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caracabe

caracabe@books.theunseen.city

Joined 2 years, 3 months ago

Writer and software engineer in the US Midwest. I enjoy poetry, horror, some f/sf, some mystery, some literary fiction (but not the kind where the main character is a professor and nothing happens).

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Junji Ito, Junji Ito, Jocelyne Allen: Uncanny (2024, Viz Media) No rating

For the first time since his debut 35 years ago, horror master Junji Ito reveals …

Review of Uncanny: The Origins of Fear

No rating

Part memoir and part “this is how I work(or at least how I think I work),” this book is fascinating and, for someone who creates things, inspiring and useful. I’ll refer repeatedly to Ito’s explanations of how he develops his initial ideas. (The phrase in quotation marks above is a paraphrase, not a direct quote.)

In The old Ambassador and Other Poems, Wayne Courtois gives the reader a sense of …

the universal in the specific

No rating

Lyrical and inventive, by turns (or sometimes simultaneously) witty, angry, and tender, these poems about living and aging and loving as a gay man in the US Midwest speak to everyone who has a body and feelings.

Michael Waters: Other Olympians (2024, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) No rating

Trans rights are human rights, and trans stories are human stories

No rating

This thoughtful, sensitively written, and sensible book is especially important now, when people who don’t fit simplistic gender stereotypes are again being targeted and scapegoated. It’s a reminder that gender policing is Nazi ideology in practice.

Janelle Monáe, Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing: The Memory Librarian (Hardcover, 2022, HarperCollins Publishers) 4 stars

In The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, singer-songwriter, actor, fashion icon, activist, …

Hopeful dystopian fiction

No rating

Unapologetically queer and hopeful fiction with urgent things to say, but not didactic. Janelle Monáe is an accomplished storyteller in the medium of the concept album. In this book, she collaborates with five fiction writers to create stories set in the dystopian world of her album Dirty Computer. Dystopian fiction is often a genre of resistance and hope, and that’s the case here. The authors recognize the messiness of human nature: even in communities of peace and mutual aid, characters find fear and hate and betrayal. But these stories challenge us to imagine the world that can be, if we create it. As Mx. Tangee says in the final story, “They don’t own the future.”