Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940. By “women of the Left Bank,” Benstock specifically means literary women: writers, editors, bookstore owners. This is not the tour de force that some more recent group biographies have been, but it’s still an interesting compare-and-contrast if you’re interested in the period.
Stephanie Burgis, A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience. Kindle. Light, fun novella about a scholar who is hustled into marriage with a vampire and has to belatedly learn the ways in which they can work together to their own benefit (but not necessarily their relatives’…).
Zig Zag Claybourne, Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe. Second in the Jetstream Brothers series, the focus of this volume is not on the eponymous brothers but on some of the women in their general circle. Similar gonzo full-on every-genre-in-a-blender tone, when you’re looking for something that just won’t quit.
Michael Cronin, Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene. Kindle. A brief work looking at various shapes of environmental impact of travel, direct and indirect.
Ellen Datlow, ed., Mad Hatters and March Hares. I picked this up on a whim, not because I have a particular Lewis Carroll interest, but there were a few quite good things in here–Jane Yolen’s, for example, what a surprise, and CSE Cooney’s, again not shocking but still satisfying. The bent of this volume is a bit darker than my tastes tend to be, but well done for that.
Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds., Black Thorn, White Rose. Reread. I can’t say “every one of these is a banger,” but pretty close, most of them are. There are some formative stories for me in here that I didn’t realize I first encountered here–I haven’t reread this since I was a teenager. I won’t say something foolish like “timeless” because all art is made in particular times, and the framings and concerns of these stories are of their time as much as anything else is. Shakespeare is, Middlemarch is, there’s no shame that these stories are. I should have gotten back to this sooner.
Michael J. DeLuca, The Jaguar Mask. Discussed elsewhere.
Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Through no fault of the author, I got a copy of this book that had every fourth page printed slightly blurry, which made it more of a slog than the text would otherwise be. The chapters that were most interesting to me were about disgrace during the Roman Republic and about empresses and other highly ranked women’s disgrace.
Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. Short and vividly written, this is an interesting view of a kind of person who doesn’t often get the spotlight. Fox is particularly clear about the different shape of crime bosses in the 19th century, particularly in this case the focus on property crime rather than “vice” or violence as a central factor.
Margaret Frazer, The Prioress’ Tale and The Maiden’s Tale. Kindle. The next two Sister Frevisse mysteries. The Prioress’ Tale is in the sort of emotionally low part of the series thus far, and The Maiden’s Tale pulls the mood up a bit, to my relief. It also gets more political and changes up the structure of the book to have one of the murders very early rather than the first murder halfway through as this series has liked to do.
Maggie Graber, Swan Hammer: An Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors. Beautiful poetry, vivid, referential, grounded. I was surprised at the breadth of geography in Graber’s groundedness, much of the North American continent really, well done her.
Juliana Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. Accounts of the relationships of both Alaskan Indigenous and immigrant Asian-Alaskan groups with each other and with white cultures. I wanted more here, but I’m glad to have even this much, it’s a pretty specialized topic.
Premee Mohamed, We Speak Through the Mountain. A sequel novella to The Annual Migration of Clouds, and you should probably read that first to enjoy this fully. Its protagonist has now arrived at the Promised Land that is college. Prepare to be disillusioned. I don’t think this is Dark Academia as I understand the genre, but it sure isn’t “academia is pure and lovely and will cherish its acolytes as humans,” and I like that it isn’t. Further SF ramifications since the first volume. Loved it.
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. It’s inevitable that some people will have to form theories right before major change, and this is one of those cases: Piven and Cloward were writing this leading up to the point where all the graphs of trends in American life in the 20th century hit a sharp turn. That’s not their fault. But it makes their assessment of movements and tendencies less useful than it otherwise might be.
Cameron Reed, The Fortunate Fall. Discussed elsewhere.
Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. Mostly about plant behavior. Schlanger occasionally seems more confused than I think is warranted about why the botanists she’s talking to are so intent on avoiding entangling themselves with debates about the nature of intelligence and instead try to focus on behaviors they can observe and document, but even with that caveat there’s a lot of interesting plant behavior in here.
Vivian Shaw, Bitter Waters. Kindle. The latest Dr. Greta Helsing story, this one in novella form. All the vampires you could possibly want in here. There’s never a moment where you could fairly say, “Good stuff but I wish you’d put in more vampires.” I don’t like vampires, this novella is wall-to-wall vampires, and I still like this novella, because I like Viv’s careful and humane exploration of the tropes.
Kathleen Sheppard, Women in the Valley of Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age. This title can’t quite be Lesbians in the Valley of Kings, but it’s close. There are a lot of wlw in this particular bit of history, and Sheppard is not shy about letting you know who they are–or which people might not have identified in ways that we do today. She also does a great job of making clear when the subjects of her work were on both ends of crushing prejudice, because some of them had to battle really terrible sexism and then perpetrated really terrible racism on their own hook, and Sheppard doesn’t shy away from that.
Dana Simpson, Unicorn Crush. This is the latest Phoebe & Her Unicorn volume, and it is not particularly outstanding as a stand-alone thing, but if you’re continuing to enjoy Phoebe and Marigold Heavenly Nostrils, as I am, it’s fun. And it sure won’t take you long.
Vandana Singh, Of Love and Other Monsters. This novella (it was a very novella birthday for me) is clearly in conversation with Octavia Butler about mental connection and the alien, which I find interesting as a subgenre categorization.
C. Spike Trotman, Kate Ashwin, Kel McDonald, and Taneka Stotts, eds., The Girl Who Married a Skull and Other African Stories. This is an anthology of short comics retelling African fables of the sort where there’s a clear moral to the story. The art styles vary considerably, so if you don’t like one, another will be along in 1-10 pages. Don’t go in expecting depth or substance, though, there’s only so much that can be done with three comic book pages at a go.
Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. What it says on the tin. Goes briskly and has lots of interesting details. If you like this kind of cultural history, I’m glad to be able to recommend you another of its genre.
Boyce Upholt, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. A mostly-cultural somewhat-natural history of the Mississippi River and what humans have done to try to manage it, and the ways in which that has and has not gone well. Interesting stuff, some stuff even I didn’t know, and I am a northern waters nerd.