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Do you believe a person should be some kind of answer?
102 °F, said the forecast this afternoon. 106 °F, said the car when I got into it. I have no difficulty believing it felt like 109 °F. The sun clanged. The electric grid of the Boston metro area was not designed to run this many air conditioners at once.
I followed Ally Wilkes from her short fiction into her debut novel All the White Spaces (2022) and I mean it as a recommendation when I say that I came for the queer polar horror and stayed for the bildungsroman. Externally, it follows the disintegration of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition over the austral year of 1920 as it comes under the traditional strains of weather, misfortune, the supernatural, mistrust. Internally, it follows the discovery of its seventeen-year-old trans stowaway that masculinity comes in more flavors than the imperial ideal he has construed from war cemeteries and boy's own magazines, that he can even invent the kind of man he wants to be instead of fitting himself fossil-cast into a lost shape. No one in the novel describes their identity off the cutting edge of the twenty-first century; the narrative resists an obvious romantic pairing in favor of one of the less conventional nonsexual alliances I enjoy so much. I am predictably a partisan of the expedition's chief scientific officer, whose conscientious objection during the still-raw war casts him as a coward on a good day, a fifth columnist on a bad, and makes no effort to make himself liked either way. It has great ice and dark and queerness and since I deal with heat waves arctically, I am pleased to report that it holds up to re-read.
Kevin Adams' A Crossword War (2018) is a folk album about Bletchley Park, a thing I appreciate existing.
I followed Ally Wilkes from her short fiction into her debut novel All the White Spaces (2022) and I mean it as a recommendation when I say that I came for the queer polar horror and stayed for the bildungsroman. Externally, it follows the disintegration of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition over the austral year of 1920 as it comes under the traditional strains of weather, misfortune, the supernatural, mistrust. Internally, it follows the discovery of its seventeen-year-old trans stowaway that masculinity comes in more flavors than the imperial ideal he has construed from war cemeteries and boy's own magazines, that he can even invent the kind of man he wants to be instead of fitting himself fossil-cast into a lost shape. No one in the novel describes their identity off the cutting edge of the twenty-first century; the narrative resists an obvious romantic pairing in favor of one of the less conventional nonsexual alliances I enjoy so much. I am predictably a partisan of the expedition's chief scientific officer, whose conscientious objection during the still-raw war casts him as a coward on a good day, a fifth columnist on a bad, and makes no effort to make himself liked either way. It has great ice and dark and queerness and since I deal with heat waves arctically, I am pleased to report that it holds up to re-read.
Kevin Adams' A Crossword War (2018) is a folk album about Bletchley Park, a thing I appreciate existing.