This year I re-directed my focus away from a couple of years of determinedly reading from backlists (so that new books comprised only about 30% of my reading) back to freshly published and forthcoming books.* What I hadn’t anticipated was how delicately I would need to balance my library
Elissa Washuta’s White Magic (2021) is a personal narrative of searching and locating boundaries about her own self amid the context of colonization. (She is a member of the Cowlitz tribe.) Her writing is considered experimental but it passes for conventional prose at first glance; much of her
Indigenous activist and leader, Ailton Krenak (Aimoré/Krenak), has published three of his short essays in Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Translated from the Portuguese by Anthony Doyle in 2020). With clarity and passion, he illustrates how the indigenous perspective acknowledges and nurtures relationships with parts
Alexie, Dunning, Piatote and an Anthology Short Stories in April, May and June Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, these stories capture a variety of reading moods. This quarter, I returned to a must-read everything author and explored two new-to-me story writers.
It’s a time of “political and intellectual crisis” in The Little Company. Sound familiar? Drusilla Modjeska’s introduction situates readers in Dark’s depiction of ordinary life in Sydney and Katoomba, in this time of “recession, nuclear threat and more failed expectations” in Australia. The Little Company is Dark’s seventh novel,
