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
I’ve been to the islands in my summer reading this year: Norwegian, Atlantic Canadian, Jamaican, Greenlandian and Sri Lankan. Roy Jacobsen’s Ingrid trilogy landed in my stack thanks to a reading copy of White Shadow from Biblioasis, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. Partly because I liked the
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
Mini Aodla Freeman’s Life among the Qallunaat (1978; 2015) is the third book published in the University of Manitoba’s First Voices, First Texts series. It chronicles her experiences as an Inuit woman adjusting to life south of the Arctic in the 1950s, working as a translator for many
During the past year, I’ve read sixty-three books, fiction and non-fiction, related to the climate crisis. Just this week, I finished Katłįà's (Catherine Lafferty's) 2020 novel Ndè-ti-yat’a (Land-Water-Sky)--an unstoppable read. Maybe this new habit has an element of contagion: have I convinced you to read one? Earlier in 2021,
