Made Man becomes an examination and celebration of change writ broadly along with all its magickal implications.
At The Edge of The Woods – Masatsugu Ono
Parenthood lends itself to a narrative that sits on the fuzzy border between natural and supernatural.
I’m thinking about the difference between intensity and suffering. I think a lot of people conflate intensity with suffering and go out of their way to avoid intensity—intense fear, intense joy, intense pleasure, intense pain, intense heat or cold, intense introspection, intense curiosity. (And on the flip side, I’ve always known and felt close to those who are intensity junkies.)
Butler thus nimbly opens the seams of the vampire figure to show the ways in which its mythology is already lined with implications about the construction of race, exclusion, and intolerance.
The Books of Jacob – Olga Tokarczuk
The Books of Jacob suggests that, no matter how far apart our various spheres of experience may seem, they are, in fact, talking to each other.
People From My Neighborhood – Hiromi Kawakami
Kawakami draws indiscriminately on the resources of various sub-genres of speculative literature, connecting her stories here and there for unity’s sake, but never straining for consistency as a straight-up fantasy writer might in conjuring a magic “system.”
The human condition is one that has violence and unexpected death. We should always be asking how people move through it and come together again. How they endure.
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 Great Indoorsman – Andrew Farkas
It’s not culture Farkas is studying so much as the many interiors of the self.
Gentleman Overboard – Herbert Clyde Lewis
Standish bears the specific features of the gentleman — or a parody of it — in all its idiotic, self-regarding, and brutal composure.