A young British Christian minister signs up to spread the Gospel on another planet. The lovely wife he leaves at home is pregnant, as it happens, and must navigate her way through the alarmingly hazardous Earth of the near future. She watches aghast as tsunamis, volcanoes, drought, famine, and genocide devastate more and more of the planet. She waits in vain for rubbish pickup service, becomes injured cleaning up her home after a freak storm, and faces life-threatening conditions at the hospital...
April 17, 2020
"Confessions of a Pagan Nun" by Kate Horsley
Author Kate Horsley dresses up her novel as a codex found on an archeological dig in Ireland. It purports to be a first-person narrative of a woman trained as a druid in early 6th Century Ireland; it even includes a Translator’s Note explicating the scholarly treatment of the text. Horsley establishes this as a way of lending a present-day flavor to a long-ago text. It works really well, and at the same time the story manages to be a compelling text with human suffering, thwarted romance, power-mad...
April 08, 2020
"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
Upon its 1947 publication Invisible Man became a cultural phenomenon. It’s easy to see why. In it Ralph Ellison produces a novel-length polemic observing and decrying the treatment of blacks in America. A first-person African-American man’s consciousness changes from the accepting subservience (and bootlicking) during his college years to big-city radical political activism, to a disillusioned resignation, through which he finally emerges a thoughtful, perhaps hopeful, individual. It’s a vivid...
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