Literary fiction. Ranges from China to Salt Lake City to the back woods roads of the northern US, but mostly it orbits a pre-apocalyptic and apocalyptic New York City. Though this book was published a couple of years ago, the apocalypse in question is 2020-appropriate – a pandemic, in this case a fungal infection that …
A short nonfiction collection by Rebecca Solnit. Most of the contents originally appeared online between 2017 and 2019. The pieces fell roughly into three categories. Some focused relatively directly on the theme described by the book’s title, the relationship between power and stories. The second category, which overlapped with the first, included a range of …
A book about struggles for social change in the Muslim Middle East, mostly focused on Iran and Egypt but with scattered references to other countries as well. The first edition was written not long before the Arab Spring and laid out an analysis that didn’t quite predict the uprising but that described dynamic circumstances allowing …
Another collection of weird, fantastical short stories. (I certainly seem to have a type when it comes to short fiction, don’t I?) I first encountered this author a couple of years ago when she was the only person with two stories in a “best of” collection that I read, and they were also two of …
Good ol’ fashioned space opera. Told from the point of view of a former ship commander of a space exploration force now residing on the to-her alien planet where her new husband is a retired military officer and high-ranking nobleman’s son – she is pregnant and said husband has just been appointed regent for the …
YA. Set in a city in a world very much like our own. Except the city – no mention is made of broader polities of any sort – is a couple of decades past a revolution. And that revolution seems to have been based on prison abolitionist and transformative justice principles, though such terms are …
Literary and fantastical. Stories from the history of an empire that never was. Slow, vaguely dream-like, in quite a distinctive voice. Very much told in the form of storytelling, in the sense that it is as if they are being told orally by storytellers. Not high fantasy, which you might stereotypically expect when the words …
A multi-author collection edited by three of the core members of Black Lives Matter – Toronto. Personal essays, dialogues, scholarly essays, poetry, photo essays. Includes accounts of the iconic moments of BLM-TO’s founding and early years of action, but ranges far beyond in its exploration of Blackness and Black struggle in Canada today. I’m a …
YA contemporary. The book’s protagonist – who is Black, queer, and trans – is navigating all the stress and drama of adolescence at an arts-focused high school in Manhattan that his dad can hardly afford when an anonymous someone plasters pre-transition images hacked from his phone (accompanied by his deadname) all over the foyer of …
Literary fiction. I really like Brand’s writing but, for whatever reason, it has been quite a few years since I last read any, so I was very happy to sink my teeth into this one. The narrator describes three love affairs that take place as she attempts to finish her doctoral dissertation. As someone who …