Science fiction and fantasy, all at once. As a cover blurb from a prominent genre author puts it, “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” Which on the one hand neatly captures some of the book’s key elements, but on the other hand doesn’t really capture its essence. I of course went into …
Historical fiction with a dash of the fantasical. Set in the New York underworld of the ’30s and ’40s. Begins from the perspective of a light-skinned Black woman passing as white who has for years been working for a Manhattan mob boss as a killer. In doing so, she is making use of her version …
A classic work (originally published in 1990) theorizing aesthetics and politics starting from the ways in which the experiences of people in the Caribbean have historically been organized. By a renowned intellectual and poet from Martinique. Translated from French (and not just any French, but a French infused with Creole and torqued through linguistic innovation …
Short stories. Literary. Weird. Translated from Japanese. Many of the stories feature some ordinary complaint in the life of an ordinary woman – to do with work, to do with a relationship, or something else – that is intertwined with some aspect of the world behaving in some manner that is different than we would …
Hardboiled detective fiction meets secret wizarding school fiction. A hard-drinking, mediocre, non-magical PI gets hired to solve a murder at the school for teens who can do magic where her estranged and very much magical twin sister is on staff. The mystery is pretty good, but I think the book is really more about the …
Memoir. By a well-known Antiguan-American novelist. Focused on her gardening. Perhaps an odd choice for me, given that I have never read any of Kincaid’s novels (though I do remember carrying stacks of them when I briefly worked at a campus bookstore many years ago) and that I am not a gardener (though I dabbled …
History of six major social reform movements in the United States from the early 19th to mid 20th centuries – abolitionism, populism, progressivism, the so-called “first wave” of the women’s movement, the labour movement, and the socialist and communist movements. The focus is how the white-dominated core of each related to racism, and how Black …
YA contemporary at heart, though it dabbles a bit in fantasy, mystery, and fairy tale. A tiny island off the east coast of a continent that is implied but not stated to be North America, an island known only for a rare bird that nests there in the summer and that draws a small but …
Sci-fi, I guess, of the 15-minutes-into-the-future variety. A group of oddball friends and the new kid in school, a girl who was a minor celebrity because her mother left her right after she was born to be part of the crew of the first ever space mission to leave the solar system – a long, …
By a prominent US scholar of slavery. A mixture of history, memoir, and essay. Organized around an extended stay in Ghana and an exploration of the key sites of the slave trade there. An intense, often painful meditation on loss, forgetting, remembering, legacies of relentless violence, and the impossibility of return. Focused to a significant …