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 …
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 …