On the surface, The Queer Art of Failure is a light-hearted academic book about pop culture and film, ranging from Finding Nemo to Austin Powers and many things in between. Digging beneath the surface, it's a provocative look at power and resistance in the context of neoliberalism, where Halberstam suggests that failure may offer a more liberatory ( Read more... )

The graphic novel Skim is a quick glimpse of the life of Kimberly Keiko Cameron, "Skim," sulky biracial Goth tenth-grader growing up in Toronto in the early 1990s. Skim's broken her arm, tripping over a make-shift Wiccan altar in her bedroom. She snipes at her best friend Lisa, smokes down in the ravine behind her all-girls school, and falls in ( Read more... )

Although she's best known for the Moomin books, Tove Jansson also wrote a wide variety of other books and short stories which are well worth reading. My pick for today is Fair Play, published in 1989: a novel about two older women and the life they've built together ( Read more... )

Alex just wants to be a normal teenager, experimenting with make-up, girls and vegetarianism. Why is this so hard for her parents to accept? And why can't she shut up the boy-Alex who's still inside her? A decision to stop taking medication results in events spiralling out of control as Alex tries to figure out matters such as identity, gender, ( Read more... )

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Link to the book on Amazon

One of my favorite reads of the past couple years is this gorgeous, romantic retelling of The Iliad. Familiarity with the basic story of the Trojan War is helpful but certainly not required to enjoy this story- it is a wonderful piece of historical/mythical fiction regardless of ( Read more... )

Widely regarded as Kashmir’s national poet, Agha Shahid Ali was born in Kashmir in 1949 and died in the US in 2001. His work has been included in a range of anthologies with disparate topics, varying from Harold Bloom’s Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems to Hoshang Merchant’s Yaarana: Gay Writing from South AsiaI’ll focus here on one ( Read more... )

( Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, and the Hardy Boys )

Seth drowns, and then he wakes up...in a strange, abandoned world that's like a dystopian version of his childhood home. Slowly he begins to gather the things he needs to survive, but every time he falls asleep, he is haunted by the best and most painful memories of his life: the events involving his friends, Gudmund, Monica and H, which led to ( Read more... )

(The Trilogy starts with The Circle is continued in Fire and will later this year be concluded in The Key)

( Witches and women, oh my! )

Hello! I'm joining the party late to throw in some extra recs for the end of the month.

I've held off on recommending the E. M. Forster novel Maurice for a while now, because the movie version was recommended a little while back and I didn't want to be unoriginal. (The movie, by the way, is also pretty great.) But I'm coming back to it now, ( Read more... )