Middle-grade. Contemporary. The book opens with the 12 year-old Sunny St. James about to enter surgery for a long-awaited heart transplant. With a penchant for gallows humour, rash decisions, and secret poetry, Sunny is committed to seizing the opportunity presented by her new heart – in the face of painful friend-drama, the sudden return of …
A collection of short stories by one of the current giants of speculative fiction. A pretty wide range of lengths, tones, and kinds of stories. I think novel length work actually shows off her brilliance more effectively, but I definitely enjoyed this. One good measure of that is the fact that even with short story …
A revised and updated version (published in 2018) of Katsiaficas’ classic book (originally published in 1987) on the uprisings of 1968, notable as the first attempt to understand the peak years of the New Left in a truly global context. There are definitely some quirky elements to this book. I’m not convinced, for instance, that …
Sound studies. Indigenous sound studies, to be precise, by Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson. The centre of the work is consideration, through very close and careful attention to a range of works and performances, of the various ways in which settler art music and Indigenous music get put in relation and taken up. That might seem …
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 …
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 …
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 …
A book concerned with “positioning sound and its discourses in dialogue with contemporary struggles,” that attempts to seek out “ethical and agentive positions or tactics” grounded in “experiences we have of listening and being heard” (1). It does this by drawing on the scholarly area of sound studies and a range of other theoretical resources, …