The Poet and the Silk Girl – Satsuki Ina
At first glance, The Poet and the Silk Girl is richly visual, with many photographs and documents reproduced alongside the text. But it’s also a book about language: the familect of a second-generation couple and their children, and the therapeutic powers of translation and writing.
In its complex imbrication of queerness and heteropatriarchy, indigenous critique and colonial discourse, Pina stages the bizarre and beautiful workings of desire.
Nashrallah thoughtfully develops Muna’s erotic imagination, most significantly in her conjuring of Halim, but also in her changing relationship to her own body.
The Disaster Tourist – Yun Ko-Eun
Class is something we act out, and, in THE DISASTER TOURIST, Yun satirizes those who write the script.
OLDER BROTHER itself attests to grief’s power as a catalyst for creativity.