Dear reader, Did you know that February is International Correspondence Writing Month (InCoWriMo for short)? The point of this month-long challenge is to slow your communication down, return to pen, paper and post-office, and write one letter a day to anyone locally or abroad, stranger or friend. I can feel your confusion. You came here …
Continue reading Letters and Lovers rule in This is How You Lose the Time War
- originally published in the January 23,2022 edition of the Stabroek News I was introduced to Elizabeth Acevedo back in 2020 when I read “Gilded”, her contribution to the short story anthology A Phoenix First Must Burn. Her tale about a young Taino metalmancer starting a revolution in the colonised Dominican Republic was one of my …
Continue reading A teen mother triumphs in Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High
-- Originally published on December 12, 2021 in the Stabroek News Last December, I had the pleasure of reviewing a gift: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko, which sits on my bookshelf as one of the best books I have ever read, and I was happy to share it with my readers last year. Thankfully, Ifueko herself …
Continue reading Behold the Saviour Empress in Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko
-- Originally published on November 14, 2021 in the Stabroek News Photograph of Premee Mohamed I love cosmic horror. There is something unsettling about one day finding one’s self battling against giant incomprehensible forces older than humanity itself. Add a dash of action/adventure to the mix and set it in the early 2000s and I …
Continue reading The triumphs and woes of genius in Premee Mohamed’s Beneath the Rising
-- Originally published on October 3, 2021 in the Stabroek News Photo of the author, Suzan Palumbo If anyone had taken me aside last month and asked me what came to mind when I heard the phrase “gothic horror”, I would have given them a very narrow description. I would have told them about dilapidated …
-- Originally published on September 5, 2021 in the Stabroek News In early August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) released an updated report on scientists’ current understanding of the state of global warming and its implications for our present and future. This review of current climate literature is a sobering warning for our …
Today is Emancipation Day, and millions of Afro-Caribbean people within the Region and across the diaspora will be celebrating the 183rd anniversary of the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. We have come a far way since this first Emancipation Day, but there are still many ingrained colonialist systems and thought processes that we …
Continue reading Overcoming post-Emancipation stagnation in Erna Brodber’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake
June is Pride Month. Throughout this month, members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Asexual, Interest and Queer communities and their allies - both in Guyana and across the globe - recognise, acknowledge, and celebrate the influences and achievements of the LGBT+ community through the millennia. These communities also use Pride month to highlight the …
I was drawn to The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by a Guardian Article in 2016 when the publication announced that Arundhati Roy was breaking her 20-year fiction hiatus and publishing a second novel. I was intrigued. I had come across Roy’s work near the beginning of my original reading challenge when I got a kindle sample …
Continue reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
The Things They Carried is the only book on my list that I have listened to exclusively. This was purely coincidental. My father had bought the audiobook months ago, and for some reason, I was struck with a pang of laziness upon seeing the cover. I just didn’t feel like seeing the words for this …
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