Or, "Word After Word: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Book Club" — "Speculative fiction" (science fiction, fantasy, horror) has always been a vehicle for writers to explore identity, social inequality, the strangeness of the world, and the hopes and fears for the future. In this monthly book club we'll be reading works of speculative fiction by women and nonbinary writers, discussing the ways these works make us think, feel, and reflect on reality.
Hosted by Haley Cowans: an editor, former bookseller, and secret writer of unpublished fiction, essays, and poems. She has worked on various projects with Two Dollar Radio and also enjoys volunteering at Thurber House. Her lifelong obsessions include Joan of Arc, animated film, and browsing staff recommendations at bookstores. Her most recent obsession is her adopted cat Lulu.
Thursday, June 15, 6pm
Grievers, by Adrienne Maree Brown
Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.
Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.
PAST PICKS FOR THE FEMINIST SCI-FI BOOKCLUB,
CURATED BY HALEY COWANS
May 2023: Sweetlust
April 2023: Imago
March 2023: A Strange Country
February 2023: When I Sing, Mountains Dance
January 2023: Adulthood Rites
December 2022: Lake Like a Mirror
November 2022: Dawn
October 2022: The Word for World Is Forest
September 2022: Scattered All Over The Earth
August 2022: Famous Men Who Never Lived
July 2022: Frankissstein
May 2022: Soft Science
April 2022: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
March 2022: The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
February 2022: Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
February 2020: The Deep by Rivers Solomon
January 2020: Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker
December 2019: The Power by Naomi Alderman
November 2019: The Female Man by Joanna Russ
October 2019: The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington
September 2019: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan
August 2019: The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza
July 2019: Mars: Stories by Asja Bakić
June 2019: Radio Iris
May 2019: The Wilds by Julia Elliott
April 2019: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
February 2019: The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
January 2019: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
January 2019: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
December 2018: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, published by Small Beer Press.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
November 2018: Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen, published by Two Dollar Radio.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
October 2018: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
September 2018: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, published by Akashic.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
August 28, 2018: The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell, published by Two Dollar Radio.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
July 19, 2018: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE ONLINE HERE, OR IN THE STORE.
