Big Moods

Tue 16 Apr 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Every month is cruel yet April still tries to claim the mantle of cruelest. Why the big mood? Powell’s is digging into it with a Big Mood Sale: Feel the love, or the angst, or the joy, or all the feelings, as long as they’re BIG. Enjoy big savings on new fiction that delivers the full range of human emotions, as only a great book can! Part of this sale: Kindling by Kathleen Jennings as well as new books from Scarlett Thomas, Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irina Rey, and more.


New Elwin Cotman: Weird Black Girls

Mon 15 Apr 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Weird Black Girls cover Good news for short story readers: Elwin Cotman’s new collection Weird Black Girls comes out tomorrow from Scribner. WBG has seven stories, including the long title story, which go deep and wide into weird and, to keep you on your toes, not-so-weird places. Kirkus Reviews not only gave it a starred review (and called it “spendidly strange”) but also — knowing that you personally, you enthusiast, read about 240 books per year — included it in a list of 20 Best Books to Read in April.

Michael Kleber-Diggs, in the Star-Tribune, captures what I love about Elwin’s writing — not knowing what’s coming next and it being both deeply imaginative as well as feeling grounded — and this new collection:

Weird Black Girls is an exceptional work of magical realism. As Cotman hops effortlessly from year to year and city to city, seeing each age and place distinctly and well, his stories remain of another world.

They are imaginative places where readers are always one sentence away from something unexpected. They’re also grounded in sharp, concise truths that illuminate moments and generations. Impossible occurrences coexist naturally with real life in a very real America where weird things seem to be happening a lot lately.

Elwin’s going to on tour so I hope you can catch him reading in San Francisco, LA,DC, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Providence, and New York. Don’t miss his City Lights launch event with Lisa D. Gray either live or on Zoom tomorrow night at 7 p.m. PST.


New Vandana Singh Book — from Routledge

Wed 10 Apr 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Teaching Climate Change coverI just came across Vandana Singh’s recently published textbook Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice. You can read the introductory chapter and part of chapter two on the Routledge page and I’ve pasted in their description of the book below. Despite not being a teacher, I was drawn in — I’m interested in just about anything Vandana is interested in enough to write about.

Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice shows educators how climate change can be taught from any disciplinary perspective and in a transdisciplinary way, drawing on examples from the author’s own classroom.

The book sets out a radical vision for climate pedagogy, introducing an innovative framework in which the scientific essentials of climate change are scaffolded via three transdisciplinary meta-concepts: Balance/Imbalance, Critical Thresholds and Complex Interconnections. Author Vandana Singh grounds this theory in practice, drawing on examples from her own classroom to provide implementable ideas for educators, and to demonstrate how climate change can be taught from any disciplinary perspective in a transdisciplinary way. The book also explores the barriers to effective climate education at a macro level, focusing on issues such as climate misinformation/misconception, the exclusion of social and ethical concerns and a focus on technofixes. Singh uses this information to identify four key dimensions for an effective climate pedagogy, in which issues of justice are central: scientific-technological, the transdisciplinary, the epistemological and the psychosocial. This approach is broad and flexible enough to be adapted to different classrooms and contexts.

Bridging the social and natural sciences, this book will be an essential resource for all climate change educators practicing in both formal and informal settings, as well as for community climate activists.

“This highly original and radical book addresses the rapidly growing need for an accessible climate pedagogy which represents the different dimensions of the climate-change challenge and can be adapted to a variety of contexts.”

 


Kij Johnson at Constellation

Wed 3 Apr 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

There’s a new review of Kij Johnson’s collection The Privilege of the Happy Ending in Strange Horizons by M. L. Clark — the kind of review I’d love to just paste the whole thing in instead of excerpting a strong line. Anyway, if you’ve not read the book, go for it, and if you’ve read the book you might enjoy it as much as me.

Kij will be one of the Guests of Honor at Constellation in Lincoln, NE, in a couple of weeks. Set out now, arrive by April 19:

Constellation 13 So Say We All


A Naomi Mitchison Bibliography

Mon 1 Apr 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Naomi Mitchison is this year’s Memorial Guest of Honor at Readercon so I’ve been trying to find a way to write a little about her. I never met her and didn’t read her until I was in my 20s. I’m not sure where I first picked up a Virago paperback copy of Travel Light. Avenue Victor Hugo? Somewhere on  a used bookshop trip with Kelly? I loved it and bought copies to give to people. How happy I was to find $4 used paperbacks I could press on someone new.

Anyway, while fiddling around, I found Beccon Press’s deep and comprehensive Naomi Mitchison – Towards a Bibliography, what a gift to find this online. I’d been looking up a Mitchison title Kelly recently gave me, What the Human Race is Up To (1962). If I read that I’ll be completely up to date, although not to today’s date.

I’ve been to Readercon many times, although not since 2019, and always enjoyed catching up with and meeting new people. This year Kate from Book Moon will be tabling for BKMN and Small Beer. I don’t have it in me to attend, damn it, but I am so tempted to go along anyway and maybe get a wheelchair to save enough energy to listen to a panel or two about Mitchison or the guests, Rebecca Roanhorse & Amal El-Mohtar. Unlikely, but a nice dream.

If you’ve read Travel Light and would like to read more Mitchison, I recommend The Fourth Pig, in part because it’s in print and mostly because it’s fun.