I really like Federici’s work, and was keen to get my hands on this new collection of essays touching in one way or another on the body, particularly the capitalist transformation of the body. I found it to be a bit peculiar – not bad, necessarily, but peculiar. Partly, that’s less about the book than …
Sci-fi. Late 22nd century. On an earth ravaged by nuclear war and climate change, after the richer and whiter nations have largely left for space-based colonies while retaining a neocolonial role in affairs on earth. Set during war between the newly-independent Igbo people of Biafra and the Nigeria from which they seceded. According to the …
Sci-fi. Time travel. Near-future (and near-past, and distant-past, and really-distant-past) almost-Earth. Feminist. Very clever – in world-building, in how it deals with time-travel, in its politics. Quite liked the writing too. But it was a bit disappointing in terms of storytelling. In particular, there were a handful of scenes, mostly early on but a couple …
Memoir. By a prominent French public intellectual of the left (whom I had not heard of until a friend recommended this book to me). He first made a name for himself with an important biography of Michel Foucault, cemented his reputation by producing some of the foundational scholarly work in gay studies in the French …
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 …