Just finished an interview with Max from Bricks & Glitter, a radical queer community arts festival based in Toronto focused on “celebrating two-spirit, trans and queer talent, ingenuity, caring, anger, and abundance.” Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio in a few weeks!
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. …
By Toronto-based writer and performer Kai Cheng Thom. Essays interspersed with poems. Smart. Thoughtful. Challenging. Names not just the violence of the mainstream but its more insidious correlates within communities that style themselves as being of marginalized belonging and/or of resistance. Less ornate in its writing than I for some reason (perhaps because the author …
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 …
Imtiaz Popat is a therapeutic counsellor in Vancouver. He is also the coordinator of the local chapter of Salaam: Queer Muslim Community, and he has played a central role in the Two-Spirit and LGBT People of Colour Alliance and the Coalition Against Bigotry – Pacific. Scott Neigh interviews him about his extensive work against oppression …
Young adult contemporary. Read it because I read a middle-grade book by the same author earlier in the year and really liked it. Focused on a teen girl and her relationship with her traumatized, addicted, and likely mentally ill mother. It captures something real and overwhelming and painful about that experience, and captures it well. …
Did not at all intend this, but somehow this is my second LA-based, relationship-focused contemporary which draws heavily on the film industry of this year. Felt a little more substantive in some respects than a lot of the non-literary contemporaries I’ve read in the last few years. I liked the characters and the relationships and …
Memoir. Short. Focused on the body. Thoughtful and theoretical and nonlinear and lyrical, a la Maggie Nelson (who also happened to blurb it). Ran across it while I was investigating another book and justified picking it up with the idea that it might be vaguely relevant to some work that I’m doing. It’s not, sadly, …