Review: Sex and Disability
Sex and Disability (ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow), Duke University Press, 2012. Sex and Disability is a fascinating collection of essays bringing together two taboo topics, discussed from a...
Category: Read
Genre trouble: Re-reading Stella Gibbon’s Starlight
Stella Gibbons is best known for 1932’s Cold Comfort Farm, a sublimely comic novel that satirised the grim, rural works of writers like Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. Cold Comfort Farm is...
Review: The Quest for the Historical Satan
The Quest For the Historical Satan, Miguel A. De La Torre and Albert Hernandez, Fortress 2011. It’s a familiar image to most people in (post) Christian societies - the red, pitchforked Satan. but...
Review: Jane Gallop – The Deaths of the Author
Jane Gallop, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time, Duke UP, 2011. “The death of the author” has long been a theme in literary theory. First posed by the French intellectual...
Review: Cherie Priest – Ganymede
Cherie Priest's Ganymede (Tor, 2011), the latest entry in the Clockwork Century series, is a delicious cross-country steampunk adventure spanning from the bayous of Louisiana to an underground...
Review: Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch
Jamrach's Menagerie, by Carol Birch, Doubleday 2011. Jaffy Brown has lived all of his short life among the streets and sewers of London. Everything changes one day when he encounters a tiger in the...
Review: Terry Eagleton – Why Marx Was Right
With riots and revolutions—wrought, some have argued, by the inequities of capitalism—dominating the headlines, Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right enters into the fray at the right time. In...
An interview with Frank Schaeffer
Frank Schaeffer, son of the late Francis Schaeffer was raised to follow in his father’s footsteps as a luminary of the Christian Right in the United States. He spent his early years in the rarefied...
Review: The Politics of Down Syndrome by Kieron Smith
The Politics of Down Syndrome (Kieron Smith, Zer0, 2011) is an attempt at a primer on some of the social, ethical, and political issues that surround Down syndrome. With chapters on prenatal...
Review: Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues
Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail, 2011) is one of the more outstanding entries on this year’s Booker Prize longlist. A lyrical, complex, layered narrative of friendship, betrayal,...