Like the best sci fi writers, Bell doesn’t hesitate to draw out the parallels between her futuristic world and our own, using the imaginary to highlight the all-too-real. What is also obvious is that there are some aspects of life that are core to happiness, no matter the context: love, empathy, and care.
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A review of Witches, Women and Words by Beatriz Copello
In Beatriz Copello’s powerful and imaginative poetry collection Witches, Women & Words, witches are seers, healers and instigators of change who are capable of restoring balance both to society and to the individual. They embody that intuitive and creative side of ourselves that reveals a deeper truth. The poems are visceral, full of irony and wisdom, taking the reader on a transformative journey that ultimately expresses hope.
A review of Our Laundry, Our Town by Alvin Eng
For Alvin Eng, a Chinese American punk rocker who is now an educator and a playwright, this has meant ‘a spiritual state of homelessness,” moving between the Foo J. Chin Chinese Hand Laundry and an American frame of reference. This reflective and personal narrative is his first memoir, and a change from his dramatic writing.
An interview with Jane Enright
The author of Butter Side Up talks about her new book its unique hybrid of memoir and how-to, the book vs her speaking gigs, the accompanying playbook, Jane’s Jam and how the two should be used together, and more.
New giveaway!
We have a copy of The Desire Card by Lee Matthew Goldberg to give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of July from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
A review of A Longing for Impossible Things by David Borofka
Regardless of the failings of his narrators and assorted ne’er do well characters, these tales are told in a generous, recognizably human voice, marking Borofka as a writer in whose company you’ll find deep pleasure. Characters’ failings are both unflinchingly observed and held in tender, witty regard, even after a lifetime of screw ups. Most are wrestling with the gap between their modest youthful dreams and the limits imposed by adult realities.
A review of How to Be Between by Bastian Fox Phelan
Bastian Fox Phelan’s memoir How to Be Between leans right into these societal norms, exposing them for the controlling mechanisms that they are, designed to make use feel chronically inadequate so we’re easier to sell to or control. These norms force an unnatural binary between male and female, attractive and unattractive, straight and queer. How to Be Between rejects these binaries and instead offers up the possibility of living a life without such constraints.
An interview with Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters’ Maya Sonenberg
Irish novelist and short story writer Shauna Gilligan interviews Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters’ author Maya Sonenberg about the stories in her new book and how they echo one another, notions of identity, artefacts, family dynamics, time and perspective, emotions, transitions, and lots of other things both deep and fun.
Empathy and Memoir: A Review of Cheryl Klein’s Crybaby
As a thirty-nine year old woman who is navigating fertility clinics and the adoption process, I inhaled this book, which is about a woman, Klein, trying to have a baby. In my online yoga class, we are asked to stretch up to the point where it hurts. This is how far Klein takes her writing: to the point it hurts, presumably for her and definitely for the reader.
New giveaway!
We have a copy of Love and Other Monsters in the Dark by K B Jensen to give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of July from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!