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Review of Ana Clavel’s novel Shipwrecked Body

Carrie Devall reviews Shipwrecked Body, by Mexican-born writer Ana Clavell:

Shipwrecked Body is a wickedly funny, insightful, fast-moving riff on gender, identity, and sexuality that might appeal to readers of feminist speculative fiction.

Antonia, a young heterosexual woman in Mexico City, wakes up one morning to find that she has turned into a man. She quickly realizes that women react to her differently, and with the help of a gay friend, Francisco, and some other men that he recruits, she explores the world of men and homosociality that was previously inaccessible to her. She gets involved with several women and a man and makes discoveries about sex, love, and identity.

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Shweta Narayan short story on Strange Horizons

Shweta Narayan’s short story Nira and I has been published by the web magazine Strange Horizons.

Nira and I are with Hemal on the day she dies. She is teaching us a clapping song game, a remembering game. She is winning.

Shweta Narayan has lived in places where Hemal’s story is less fictional than she’d like. She was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at Clarion 2007. She has a poem in the Winter 2009 issue of Goblin Fruit and stories forthcoming in places like Shimmer, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, and the Beastly Bride anthology, and she is working on her first novel. For more about the author, see her website.

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Superman in the Cotton Fields: Comics in Black and White, Mostly White

Superman in the Cotton Fields is a 2005 article by Scott Poole on systemic racism in the comics industry.

A racist society is one in which significant political and social capital rests in white hands, even if that society gives lip service and official tribute to the ideals of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’. At least in the marginal art form of comics, African American representations are changing.