Ariadne’s Crossword Library, July 2026

ACL Grid: 13 mins; Meta: 10 mins [5.00 avg; 1 rating] rate it

Greetings from Australia: Ben, again, with the July release from Ariadne’s Crossword Library. The run of guest appearances appears to be at an end (for the moment) and we have a puzzle from series editor Emma Oxford! This month the puzzle, with a 16×15 grid, is entitled “State of Communication”; and the meta answer is a novel published in the 1980s whose title would make a good sixth theme answer.

As I was filling in the grid, the theme format became pretty obvious: a US state either preceded or followed by a letter from the NATO phonetic alphabet:

• 18A. {Subject of the 1992 book “The Most Southern Place on Earth”} MISSISSIPPI DELTA
• 24A. {Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio, famously} NEW YORK YANKEE
• 41A. {City a little over 60 miles southeast of Fort Wayne, Indiana} LIMA OHIO
• 53A. {Brewing company counterintuitively headquartered in California} SIERRA NEVADA
• 64A. {2015 Chris Stapleton hit with the lyric “And honey, I stayed stoned on your love all the time”} TENNESSEE WHISKEY

Unfortunately, nothing immediately came to mind when I tried to think of novels from the 1980s with a title that follows the template. So I cast my eye down a list of the NATO letters and nothing really popped. Then I did the same with US states, and when I got to New Hampshire, something clicked: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE. A quick Goodreads search revealed that, yes, a novel of that name (with an initial “The”, though) by John Irving was published in 1981. So that’s the likely answer.

Thanks to Emma for a getting back into constructor mode and giving us a cool meta puzzle!