If I were to press one recent genre short story into your
hand and to say, ‘read this’, it’d be ‘
Self Care’ from Julian Jarboe’s debut
collection
Everyone On The Moon Is Essential Personnel – a first person, somewhat stream-of-consciousness narrative infused with street-speak continually breaking into ALL CAPS (denoting emphasis,
outrage, faux-outrage, self-commentary or some mix of the above) delivered by a
formerly street-homeless former sex worker, living temporarily (as a trans
woman with more than a passing interest in Wicca) at a Catholic-run homeless
shelter in a town and a world that’s simultaneously on fire and drowning. This is a
perfectly formed ‘dramatic monologue’ (remember those from Year 10?) delivered
from a science fiction place that’s well acquainted with magic realism and
the devices of literary modernism(s) as well as being interested in and alert
to present moment (climate emergency) urban lived experience and marginalised subjectivities – and it’s also
much
funnier than any of that lit-crit word-salad sounds.
(Also: "
punk rock as hell" -
Iori Kusano in
Strange Horizons).
Other books I’ve read recently (and enjoyed in their various
ways) have been Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon, John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility.
I’m also reading all of Iris Murdoch’s novels in sequence (currently at #5 of 26, A Severed Head). (To find out more about why you should read Iris Murdoch - along with a couple of reasons not to, I mean, it's a free country - do take a look at Colin Burrow's London Review of Books piece about her 'parodiability'. There's a Society btw, there are podcasts).
Twenty-seven word reviews? Yeah, I might do those again: I
have Focus (BSFA) and counselling journals to write for, though, a King Charles spaniel to walk and an absolute mountain of washing-up to get done (“you make the
beds, you wash the dishes and then six months later…”).
You don’t happen to know
any good jokes about the Jungian concept of ‘the shadow’ by any chance…?
