Memoir that sometimes reads like essays, with a heavy emphasis on linguistics. Written by a white English woman who is a literary translator between Japanese and English. Orbits around her time living in Japan when she was younger, and her complicated, ambivalent trajectory with Japanese nation, culture, and language. Reflects, through all of that, on …
Middle grade contemporary. The protagonist, Hazel, is a 13 year-old girl, an older sister, and a daughter of a single mom. Hazel is deeply traumatized from the kayaking accident two years before that killed her other mom but spared her. Since then, she and her mom and her sister have been moving a lot, living …
Science fiction. Starts fifteen minutes into the future and extends for several decades, focusing on the climate crisis at a global scale. Begins with a powerful chapter describing in an embodied way one character’s experience of a devastating heat wave that ultimately kills 20 million people – made all the more gripping and disturbing by …
Movement history. An interview-based and archival history of the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the United States in the late 1960s. It particularly focuses on the ways in which women’s liberation came out of the experiences of women active in the civil rights movement and in the new left student movement earlier in …
In this book, prominent migrant justice organizer Harsha Walia writes migration and borders into our understanding of how power works at a global level. In a clear rejection of shallow liberal conceptualizations of the issue, it looks to root causes and to the many ways migration and its regulation are intertwined with capitalism, settler colonialism, …
Literary fiction. The young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer protagonist is living in Winnipeg, supporting himself as a cybersex worker, and needs to raise enough money to get back to the reserve community where he grew up, for his stepfather’s funeral. The narrative wanders across the days he has in which to do this, and across his whole life. …
Scholarly collection. Earlier this year, I read and reviewed *The Racial Contract* by philosopher Charles Mills, which inserts the realities of global white supremacy into the social contract tradition within political philosophy. As I said then, I’m not super interested in the social contract as a way of understanding the world, but one of the …
YA contemporary. Canadian. Two teen cousins who live on opposite coasts are brought together in Ontario by the death of their grandfather. After the funeral, they find themselves together at the family cottage that neither has been to since they were kids. Both are queer and Toronto Pride weekend is fast approaching, and they (plus …
Science fiction. Set in Nigeria with the main timeline in 2066 and flashbacks to earlier moments. Alien life arrived on earth at least 50 years prior, but just *life*, most readily observably fungal life, and not little green people or slender grey entities in space ships or anything like that. Other than North America sealing …
Sci-fi contemporary novella. Sequel to Finna, featuring low-wage precarious retail employees of the same Ikea-esque big-box chain whose stores, because of the bizarre physics of their layout, sometimes connect with parallel worlds. This one begins, according to the author in the Acknowledgments section, from that one “otherwise inoffensive coworker that still somehow manages to earn …