Novella. Our world but speculative – a bit science fictional, a bit fantastical, it’s not entirely clear, but our violent oppressive world to the core. Starts on the same day as the uprising ignited by the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, and runs to the metaphorical twenty minutes into the future. …
Scholarly. Edited collection. Pieces from a range of authors examining how people in different social movements and communities-in-struggle have engaged with material and ideas from earlier movements and made use of them in political education and struggle in the present. Read it because I thought it might be useful to something I’m working on. Turns …
Short stories. Speculative fiction. From Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer authors. A range of kinds of stories, writing, and tones in what is a relatively short collection. Most, though, start in one way or another from a recognition that for many the apocalypse has already happened and is still happening, and that survival towards a more liveable …
The last of my current work-related re-reads, so again I’ll keep my comments brief. I originally read this one quite a bit more recently than the others – only about five years ago – and not only did I do my usual review but I actually interviewed the author about this book and related things …
Literary fiction. A family novel focused on a mother and her twin daughters. The mother, for her entire life, is seen by most as not-quite-right or worse, though her own narrative of things is rather different. And the twins, one straight and one queer, are sent on very different trajectories after a “bad thing” happens …
Scholarly. Focused on the work of radical Jamaican intellectual Sylvia Wynter. Includes a lengthy dialogue between the editor and Wynter that explores key elements of her work and thought, and then a series of essays which do a mix of laying out the basics, applying her work in specific areas, and extending it in various …
Lyric memoir. By a queer Cree poet, writer, scholar. Intense, compelling. Memory, poetry, theory, love, lust, rage, grief, joy, opacity, play. Keenly situated in the painful space between worlds violently unmade and worlds straining to grow. As is often true with this kind of book, I feel a pull to find a “right way” to …
Fantasy novella. A world reminiscent of imperial China. A cleric from a monastic order devoted to preserving history arrives, along with their talking bird-like companion with perfect recall, at what had been the late empress’ home while she was in internal exile many years before. They encounter an old woman who, as they catalogue the …
Literary fiction with fantastical elements. The author is from Argentina and the book was translated from Spanish. A girl in a poor neighbourhood of Buenos Aires responds to her mother’s death by compulsively eating dirt. As she gets older, it becomes clear that when she eats earth associated with someone who has been murdered or …
Scholarly. Anthropology, Indigenous studies. The book emerges from ethnographic research conducted among Mohawk people from Kahnawà:ke, and the author herself is Mohawk and from Kahnawà:ke. Unlike a lot of anthropological research, the book takes up questions of key concern to the community itself – things like membership, belonging, and borders – in the context of …