Weird sci-fi. An invasion, of sorts, or an infection, or an infestation. An alien life form comes to earth, joins with humanity, and brings about a new world, a utopic world, a vaguely unsettling world, a world without the great harms that define ours, a world of community and met needs and amazing new tech …
Thank-you to Pierre and Tai of JusticeTrans (http://justicetrans.org) for the great interview just now about their work around increasing access to justice for trans people in Canada. Listen for it in a few weeks on @TalkingRadical Radio!
Kearie Daniel is a communications and public relations professional who focuses on equity consulting, as well as a podcaster and blogger. She is also a parent advocate and co-founder of the group Parents of Black Children. Scott Neigh interviews her about anti-Black racism in the school system and about how Parents of Black Children is …
YA historical fiction. I don’t read much historical fiction, but I’ve been a fan of this author since her first novel, the Cinderella retelling *Ash*, and I’ve followed her as she has worked her way across a range of genres. This book traces the story of a teen Chinese-American girl in 1950s San Francisco as …
Literary fiction. Draws, I think, on Nishnaabeg storytelling traditions, which I know little about. The building blocks of the book are units of text ranging from a sentence to a couple of pages, each focused on one of the book’s characters. These characters are human and not, and introduced in a way to unsettle the …
On February 1, 2021, Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, announced that it was filing for creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). It faces the likelihood of massive program cuts and job losses. Reuben Roth is a labour studies and sociology professor at Laurentian. Katlyn Kotila and Darius Garneau are both fourth-year undergraduate …
Fantastical absurdity and wry amusement at human (and nonhuman) foolishness. I read a scant handful of books from Pratchett’s famous Discworld series when I was a teen and enjoyed them, but they didn’t captivate me sufficiently for me to go out of my way to find more of them at the time. But recently, on …
Middle grade. Translated from Japanese. A classic that has also been made into an animated film, though I’m not familiar with it. Kiki is a witch. When a witch turns 13, she and her cat must fly on her broom from the town where she grew up to find a new town to be her …
Jonny Sopotiuk is a visual artist, a curator, and a community and labour organizer. Zandi Dandizette is a new media installation artist and an arts and culture worker. Both are founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union Co-operative (VALU CO-OP), a workplace owned and run democratically by its workers, and of the Arts and …
There’s a genre of scholarly left nonfiction which I think of as “capitalism and ____” which is organized around talking about capitalism as understood through some novel lens, with a specific focus, or highlighting some feature with hitherto underappreciated significance. I’ve read my share of these books, and I’m sure I’ll read more in the …