All the Way to Summer – Fiona Kidman
Particularly in those stories set in dismal small towns or isolated rural plots in mid-twentieth century Aotearoa (New Zealand), [Kidman’s] women long for escape: for a bigger, more liberated elsewhere.
Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home – Jessica E. Johnson
So much within these pages concerns the relationship between self and place, and between place and environment, what we do to it and take from it.
Sun’s first novel is very much its own book, but it invites comparison to Fyodor’s 1880 family-drama-cum-spiritual-murder-mystery, The Brothers Karamazov, so boldly that I think I’ll go ahead and compare them.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? – Judith Butler
Like a patient teacher, Butler guides readers through lazy interpretations of science, the bad arguments, and the way leftist language is . . . misused by the right. . . . Those with dog-eared copies of [their] previous . . . books will find this one an easier read.
Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun – Jackie Wang
When Wang writes about wanting to “pollute white space with [her] Brown body,” or that “the task is to blow up language,” she means it.
The Garden of Seven Twilights – Miquel de Palol
The tales and tellers of Palol’s novel compose a meticulous alignment of points and lines, a rigorous intellectual structure resembling the mysterious sculpture in the center of the titular Garden.
Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom – Grace Lavery
Lavery, as a queer theorist, resists and problematizes the sitcom’s implicit assumption of the automatic goodness of marriage and family ties.
Blue Notes – Anne Cathrine Bomann
Blue Notes is no quiet meditation on grief: it’s a well-paced and highly readable medical thriller.
Hjorth reworks that old aphorism: unhappy stories are all alike. It’s the ones that eke out a kind of happiness that set themselves apart.
The Buddha learned to extinguish desire. For [Debré’s] narrator, desire appears as liberation, what the rigid world of shitless boredom kept from her.