“Absolute reality was too much for any human to bear.” Once there was an island where the dead walked the earth, and seven noble houses ruled by the arcane secrets of necromancy. A conqueror’s blade brought them low, burning their libraries, killing their lords, and extinguishing their eldritch magic. But defiant against the new order…
Tag: Rape
Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom
“i have questions about heaven. i have questions about the Revolution. those questions are the same: upon whose bones do you intend to build your paradise?” Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she’s always pursued the same deeply…
Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire
“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another,…
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
“To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better…
Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister
In a world that has become treacherous and desiccated, Magdala has always had to fight to survive. At nine years old, she and her father, Xavier, are exiled from their home, fleeing through the Sonoran Desert, searching for refuge. As violence pursues them, they join a handful of survivors on a pilgrimage to the holy…
The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
“Your enemy looking like you—recognizing yourself in your enemy—made it so much worse because it mirrored back to you all the darkness you held.” Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service…
A Crane Among Wolves by June Hur
“When someone you love is taken, you go into the den of the tiger. You go to the ends of the kingdom and across. You go to where they are. You find them—no matter the cost.” 1506, Joseon. The people suffer under the cruel reign of the tyrant King Yeonsan, powerless to stop him from…
Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
“It’s sad really…She thought if she could get us out of China, we’d be safe. But she couldn’t outrun her mental illness. It was waiting to devour us. She always was a drowning woman, trying desperately to throw me on the shore so I would not drown with her.” In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir,…
Corregidora by Gayl Jones
“I am Ursa Corregidora. I have tears for eyes. I was made to touch my past at an early age. I found it on my mother’s tiddies. In her milk. Let no one pollute my music. I will dig out their temples. I will pluck out their eyes.” Here is Gayl Jones’s classic novel, the…
A Woman of Pleasure by Kiyoko Murata
“Some women were objects of men’s love and some were not. Some women’s faces and bodies were smooth, their deportment and carriage exquisite, others’ not. Being loved by men wasn’t everything in life, but Ichi now understood what kind of beauty men found irresistible.” In 1903, a fifteen-year-old girl named Ichi Aoi is sold to…
The Great Book Wyrm 