Tag: queer

October 27, 2019

Cosmic Horror and Challenging Ableisms

Cosmic Horror and Challenging Ableisms  A review of Ada Hoffmann’s The Outside (Angry Robot, 2019). By Derek Newman-Stille   There aren’t enough narratives about autism by autistic people. This, and their powerful style of writing and brilliant science fiction, is why I keep coming back to the works of Ada Hoffmann with adoration. Hoffmann’sThe Outside, with its autistic, queer narrator, is...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

July 5, 2019

Fever Dream

Fever Dream A review of Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018) By Derek Newman-Stille Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu is a fever dream on paper, vivid and fantastical, and full of nightmares, which is perfect for a pandemic narrative. It is a surreal story, but it comments on issues of relevance to the real world. Set in...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comment: 1

June 24, 2019

A Fantasy Trans Memoir

A Fantasy Trans Memoir A review of Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir (Metonymy Press, 2016). By Derek Newman-Stille Kai Cheng Thom decided to include the word “Memoir” in the title of her book Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, yet she also cleverly weaves fantasy elements...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

December 27, 2018

In The Shadows of Giants

In The Shadows Of Giants A review of Liz Westbrook-Trenholm’s “White Rose, Red Thorns” in Over The Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales From The Margins (Exile, 2018). By Derek Newman-Stille Liz Westbrook-Trenholm intertwines multiple fairy tales in her story “White Rose, Red Thorns” while giving complexity to the characters involved. She tells a tale of a giant’s tiny human caretaker...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

December 10, 2018

No Longer Isolated

No Longer Isolated A review of Robert Dawson’s “Iron Jenny and the Princess” in Over the Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales from the Margins (Exile Editions, 2018) By Derek Newman-Stille Fairy tales have a propensity toward a “happily ever after” that results in a heterosexual marriage… yet that excludes a lot of people and suggests that only straight identities can...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

October 2, 2018

A Green Monster Who Isn’t Envy

A Green Monster Who Isn’t Envy A review of Morgan Sea’s “Abominatrix” in We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comic Anthology (Stacked Deck Press, 2018) By Derek Newman-Stille In “Abominatrix”, Morgan Sea plays with the notion of Marvel Comics’ She Hulk and produces another gamma powered superhero. Sea’s hero is a Trans woman who adores She Hulk, and decides to take...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

September 2, 2017

Pins and Needles

A review of Jerome Stueart’s “How Magnificent is the Universal Donor” in The Angels of Our Better Beasts (ChiZine Publications, 2016). By Derek Newman-Stille Ever since the AIDS crisis, we queer people have had a complex relationship to blood, so we are put in an interesting relationship with the fictional figure of the vampire, a figure who can alter what...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

July 1, 2017

Canada Day Complexities and Questioning the 150

By Derek Newman-Stille Like many marginalized Canadians, Canada Day can evoke some complicated feelings. We are often very aware of the oppressions that have been carried out in the name of “Canada”: residential schools for aboriginal people, asylums that perpetuated the torture of people with disabilities, the Pink scare, bathhouse raids, and other attacks on queer Canadians, the razing of...

Categories Editorials Comments: 0

November 4, 2016

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 72: An Interview with A.C. Wise

On this episode of Speculating Canada, I Interview the fabulous A.C. Wise about The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves The World Again. We discuss trans narratives, femininity and femme identity, Lovecraftian fiction, monstrosity, unspeakable horrors, weird literature, horror literature, resistant texts, diversity, representation in literature, making our fiction match the diversity of our own world, memory, the power of speculative...

Categories Interviews Comments: 0

October 23, 2016

Stigma is Sticky

Stigma is StickyA review of Nalo Hopkinson’s The Chaos (Margaret McElderry Books, 2012) By Derek Newman-Stille As she frequently does, Nalo Hopkinson uses her novel The Chaos to disrupt hegemonic ideas of normalcy, questioning what is ‘normal’ and using the supernatural and magical to point out the way that the norms we create are equally strange. The Chaos takes elements...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0