES
We’ve had some great author visits and interviews recently, so don’t miss out. Here is some of our book-related coverage from the last two weeks! Read all this and more at Independent.com.
“Graphic Novel Energy Meets Fascinating Fish Facts in Gonzo Ichthyology” by Matt Kettmann
“Bloomsday Returns to Santa Barbara with New Stage, Same Literary Spirit” by Tiana Molony
UPCOMING BOOK EVENTS
Below, you will find a few bookish events coming up in Santa Barbara. If you are hosting a bookish event in Santa Barbara, be sure to submit the event to our online events calendar.
SBMM Book Club
Tuesday, June 9, 10 a.m. | S.B. Maritime Museum
S.B. Eastside Library Bilingual Songs & Stories for Kids
Tuesday, June 9, 11 a.m. | Eastside Library
The Narrative Exchange Presents Lunch with an Author: Lisa Genova
Wednesday, June 10, noon-2 p.m. | Magic Hour, Ojai
Lit on the Lawn
Wednesday, June 10, 1 p.m. | Buellton Library
S.B. Central Library Romance Book Club
Wednesday, June 10, 5:30 p.m. | S.B. Central Library
Book Talk & Signing: John La Puma, MD, Indoor Epidemic
Thursday, June 11, 6 p.m. | Chaucer’s Books
Godmothers Gather: Rachel Hochhauser, Lady Tremaine
Thursday, June 11, 6 p.m. | Godmothers
Buellton Library Bookworms
Friday, June 12, 1 p.m. | Buellton Library
S.B. Central Library Sensory-Friendly Storytime
Friday, June 12, 4:45 p.m. | S.B. Central Library
Godmothers Gather: Natalie Ellis & Jamie Kern Lima, The Freedom-Based Business Method
Friday, June 12, 6 p.m. | Godmothers
Storytime at the Sea Center
Saturday, June 13, 10:30 a.m. | S.B. Museum of Natural History Sea Center
Buellton Library Wiggly Storytime
Saturday, June 13, 11 a.m. | Buellton Library
Godmothers Storytime: Little G’s: The Greatest Bedtime Story Ever
Saturday, June 13, 11 a.m. | Godmothers
Beach Book Club
Saturday, June 13, 2 p.m. | Goleta Beach
Godmothers Gather: Rebecca Chace, Talking to the Wolf
Sunday, June 14, 6 p.m. | Godmothers
Buellton Library Wiggly Storytime
Tuesday, June 15, 10:30 a.m. | Buellton Library
S.B. Eastside Library Bilingual Songs & Stories for Kids
Tuesday, June 16, 11 a.m. | Eastside Library
Godmothers Gather: The Elsewhere Book Club: Marie NDiaye, The Witch
Tuesday, June 16, 5:30 p.m. | Godmothers
Alhecama Theatre Fifth Annual Bloomsday!
Tuesday, June 16, 6 p.m. | Alhecama Theatre
Book Talk & Signing: Teri Siri, Pretty for a Crippled Girl
Tuesday, June 16, 6 p.m. | Chaucer’s Books
Lit on the Lawn
Wednesday, June 17, 1 p.m. | Buellton Library
Godmothers Gather: Danielle Crittenden, Dispatches from Grief
Wednesday, June 17, 6 p.m. | Godmothers
Montecito Library Poetry Club
Thursday, June 18, 10 a.m. | Montecito Library
Trail Talks: Open Mic
Thursday, June 18, 6:30 p.m. | S.B. Central Library
Storytime at the Sea Center
Saturday, June 20, 10:30 a.m. | S.B. Museum of Natural History Sea Center
Godmothers Storytime: Little G’s: Sabrina Hahn, The Wise Pickle
Saturday, June 20, 11 a.m. | Godmothers
Goleta Community Center Horror Book Club: Tananarive Due, The Reformatory
Saturday, June 20, 1 p.m. | Goleta Community Center
Godmothers Gather: Eddie Huang, Come Undone
Saturday, June 20, 6 p.m. | Godmothers
Storytime at the Sea Center
Sunday, June 21, 10:30 a.m. | S.B. Museum of Natural History Sea Center
Goleta Valley Library Poetry Club
Sunday, June 21, 2 p.m. | Goleta Community Center
Godmothers Gather: Walter Mosley & Shaka Senghor, Ghalen: A Romance in Black
Sunday, June 21, 6 p.m. | Godmothers
Book Launch Event: You Don’t Need a Calling by Damon Garcia
Monday, June 22, 6 p.m. | Third Window Brewing Co.
Poetry Reading: Hannah Turner, The Clarity of Chaos
Monday, June 22, 6 p.m. | Chaucer’s Books
Godmothers Gather: Stacey Lindsay, Being 40
Monday, June 22, 6 p.m. | Godmothers
S.B. SPOTLIGHT
We at the Independent get many books sent to us by area authors, sometimes too many! It’s practically impossible for us to read and review them all, but just because we are busy bees does not mean that they aren’t worth the attention. In an attempt to not completely drop the ball, we have compiled a list of books here that are either written by a Santa Barbara author, feature someone in our community, or have another tie to Santa Barbara. I urge you to look through this list. Perhaps you will find your new favorite read!
The following are the most recent titles that have been sent to us.
The USCGC Cutter Eagle: The Legacy of the Coast Guard’s Flagship by Will Sofrin
The Earth Is Flat?! And Other Things My Mother Taught Me: How a Childhood in the Evangelical Church Became an Adulthood in Conspiracy Theories by Susan Huckle
You Don’t Need a Calling: An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto for a Life of Purpose by Damon Garcia
If you are a local author and would like us to feature your book in this section, please email allbooked@independent.com with the subject line “S.B. Spotlight.”
Book Reviews Courtesy of CALIFORNIA REVIEW OF BOOKS*
Thanks to the generous contributions of David Starkey, Brian Tanguay and their team of reviewers at California Review of Books, we are able to provide a steady stream of book reviews via our content partnership. Recent reviews at Independent.com include:
Gerhard Richter, edited by Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota; review by David Starkey
The Art of Becoming a Citizen: a Memoir by Gail Godwin; review by David Starkey
*At the present time, all of the Independent’s book reviews are provided in collaboration with California Review of Books (calirb.com).
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