Tag: queer
-
Language and the queer journey in Arinze Ifeakandu’s ‘God’s Children Are Little Broken Things’
Arinze Ifeakandu‘s God’s Children Are Little Broken Things (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2022) won the International Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. It’s a collection of nine short stories set in Nigeria—in Abuja and Kano, mostly—all of which have male queer stories at the heart. In none of the stories is being queer straightforward. Sometimes the difficulties…
-
Dancing the night away: Joelle Taylor’s ‘C+nto & Othered Poems’
Joelle Taylor’s C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press, 2021) won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize. It offers a searing history of butch culture in the 1980s and after, with both tragedy, epiphany, and liberation tracking across its 121 pages. It is a collection that stores tragedy at its core, especially in the magisterial scene…
-
Top 5 blogs of 2020
The new year will soon be heralded by new blogs from me. But for now, here’s a list of my Top 5 blogs of 2020 according to views. Apart from anything else, the list provides an interesting snapshot of last year’s popular and thought-provoking books … Enjoy, and thanks for reading this blog in 2020!…
-
‘Judge for Yourself: Reading Hyper-contemporary literature and book prize shortlists’
‘Judge for Yourself’ is published on 5 October 2020.
-
Two families, alike in dignity: Christina Thatcher’s ‘How to Carry Fire’
Christina Thatcher’s How to Carry Fire (Parthian, 2020) is her second collection of poetry. It’s a fierce, impassioned, and (at times) scary collection that details the persona’s two families: her US family (mother, father, brother) beset by a range of tragedies, and her newly-forming Welsh family consisting of the persona and her husband. The literary…
-
‘Lot’ by Bryan Washington: a battle for an ordinary
Bryan Washington’s Lot (Atlantic Books: 2019) is a short-story collection depicting the lives of several Houston citizens. One character’s story recurrently comes in and out of focus throughout Lot, but otherwise the stories transition between characters—mostly men—and explores how they experience the city. Another key element of the collection is its focus on who we’d…