Sidrah Ahmad-Chan and N.A. are members of Rivers of Hope, an organization based in Toronto whose “mission is to dismantle Islamophobia, racism, and all related forms of oppression” in order “to create a safer and more equitable world for us all.” Scott Neigh interviews them about Islamophobia in Canada and about the work they are doing to address it. …
A novella by a fairly new sci-fi/fantasy author whose debut short story collection I read earlier this year and liked. Features two twenty-somethings precariously employed in low-wage retail jobs in a big box store – a sort of low-rent Ikea knock-off – who just broke up a few days before. A customer wanders into one …
Contemporary fiction. Picked it up because I saw a few bookish people online speak well of it and I thought it might be a pleasant diversion, even if it’s a bit outside my usual range, and it mostly was. The story was pretty predictable but engagingly told. The writing did once in awhile go for …
Max ZB is a musician and photographer, and a member of the core organizing team for the Toronto-based queer and trans community arts festival Bricks and Glitter. Bricks and Glitter is a collective response to a lack in the present, and an insurgent act towards what the world could be. Its mission statement begins, “We are a trouble …
Just finished an interview with Sharon Gregson about the $10 a Day Child Care Campaign from the Coalition of Childcare Advocates of BC. Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio in a few weeks!
The last scholarly book I read left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth – despite encountering a handful of interesting ideas, overall it didn’t feel like a terribly good use of my time. Thankfully, this book has cleansed my metaphorical reading palate and proved to be both a fascinating read in its …
Gillian Müller has a long history of working as a crew member, particularly an assistant director, in Canada’s TV and film industry, and she currently works as a screenwriter. Tony Tran is an actor and writer, and he aspires to one day be showrunner. Scott Neigh interviews them about their involvement in BIPOC TV & Film, a grassroots organization of Black, …
Thank-you to radical scholar Shahrzad Mojab for the interview just now. We talked about the newly translated poem Lives Lost by Saeed Yousef, and about the politics of grassroots memory of oppression and resistance. Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio!
Short stories. Weird, creative, clearly influenced by both literary fiction and sci-fi. Pretty queer. The stories explore things like history and memory on a generation ship, a working-class teen on a cross-country road-trip with a rich woman in a car shaped like a whale, escaping anti-semitism in Europe and moving to America with a mechanical …
An English translation of a Persian poem remembering the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran – mostly people, both secular and religious, who supported the revolution but then faced repression by the new regime. Published by a small, new, not-for-profit, left publisher run by women of colour in Toronto, Trace Press. I read this …