A review of Trouble On Earth Day by Kathy Stemke

Trouble on Earth Day is a simple book that is easy for very young children to understand and for early readers to read themselves. Kurt Wilcken’s bright cartoon images have lots of fun detail (like a baseball cap on the guitar playing bird), and children will relate to the vivacious young animals.

A review of Sourdough and Other Stories by Angela Slatter

These stories are stupendously good and offer many distinct pleasures: a strange yet superbly realised world, compelling characters and, above all, beautiful prose that has the power to move. One of those characters mentions of her lover’s failings that ‘he could not realize how all women are, in one way or another, “her kind” [i.e. a witch], even his dear departed mother.’ And that could be a coda for the book.

A review of The Key to Starveldt—The Rare: book 2 by Foz Meadows

With its shades of Alice in Wonderland, Misfits, Supernatural—and others—this series will delight the Twilight generation. Meadows has handled her large cast of characters with ease; each is as multi-layered and complex as the plot—which really is a slippery thing: easy enough to grasp, but not so easy to hold onto. It twists, squirms and folds back on itself, all the while keeping readers guessing.

The Leading African-American Literary Critic of His Generation: Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his book Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora

In England, writer Zadie Smith and actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and rock singer Kele of Bloc Party have made their own giant splashes, as had the androgynous singer Ephraim Lewis, before he died; and Ejiofor played a cross-dressing designer in Kinky Boots, and Kele is gay and alludes to that experience in his songs.

A review of Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion by Johan Harstad

Buzz Aldrin himself and his trip through space is as evocative a backdrop to the story as Mattias’ hometown of Stavanger, Norway, and the moonlike Faroese Islands, where Mattias takes his own life-changing first steps. This is a lovely, delicately written novel whose power lies in the balance between Mattias’ awakening, and his acceptance that there are many kinds of glory, and many different ways to create meaning and leave footprints.

Interview with Johan Harstad

The author of Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion talks about his first novel, his characters, about fame and obscurity, The Faroe Islands, about music in his work, about Buzz Aldrin himself, the television series, on international translations, and lots more.