Literary fiction. Short stories. I don’t generally orient my reading via prizes, but the fact that this collection won the latest Giller Prize is probably why it was prominent enough in my awareness that, after my partner borrowed it from a colleague, I spontaneously picked it up and read it as well. Stories of everyday …
Claire Bodkin and Sara Alavian are both physicians in Hamilton, Ontario. They are also part of an ad hoc group of health workers from different parts of Canada with an interest in prison abolitionist politics. Scott Neigh interviews them about what it means to think about prison abolition in the context of health care, and …
Thank-you to Sarah of Nuance and pihêsiw of The Native Youth Sexual Health Network for the interview just now about sexual and reproductive health and rights centering Black and Indigenous youth, and SRH Week 2021! Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio in the coming weeks.
Science fantasy. In a post-apocalyptic Sudan, a child of a rape that happened as part of war-slash-genocide develops powerful magic as she grows up, and seeks to confront both the threat to her and the threat to her people. I’ve read a bunch of books by Okorafor – her Binti series and her Akata series …
First Talking Radical Radio interview of 2021! Just spoke to Michelle and Bill, who are part of a group in South Bruce, Ontario, trying to stop a high-level radioactive waste storage facility from being put in their community. Listen for it in a few weeks!
Maya Adachi and Kota Kimura are members of the Toronto-based Japanese Canadians for Social Justice. Scott Neigh interviews them about the group’s origins, its expansive vision of solidarity, and its involvement in struggles on the ground. In 2018, famous Japanese-Canadian poet and novelist Joy Kogawa brought together a number of people that she knew in …
YA fantasy. This author’s take on the secret British magic school and the ‘chosen one.’ Was pretty skeptical before I picked it up, but it drew me in fairly quickly. It manages a good balance of taking things seriously and poking a little bit of fun at, ahem, a certain similar series. The book enters …
Second edition from 2014 of a classic of US liberalism first released in the early George W. Bush years. The author is a cognitive scientist who has devoted much of his career to applying the findings of experimental neuroscience to politics. He has published a bunch of scholarly work along these lines too, but this …
Samantha Smith, Leslie Scott, and Robert Crooks are renters and current or former residents of the West Broadway neighbourhood in Winnipeg. They are also active members of the West Broadway Tenants Committee, a grassroots group of renters. Scott Neigh interviews them about the committee’s work organizing for tenant justice and building tenant power to oppose …
History. A reexamination of the Black civil rights movement in the US. The conventional narrative frames it as a struggle that took place from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and that involved pushing the US nation and state to more completely live up to the supposed high principles of its founding by admitting Black people …