Category: Reading…

Linda Sue Park's 1999 first novel SeeSaw Girl is a melancholy study of gender and coming-of-age in seventeenth-century Joseon Korea, with glimpses of European travelers, elite life, painting, embroidery, and how we make do with what we can—oh, and just how awesome Korean seesaws are!

Linda Sue Park's Newbery Medal-winning 2001 novel A Single Shard is mundane, quiet, cerebral, and touching. One of the few novels from my childhood I regularly return to, it is a brilliant, emotional examination of pottery, poverty, and community in 13th century Korea.

Developer Morteshka's masterpiece Black Book is a Russian folk horror fantasy game thick with culture and history, with memory and belief; beautiful, heart-breaking, entrancing, and more, it is at once intoxicatingly real and hauntingly fantastical.

Ai Jiang's I AM AI is a powerful, multi-award-nominated novelette that reawakens the cyberpunk ethos of an earlier sff generation and makes readable a whole host of issues composing our polycrisis, not the least of which is generative AI and its impact on (and abuse of) human creative labor.

John Greenaway's Capitalism: A Horror Story is a careful, clever, and thorough work of Marxist and especially Marxist utopian theory, offering a history of the Gothic Marxist intellectual tradition and careful readings of circa two dozens horror films and novels that raises questions about the politics of genre.

This essay responds to two recent introductory histories of two fascinating, and very different, ancient civilizations: Damien Stone's The Hittites and Sarah M. Schellinger's Nubia, which published by Reaktion in the Lost Civilizations series. The essay makes the case for why genre studies needs to read ancient history.

Naomi Noviks’s Empire of Ivory (2007), the fourth novel in the Temeraire series, leads to some reflections on narrative and worldbuilding strategies in alternate history, some concerns about the series's politics (or lack thereof), and prompts the question: when do you give up on a series?

Herb Boyd’s African History for Beginners (1991) may not be an African history worth reading for African history, but it is an important, illustrative, and eccentrically illustrated example of an attempt to create a popular history textbook in the Afrocentric mold for a mass audience.