Bookends #8

There are a whole bunch of books I hear about that look amazing, but realistically I'm not going to read them all. That means they may never be mentioned on Outlandish Lit, which is so tragic. Every week I'll introduce you to a few books that caught my eye and some interesting bookish links.

THE BOOKS

Already Out

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood

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As the daughter of a meth dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. Struggling to raise her little brother, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible "adult" around. She finds peace in the starry Midwestern night sky above the fields behind her house. One night everything changes when she witnesses one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold, wreck his motorcycle. What follows is a powerful and shocking love story between two unlikely people that asks tough questions, reminding us of all the ugly and wonderful things that life has to offer.

This sounds like a very tough read, but I'm so intrigued that I put it on hold at the library. I've heard that it's beautiful.

The Gloaming by Melanie Finn

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Pilgrim's husband left her for another woman, stranding her in a Swiss town where she is involved in an accident that leaves three children dead. Cleared of responsibility though overcome with guilt, she absconds to Africa, befriending a series of locals each with their own tragic past.

Mysteriously, the remains of an albino appear, spooking everyone—sign of a curse placed by a witch doctor—though its intended recipient is uncertain. Pilgrim volunteers to rid the town of the box and its contents, though wherever she goes, she can't shake the feeling that she's being followed.

I heard from a friend that this book wasn't nearly as creepy as it sounds, which is a shame for me. But maybe good for anybody else.

The Vanished: The "Evaporated People" of Japan in Stories and Photographs by Lena Mauger

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Every year, nearly one hundred thousand Japanese vanish without a trace. Known as the johatsu, or the “evaporated,” they are often driven by shame and hopelessness, leaving behind lost jobs, disappointed families, and mounting debts. In The Vanished, journalist Léna Mauger and photographer Stéphane Remael uncover the human faces behind the phenomenon through reportage, photographs, and interviews with those who left, those who stayed behind, and those who help orchestrate the disappearances. Their quest to learn the stories of the johatsu weaves its way through:

A Tokyo neighborhood so notorious for its petty criminal activities that it was literally erased from the maps
Reprogramming camps for subpar bureaucrats and businessmen to become “better” employees
The charmless citadel of Toyota City, with its iron grip on its employees
The “suicide” cliffs of Tojinbo, patrolled by a man fighting to save the desperate
The desolation of Fukushima in the aftermath of the tsunami

Thank you to Shaina for pointing this one out to me!!

Coming Out Next Month

We Show What We Have Learned: And Other Stories by Clare Beams

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The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams’s landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters’ desires stretch the limits of reality. Ing énues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmaster’s vision of perfection ; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable ; a bride glimpses her husband’s past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown ; and a teacher comes undone in front of her astonished fifth graders.

Um can we talk about the cover? PLEASE??

THE LINKS

I'm not sure if reading this interview of Ottessa Moshfegh (author of Eileen) made me love her or made me really annoyed by her.

Tor made a list of The Year's Best Alternate Histories. COOL.

If you didn't know, it's Tolkien week! Want to learn a little more about Middle Earth? Here's some info on Luthien: Tolkien's Badass Elf Princess.

What books did you hear about this week?

Bookends #7

There are a whole bunch of books I hear about that look amazing, but realistically I'm not going to read them all. That means they may never be mentioned on Outlandish Lit, which is so tragic. Every week I'll introduce you to a few books that caught my eye and some interesting bookish links.

THE BOOKS

Already Out

The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón

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In the subsidiary offices of a major Latin American corporation, the power suddenly goes out: the lights switch off; the doors lock; the phone lines are cut. The employees are trapped in total darkness with only cryptic, intermittent announcements dispatched over the loud speaker, instructing all personnel to remain at their work stations until further notice.

The Subsidiary is one worker's testimony to what happens during the days he spends trapped within the building's walls, told exclusively—and hauntingly—through the stamps he uses to mark corporate documents.

Hand-designed by the author with a stamp set he bought in an bookstore in Santiago, Matías Celedón's The Subsidiary is both an exquisite object and a chilling avant-garde tale from one of Chile's rising literary stars.

This is a GREAT looking book. There's rarely more than a sentence per page, and the stamping is very effective. I think I'll start this one immediately because it shouldn't take more than 20 minutes to read.

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

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Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for using unconventional methods in a battle against heretics. Kel Command gives her the opportunity to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a star fortress that has recently been captured by heretics. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake. If the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.

Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress.

The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own. As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao–because she might be his next victim.

If I ever have my own craft room, I'm calling it the Fortress of Scattered Needles.

Coming Out Next Month

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey

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Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes," Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as "the most haunted mansion in America," or "the most haunted prison"; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.

With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living--how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made--and why those changes are made--Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved.

Helloooooo, perfect book for me.

Stony River by Tricia Dower

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“Dower is a masterful storyteller” (Globe and Mail) whose “sinister imagery and crisp, evocative prose” (Billie Livingston) make Stony River a page-turner with a strong message for current times. From its deceptively innocent beginning—two young teens exploring the riverbank and spying on “Crazy Haggerty’s” house—through the intertwining storylines of paganism, murder, and sexual violence, this tale shows us small-town dysfunction and the dangers of ignoring the threats to women. The central mystery, inspired by the crimes of Robert Zarinsky as documented by Robin Gaby Fisher and Judith Lucas in Deadly Secrets (Newark Star-Ledger 2008), keeps the reader guessing until almost the very end, when the frightening truth is revealed.

Sounds very unsettling and I already want to know what happens!!

THE LINKS

I don't have any links this time around. I haven't really interneted. Our car got totaled. Talk to you on Monday!!

What books did you hear about this week?

Bookends #6

There are a whole bunch of books I hear about that look amazing, but realistically I'm not going to read them all. That means they may never be mentioned on Outlandish Lit, which is so tragic. Every week I'll introduce you to a few books that caught my eye and some interesting bookish links.

THE BOOKS

Already Out

Tales of the Metric System by Imraan Coovadia

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From a Natal boarding school in the seventies and Soviet spies in London in the eighties to the 1995 Rugby World Cup and intrigue in the Union Buildings, Tales of the Metric System shows how ten days spread across four decades send tidal waves through the lives of ordinary and extraordinary South Africans alike.

Playwrights, politicians, philosophers, and thieves, all caught in their individual stories, burst from the pages of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System as it measures South Africa’s modern history in its own remarkable units of imagination.

Written in a style similar to David Mitchell's novels and Jennifer Egan's Visit From the Goon Squad!

Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith

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Twenty years ago Lucie Bowen left Marrow Island; along with her mother, she fled the aftermath of an earthquake that compromised the local refinery, killing her father and ravaging the island’s environment. Now, Lucie’s childhood friend Kate is living within a mysterious group called Marrow Colony—a community that claims to be “ministering to the Earth.” There have been remarkable changes to the land at the colony’s homestead. Lucie’s experience as a journalist tells her there’s more to the Colony—and their charismatic leader-- than they want her to know, and that the astonishing success of their environmental remediation has come at great cost to the Colonists themselves. As she uncovers their secrets and methods, will Lucie endanger more than their mission? What price will she pay for the truth?

I've only heard really excellent things about this one!



Coming Out This Month

The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir by Susan Daitch

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Indiana Jones meets Italo Calvino in a masterful, absurdist blend of biting social satire, rollicking adventure, invented history and mythology.

A series of archeological expeditions unfolds through time, each one looking for the ruins of a fabled underground city-state that once flourished in a remote province near the border of present-day Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Sealed off for centuries by seismic activity, Suolucidir beckons with the promise of plunder and the glory of discovery, fantasies as varied as the imaginations of her aspiring modern-day conquerors.

A satiric, post-colonial adventure story of mythic proportions, The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir takes place against a background of actual events, in a part of the world with a particular historical relationship to Russia and the West. But though we are treated to visual "evidence" of its actual existence, Suolucidir remains a mystery, perhaps an invention of those who seek it, a place where history and identity are subject to revision, and the boundaries between East and West are anything but solid, reliable, or predictable.

Ok, this just sounds fun. It's got blurbs from some great authors!!

THE LINKS

From Panels: Beyond Bechdel: A Brief History of Queer Comics

New Yorker article on the ongoing importance of the true crime genre. There's certainly a resurgence lately, at least in the mainstream.

For anybody interested in the business of books, Here's everything you wanted to know about book sales written by Lincoln Michel.

And, from Tor: 100 African Writers of SFF - Part One: Nairobi. An amazing, in depth look at some great authors!!

What books did you hear about this week?

Bookends #5

There are a whole bunch of books I hear about that look amazing, but realistically I'm not going to read them all. That means they may never be mentioned on Outlandish Lit, which is so tragic. Every week I'll introduce you to a few books that caught my eye and some interesting bookish links.

Sorry I've been a little quiet on the blogging front. Work is still crazy and I still can't find much time to read. BUT I'M LEARNING ABOUT BOOKS and that's almost as good, right??

THE BOOKS

Out Already

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya

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Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he’s happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he’s managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.

I'd never heard of this until I shelved it the other day and um YES.

Damnificados by J.J. Amaworo Wilson

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Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, 600 “damnificados”—vagabonds and misfits—take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical “owners.” Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse.

Perhaps not exactly what I'd typically read, but I've got to say it sounds pretty interesting.

Seeing Red by Lina Meruane

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This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.

I like me some fiction and autobiography combos.

THE LINKS

This poem written in response to Orlando moved me to tears: All The Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto

From Panels: America, Bunker, and LGBTQ+/Latinx Visibility: Affirmation in Tragedy

Barnes and Noble put together a cool list of 6 of the Strangest Political Systems in SFF.

33 Ways To Have a More Bookish Summer is p cute, I have to say. Let's also throw in BOTNS Book Bingo, though.

What books did you hear about this week?

Bookends #4

There are a whole bunch of books I hear about that look amazing, but realistically I'm not going to read them all. That means they may never be mentioned on Outlandish Lit, which is so tragic. Every week I'll introduce you to a few books that caught my eye and some interesting bookish links.

I only learned about two books this week, but they both look SO GOOD!

THE BOOKS

Not Yet Released

Pull Me Under by Kelly Luce

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Kelly Luce's Pull Me Under tells the story of Rio Silvestri, who, when she was twelve years old, fatally stabbed a school bully. Rio, born Chizuru Akitani, is the Japanese American daughter of the revered violinist Hiro Akitani--a Living National Treasure in Japan and a man Rio hasn't spoken to since she left her home country for the United States (and a new identity) after her violent crime. Her father's death, along with a mysterious package that arrives on her doorstep in Boulder, Colorado, spurs her to return to Japan for the first time in twenty years. There she is forced to confront her past in ways she never imagined, pushing herself, her relationships with her husband and daughter, and her own sense of who she is to the brink.

Kelly Luce wrote Three Scenarios In Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, a delightful collection of weird short stories. Her debut novel is being compared to A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, so I'm there. Also THAT COVER.

Out Already

Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii

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In a future where reality has been augmented and biology itself has been hacked, the world's food supply is genetically modified, superior, and vulnerable. When gene mapper Hayashida discovers that his custom rice plant has experienced a dysgenic collapse, he suspects sabotage. Hayashida travels Asia to find himself in Ho Chi Minh City with hired-gun hacker Kitamura at his side—and in mortal danger—as he pushes ever nearer to the heart of the mystery.

Yes to all of this.

THE LINKS

I'm currently reading The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz and I want to read more Middle Eastern writers!! The New York Times highlights 5 for us.

Kelly Luce (mentioned earlier!) read every short story published in 2014-15?? Here are 12 Things She Noticed While Ready Every Short Story Published in 2014-15 (or, Extremely Long Titles That Are Complete Sentences Are Still Very Much a Thing).

Has Mary Shelley been beat out? Work from 1616 is 'the first ever science fiction novel' from The Guardian.

What books did you hear about this week?

Bookends #3

There are a whole bunch of books I hear about that look amazing, but realistically I'm not going to read them all. That means they may never be mentioned on Outlandish Lit, which is so tragic. Every week I'll introduce you to a few books that caught my eye and some interesting bookish links.

THE BOOKS

Out Already

The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan

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Hellsmouth, a wilful thoroughbred filly, has the legacy of a family riding on her.

The Forges: one of the oldest and proudest families in Kentucky; descended from the first settlers to brave the Wilderness Road; as mythic as the history of the South itself – and now, first-time horse breeders.

Through an act of naked ambition, Henry Forge is attempting to blaze this new path on the family's crop farm. His daughter, Henrietta, becomes his partner in the endeavour but has desires of her own. When Allmon Shaughnessy, an African American man fresh from prison, comes to work in the stables, the ugliness of the farm's history rears its head. Together through sheer will, the three stubbornly try to create a new future – one that isn't determined by Kentucky's bloody past – while they mould Hellsmouth into a champion.

This wouldn't normally appeal to me at all, but I've heard from some of my most trusted bookish people that it's amazing. And if the writing is beautiful, I'm generally good.

Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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“You should be here; he’s simply magnificent.” These are the final words a biologist hears before his Margaret Mead-like wife dies at the hands of Godzilla. The words haunt him as he studies the Kaiju (Japan’s giant monsters) on an island reserve, attempting to understand the beauty his wife saw.

“The Return to Monsterland” opens 'Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone,' a collection of twelve fabulist and genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore, historical events, and pop culture. In “Rokurokubi”, a man who has the demonic ability to stretch his neck to incredible lengths tries to save a marriage built on secrets. The recently dead find their footing in “The Inn of the Dead’s Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost”. In “Girl Zero”, a couple navigates the complexities of reviving their deceased daughter via the help of a shapeshifter. And, in the title story, a woman instigates a months-long dancing frenzy in a Tokyo where people don’t die but are simply reborn without their memories.

I fully intend to read this collection of short stories because JAPAN.



Out in July

The Last One by Alexandra Oliva

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It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens—but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them—a young woman the show’s producers call Zoo—stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game.

Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life—and husband—she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills—and learn new ones as she goes.

But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways—and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.

Let's be real, you had me at "reality TV show." It's compared to Station Eleven and The Passage, so I'm intrigued. This could be a really good literary-scifi-thriller combo.

THE LINKS

Here are 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors. SLAY.

How Two Young Women Reimagined the American Novel - Emma Cline (The Girls) and Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing) yessssssss.

Minneapolis residents - we're getting a new bookstore. Milkweed Editions is opening one in Open Books/The Loft.

Rachel Cordasco, one of my favorite Book Riot Contributors, 1. Started a site about speculative fiction in translation. And 2. Interviewed Thomas Olde Heuvelt (who wrote Hex). Cool things all around!

What books did you hear about this week?

Bookends #2

There are a whole bunch of books I hear about that look amazing, but realistically I'm not going to read them all. That means they may never be mentioned on Outlandish Lit, which is so tragic. Every week I'll introduce you to a few books that caught my eye and some interesting bookish links.

THE BOOKS

All of the books this week are out already!

Septimania by Jonathan Levi

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On an spring afternoon in 1978 in the loft of a church outside Cambridge, England, an organ tuner named Malory loses his virginity to a dyslexic math genius named Louiza. When Louiza disappears, Malory follows her trail to Rome. There, the quest to find his love gets sidetracked when he discovers he is the heir to the Kingdom of Septimania, given by Charlemagne to the Jews of eighth-century France. In the midst of a Rome reeling from the kidnappings and bombs of the Red Brigades, Malory is crowned King of the Jews, Holy Roman Emperor and possibly Caliph of All Islam.

Over the next fifty years, Malory’s search for Louiza leads to encounters with Pope John Paul II, a band of lost Romanians, a magical Bernini statue, Haroun al Rashid of Arabian Nights fame, an elephant that changes color, a shadowy U.S. spy agency and one of the 9/11 bombers, an appleseed from the original Tree of Knowledge, and the secret history of Isaac Newton and his discovery of a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything. It is the quest of a Candide for love and knowledge, and the ultimate discovery that they may be unified after all.

I can't remember where I heard of this. Perhaps it's not what I'd normally read, but it sounds CRAZY and whoever read it said it was good. I think.

Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

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Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a 17th century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters your homes at will. She stands next to your bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting, but in so doing send the town spiraling into the dark, medieval practices of the past.

Well, this sounds like the creepiest book ever.

Forest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Katya deals in Authenticities and Captures, trading on nostalgia for a past long gone. Her clients are rich and they demand items and experiences with only the finest verifiable provenance. Other people’s lives have value, after all.

But when her A.I. suddenly stops whispering in her ear she finds herself cut off from the grid and loses communication with the rest of the world.

The man who stepped out of the trees while hunting deer cut her off from the cloud, took her A.I. and made her his unwilling guest.

There are no Authenticities or Captures to prove Katya’s story of what happened in the forest. You’ll just have to believe her…

A sci-fi book mixing memory and technology? That's only 88 pages?? This book was made for me.

The Trees by Ali Shaw

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There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins…

There is no warning. No chance to prepare.

They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed. Broken bodies, still wrapped in tattered bed linen, hang among the twitching leaves.

FUCK YES, KILLER TREES.

THE LINKS

The Natural Way of Things won the Stella Prize! I've been needing this book to come to America for what feels like ages.

#1000BlackGirlBooks has an online database now! Go peruse!

I dig pretty much all of Book Riot's 100 Must-Read Strange and Unusual Novels list.

Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, has a new story in the New Yorker. GO READ IT, she's amazing.

Ghost in the Shell is being made into a movie and the Japanese main is being played by Scarlett Johansson. A Tor.com writer asks Why Are We Still White-Washing Characters?

What books did you hear about this week?

Bookends #1

Welcome to my new weekend feature: Bookends! There are a whole bunch of books I hear about that look amazing, but realistically I'm not going to read them all. That means they may never be mentioned on Outlandish Lit, which is so tragic. So every week I'm going to introduce you to a few books that caught my eye and interesting bookish links.

THE BOOKS

Books Out:

Furnace by Livia Llewellyn

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Horror fiction has long celebrated and explored the twin engines driving human existence. Call them what you like: Sex and Death, Love and Destruction, Temptation and Terror. While many may strive to reach the extremes, few authors manage to find the beauty that rests in the liminal space between these polar forces, the shuddering ecstasy encased within the shock. And then there’s Livia Llewellyn, an author praised for her dark, stirring, evocative prose and disturbing, personal narratives.

Lush, layered, multifaceted, and elegant, the thirteen tales comprising Furnace showcase why Livia Llewellyn has been lauded by scholars and fans of weird fiction alike, and why she has been nominated multiple times for the Shirley Jackson Award and included in year’s best anthologies. These are exquisite stories, of beauty and cruelty, of pleasure and pain, of hunger, and of sharp teeth sinking into tender flesh.

Books Not Out Yet:

Nicotine by Nell Zink

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Recent business school graduate Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life—by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of a South American tribe called the Kogi; her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cult-like deity status among a certain cohort of aging hippies while operating a psychedelic “healing center.” And she’s never felt particularly close to her much older half-brothers from Norm’s previous marriage—one wickedly charming and obscenely rich (but mostly just wicked), one a photographer on a distant tropical island.

But all that changes when her father dies, and Penny inherits his childhood home in New Jersey. She goes to investigate the property and finds it not overgrown and abandoned, but rather occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters whom she finds unexpectedly charming, and who have renamed the property “Nicotine.” The Nicotine residents (united in defense of smokers’ rights) possess the type of passion and fervor Penny feels she’s desperately lacking, and the other squatter houses in the neighborhood provide a sense of community she has never felt before. She soon moves into a nearby residence, becoming enmeshed in the political fervor and commitment of her fellow squatters.

The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga

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From the winner of the PEN International New Voices Award comes the story of Lindanathi, a young HIV+ man grappling with the death of his brother, for which he feels unduly responsible. He and his friends—Cecelia and Ruan—work low-paying jobs and sell anti-retroviral drugs (during the period in South Africa before ARVs became broadly distributed). In between, they huff glue, drift through parties, and traverse the streets of Cape Town where they observe the grave material disparities of their country.

A mysterious masked man appears seeking to buy their surplus of ARVs, an offer that would present the friends with the opportunity to escape their environs, while at the same time forcing Lindanathi to confront his path, and finally, his past.

THE LINKS

MIND MELD: Sub-Genres We Love - Great speculative fiction writers talk about what sub-genres they're into. YAS.

That's actually all I have for links. WE'LL START SLOW.

What books did you hear about this week?