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, …
Graphic memoir. I’ve read a couple of graphic novels by the author, but picked this up somewhat randomly not so much for fannish reasons but because I figured it would be a light and quick read. And it was. Drawing largely from material she has previously published online, it follows her life from 2011 to …
I don’t pay a lot of attention to literary awards for the most part, but the one exception that I regularly make is what used to be called the Tiptree Award and is now the Otherwise Award, the tagline for which is “an award encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender.” I picked this book …
A scholarly history of the social and cultural origins of sound reproduction. Very much not an effort to tell a straightforward, linear story about the history of telegraphy, telephony, broadcasting, and recording, but rather draws selectively and nonlinearly from the decades before such tech was introduced and the early decades after to push readers to …
Memoir. Place, desire, compulsion, shame, relationships ending and beginning, abuse, family history, faith. And especially place. The place that it is, especially, is Epping Forest, a 2400 hectare former royal forest in the UK that straddles the border between London and Essex. It is other places too, but particularly there. The author broods and reflects. …
Based on stories of the rogarou, a figure something like a werewolf that haunts Metis communities. Set in such a community on Georgian Bay in Ontario, following a woman whose husband suddenly disappeared almost a year ago. At the beginning of the book, she encounters someone who looks just like him but seems to be …
A scholarly examination of “told-to” narratives in the Canadian context, with some longer-ago history but mostly between the 1970s and 1990s. The told-to narrative is an old form that is of particular relevance to colonial contexts, in which white settler scholars and writers have produced written texts from oral stories told to them by Indigienous …