It’s hard to believe that’s already time for another Margaret Atwood Reading Month #MARM in November 2021. “Time is not running at its usual unvarying pace: it makes odd lurches.” (From 1996’s Alias Grace) For many, 2020 and 2021 have been challenging years; for many, looking ahead seems to
After just a few pages, I knew I was going to love Mateo Ashkaripour’s Black Buck (2021): smart, funny, relevant, incisive. A few chapters in, Buck says: “I should’ve known from the Middle Passage to never trust a white man who says ‘Take a seat.’ It could be your
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
