Rather than falling into conventional narratives, eco-fiction needs to underscore the need for traditional environmentalism to question its own positions of privilege and provide a space for imagining non-normative paths to sustainability if it is to inspire genuine social justice.
When the Sick Rule the World – Dodie Bellamy
The path today’s Bellamy traces through her past is thus contaminated on every level, disdain for racism and brutality mingled with disdain for poverty, the development of better politics mingled with social climbing and self-exculpation.
Is The Vegetarian, devastating as it doubtlessly is, funny? The question feels almost perverse to ask, but only because the novel begins in the brilliant tradition of high, scrambling Kafkaesque comedy and then turns sharply away.
Complicated Grief – Laura Mullen
[Laura Mullen] adopts a new way of speaking about grief in every single chapter of this challenging work.
Drone and Apocalypse – Joanna Demers
[DRONE & APOCALYPSE] is in part a delineation of a secular, nihilistic faith, a faith that can rely only on worldly beauty for its unifying force.
Walsh uses the twister as both a propelling incident in the plot and a pattern for how the book will progress, making the structural choice feel necessary, as the form and the content merge to create an immanent sense of disaster.
Matches: A Light Book – S.D. Chrostowska
Matches is not a prescription for how to think, but an incitation that you think.
With his skilled take-down of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, Montes’ Perfect Days is a worthwhile, pleasantly creepy English-language debut.
Grand Menteur – Jean Marc Ah-Sen
I’m torn between thinking Grand Menteur somewhat messy and unfocused, and comparing it to the dizzying effect of a merry-go-round — you can almost catch hold of images as you pass, but never fully.
What might be taken for granted as comfortable or soothing or beautiful in a novel that subscribes to bourgeois realism becomes intentionally alienating or disconcerting and potentially hostile in a novel about the subaltern.