Another collection of weird speculative literary short-stories – seemingly my go-to type for short fiction in the last year or two. It’s mostly about the characters, of course, but you’ll also find some time travel, a few fossils from sentient wolverine otter-ish things that lived millions of years before humans, the odd mildly irritating haunting …
A look at the ways in which, in Western societies, binaries organize our thinking and our lives, and at ways we can navigate and perhaps at moments move beyond them. Clever and very accessible, though not without its limitations. I’ve read two books by one of the authors (Barker) before, one focused on relationships and …
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. I like the author – I’ve enjoyed her acting and her range of online projects, as well as her memoir a few years back. I also read a lot of books about process – this one frames it as process related to “creativity” rather …
Essays about schizophrenia and related conditions. Written by a multiple-award winning author (and highly skilled essayist) with a schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. Draws heavily on memoir, of course. Intense, powerful, honest, sometimes hard to read, occasionally funny, and very well written. I can imagine it would be a topic where it would be easy to overdo …
Memoir shading into dream, everyday life into imagination that reveals truths as it goes beyond fact. Meditations that are melancholy, even bleak, with age and the looming deaths of friends and the state of America in 2016, but that are also, through their weariness, curious and playful and fully engaged with life. I love Smith’s …
Second and latest book in what promises to be a lengthy series. In my review of book one, I desribed it as “sufficiently akin to *Harry Potter* in premise and story to bear the comparison, but not so similar that you feel like you’ve read it before,” and that assessment holds in book two. It’s …
A very thoughtful, very well-written book by an artist who lives in California’s Bay Area. A self-proclaimed “field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy” (xi) that is “not anti-technology” but that is “obviously anti-capiatlist” (xii). A book about why we might want to resist the latest generation …
It is early winter in an Ojibwe community in northern Ontario, and all of the external infrastructure – electricity, internet, phone – goes out, all at once. Though all of these systems are relatively recent and precarious this far north, it soon becomes clear that this was not some random, localized blip but something general …
Essays that use memoir in a mode the author describes as “fictionalized nonfiction” (20) to explore migration, (non)belonging, becoming, and the hypocrisies, indignities, and violence of white-supremacist, colonial, multi-cultural Canada. The author was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, grew up in Edmonton, has lived in and travelled to many parts of Canada, and for many …
[James C. Scott. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.] A classic from a political scientist of anarchist proclivities doing what amounts to anthropology and studying the fine-grained class relations in a peasant village in Malaysia in the late ’70s and early ’80s, in the …