David Yoon

In this collection of essays Cathy Park Hong examines her racial identity as an Asian, cis female, professional, atheist living in the United States. Immediately she's struck by how minor and non-urgent this feels. Compared to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake her specific griefs can feel small. She wrestles with this and the presumptuousness to think she could invoke any sort of Asian we.

These minor feelings in response to micro-aggressions are easily dismissed. We're the model minority, the next in line to be white as she puts it. Asians don't take up space, we're still relatively non-existent in the political and cultural discourse. We're an emergency relief valve when things get too hot to resort to anti-black sentiment.

But Hong, tired of writing for an imagined white audience of academia, poetry prize panels and fellowships, decides to lay it bare, acknowledging her racial identity and playing it personal - giving some credit to Richard Pryor and stand-up comedy in the process.

Hits and misses in this collection of essays but when it hits, it packs a punch. Acknowledging her Asian-American identity and exploring what it means to inhabit that space in this moment - this is what it feels like to be seen in such a specific way. It's not something that I'm used to. That alone is a revelation and worthy of a read and I'm sure subsequent re-reads.

I read Ha Seong-nan's first collection, Flowers of Mold, and the stories here are just as elusive. Most of them evade me and resist imprinting. All this despite the fact that I think I'm getting the hang of Korean short stories. You don't so much arrive at your destination as much as the bus just stops and boots you off and you're left standing at the side of the road trying to remember exactly how you ended up here with an odd sense of disquiet.

Set in an orthodox Muslim village in Tamil Nadu the book tells the stories of several women. As girls they enjoyed brief glimpses of carefree abandon and sly subversion. As soon as they are married off as teens, the trajectory of their lives is completely at the mercy of their husbands.

Mehar has quietly had numerous abortions, her wildly misogynist and fiercely religious husband refuses contraception of any kind. She leaves with her two children when he decides to take a second wife. Mehar's daughter Sajida is caught between two warring parents, one perpetually miserable, the other intent on curtailing her dreams of becoming a doctor. Parveen is divorced and disgraced to hide her husband's impotence. Subaida is widowed when the man she is married off to at 14 is revealed as gay, prompting his death by suicide.

It is breathtaking how absolutely curtailed these women's lives are, how absolutely trapped not only by the hands of an abusive or disinterested spouse but by the very system that sees nothing wrong with marrying them off as children. Of a faith that empowers the men over their lives. Of a generational helplessness that feeds this cycle of misery.

I was invested in these women's stories but the constant wailing, weeping without end, cursing fate and lamenting their plight, the persistent sobs of hopelessness and the endless keening that seemed to finish every chapter became too much. Their cries became the background noise of the entire story and while it didn't obliterate my sympathies it did have me eager for the book to move on. It never does.

Julia Power is a maternity nurse working out of a repurposed supply closet that barely holds three beds and functions as a makeshift delivery ward. The book covers a mere three days in the midst of the 1918 flu pandemic in Ireland. The writing is breathless and steamrolls relentlessly forward. It starts to feel as claustrophobic as that tiny room and one wonders if author Emma Donoghue had stumbled across a turn of the century gynaecological manual in researching the story and is now intent on stuffing every page of her book with all manner of birthing catastrophes and unorthodox delivery procedures.

Still, amidst the turmoil of a mother gripped in fever coughing violently in one cot, another mourning the loss of her child and a third screaming through contractions, Julia strikes up a warm familiarity with her orphaned helper Bridie Sweeney. Their growing relationship a bright spot in an otherwise calamitous read.

I really didn't want to read this. The black and white cover and the story of a Glasgow boy growing up gay with his alcoholic mother. Literary misery porn parading gay suffering. When it wins the Booker it only confirms my suspicions about how inevitably bleak and dire the story would surely be. And then I'm tasked to review it for the Booktube Prize so I begrudgingly pick it up.

I'm immediately hooked. Shuggie is growing up in council housing surrounded by unemployed miners, dirty faced kids, drunken gossips and folks prying open electric meters to steal the coins within. Meanwhile Shuggie's mom is drinking herself into a stupor, screaming into the telephone, raging against the men she's hard done by, putting her head into the oven, setting the bedroom on fire, and driving away her two eldest children. Agnes is just a huge character on the page. Despite her faults Shuggie remains steadfast, can see the effort she puts into appearances, her fierce unbroken pride that stands with her back straight even as she's sinking in the grey.

It's less gay trauma and more the resilience of love even in the face of a challenging person, clear eyed about their flaws and faults and loving them just the same. It's heartbreaking but comes from a place not intent on mining Agnes or Shuggie's misery in some showy literary way but instead a confident portrayal - warts and all - of a complicated woman. Pure gallus.

Let's give credit where credit is due. Lawrence Wright does his research. He won the Pulitzer for non-fiction for his examination of Al-Qaed. He followed that up with an expose on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology which got turned into an HBO Documentary. Now he's trained his eye on a possible pandemic for this fictional thriller.

How did he do?

Well, we have a mysterious influenza virus that originates in Asia in the Spring of 2020 that sends economies into a tailspin, shuts down schools, overwhelms hospitals, has the American government playing catch-up while battling disinformation and wild conspiracies. Not too shabby.

The thing is his endgame is the near complete breakdown of human civilization. This was prompted by a question from Ridley Scott who, after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, wondered what would nudge humanity to this dystopian hellscape? And so he ups the ante with a bomb in Rome, rising tensions in the Middle East, and a Cold War threatening to go nuclear with Russia sabotaging critical American infrastructure. Things get pretty dark.

And here's where it veers into airport thriller territory. Unlikely hero, short, stooped and in need of a cane while being the foremost expert in disease that sees him traipsing the globe in a helicopter, private jet and a fast-attack submarine - naturally. He goes from hobnobbing with Middle Eastern royalty to working in the midst of viral hotspots. It's Dan Brown writing a pandemic novel.

So the writing isn't exactly the sharpest, but it's no less a page-turner. Where you find yourself gulping in nervous anticipation is how much he got right so far, and how much more death he predicts will arrive come the End of October.

Nora Seed has decided to die. No spoiler here, the book opens the early chapters with an ominous countdown to her death. In the ensuing hours Nora is let go from her job, we are reminded of the fiancé she left at the altar, the record deal she wouldn't sign breaking up a her promising band and estranging her from her brother, the Olympic swim dreams sidestepped, the lone friend on the other side of the world and to top it all off the death of her beloved cat.

In death though, she finds herself in a massive library filled with an infinite number of books tended by her grade school librarian Mrs Elm. Each book represents a life. A different one driven by different choices made where she becomes a wife, pursued her Olympic dreams, stayed on as the lead singer of her band and most importantly, saved the life of her cat.

Spoiler! Fame and fortune isn't a guarantee of happiness. Olympic medals, sold out international concerts, influential TedTalks aren't fulfilling on their own. Those paths not taken are no less fraught, not necessarily better. Blah, blah, blah - we've heard it all before. It's a 300 page Live, Love, Laugh poster. It reads like a novelization of a self-help book, Lord knows Matt Haig has made a name for himself examining his anxieties and working through his depressive tendencies.

My rational, judgy, cynical mind knows this and is ready to dismiss it out of hand - but I'm won over by the complete earnest, unironic commitment of it all. As Haig puts it - cynicism is a luxury for the non-suicidal. It's a self-help genre novel. You know how it's going to end, the conventions it's going to explore. It's a riff on It's a Wonderful Life set in the internet era. But the getting there is no less fun. It's a mystery to unravel each life Nora slips into. What were her expectations with this choice and how will it ultimately fail her? I blazed through this in a weekend. Reading it I was gently reminded that I am enough, that we all matter in the world and there's space ahead to make changes ...but I gotta be honest, that life on a winery sounded pretty damn good to me.

We find ourselves in a completely immersive steampunk Cairo at the turn of the century. Ever since al-Jahiz opened a hole between worlds, djinn now co-exist with people. Intricately realized, magic and technology mingle as the wider world rumbles to World War I.

The book opens with The Brotherhood of Al-Jahiz, consisting mostly of blue-blooded Englishmen, brutally burned, their clothes mostly untouched as if they had all spontaneously combusted. It seems to herald the return of the famed Al-Jahiz, and Agent Fatma el-Sha'awari from the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is on the case. She is a sartorial dandy in colourful bespoke suits of forest green and magenta stripes perhaps paired with a fuchsia tie, bowler hat, and the always present cane. The perfect protagonist that guides us through the bustling city with its abundant share of interesting figures.

Author P. Djèlí Clark is revelling in this world, already having written several novellas based here, and he writes with sure-footed confidence even as he introduces us to the Clock of Worlds, possessed librarians, indifferent angels, magic texts, ifrits, ghuls, old gods and more. It's a whodunnit with earth shattering consequences. Even for someone who doesn't always enjoy fantasy, I found myself completely hooked.

I mean it starts out as a story of family. Saskia is the frumpy, studious one, her twin Jenny the wild child narcissist. Meanwhile we have Sara, the sensual academic, caring for her mentally delayed sister Mattie. It's the push and pull of family and the love and labour between these sisters. But then tragedy visits both families and suddenly we're veering into unexpected territory. The sleepy interiority of familial musings turns into a mystery that leans into thriller.

Lyon is having a blast here keeping the reader guessing. It's an erudite K-drama that isn't afraid to take sharp left turns. You never know where you're going to end up and given the distance of time and reflection it's frankly wild how it managed to hold itself together. A Coles Notes version of this book with names and places stripped away would read like the plot of a modern day Telenovela. What can I say, I like me some literary crazy.

It's a revelation! After a month of reading Korean works in translation and just soaking in that feeling of “han” it's nice to get what is essentially a sunny middle-grade read! I mean it is still Korean, people get beaten and there's more than one brutal knife attack, but otherwise it's downright hopeful!

Yunjae has a brain condition called Alexithymia which means he doesn't feel fear or anger. He's not good at reading other's emotions either and has to be taught to fake it by his mom and grandmother. Yunjae's a teenager so you can imagine how his condition is quickly seen by his peers - and he is soon targeted by the bully Gon. But they soon form an unlikely bond, until Dora enters the picture.

Told from Yunjae's perspective, the English translation lends itself well to our emotionless protagonist, opting for a clean translation without the need for literary flourishes. The whole thing is a bit of a fairytale but I can't begrudge this uncharacteristically (for Korea) sunny read.

I don't know man.

I'd been having trouble connecting with the voice of the thing, the loping regional vernacular. I'm nearly 100 pages in before its weird paranoid rambling just goes from 0 to holy crap in a few short pages. The following act is filed with so many uncanny contrivances and over orchestrated set pieces that it starts feeling encumbered and I'm almost relieved to have a basketball game to turn to.

Just a little lost I guess. It's weird to frame the native deaths at the hands of angry white bar patrons and police as a reckoning for their own past acts. The innocents made bloody collateral in this karmic war. How the circle gets closed. It's scattered and uneven, the pacing hiccupping along in sporadic bursts instead of truly building tension and clarifying the stakes.

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Korean translator Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony didn't cohere for me. The Orphan Series is a devastating account of the Sancheong–Hamyang massacre and Ahn Hak-Sop's testimony from his home in the Civilian Control Zone on the South Korean side of the DMZ is nothing short of harrowing. But then the poetic tricks of Mirror Words and whatever is happening in The Apparatus is just lost to me. The literary journals I seek out to decipher the words on the page only frustrate me more, drenched in oblique language, literary folderol and referencing an artistic tradition I'm unfamiliar with. It's like I'm missing the key that brings it all into focus, the rosetta stone that brings the language into clear focus. I don't doubt it's art - but it flew well past me.

Total “didja know?” sort of book. Selling time, second sleep, trains and timezones and that Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man of his time.

Photography proved a hell of a chapter. I learn how Kodak blithely ignoring complaints from black mothers in the 1950s and 60s. They'd argue that Kodak colour film left their children's faces underexposed with only the eyes and teeth visible against an otherwise featureless dark shape. This would contribute to damaging stereotypes that were perpetuated for years. The thing was that Kodak's film was calibrated to perfect the portrayal of white skin. It wasn't until furniture makers and chocolatiers complained in the 70s that the formulations were recalibrated to better show off rich walnut grains and melting dark chocolate - not to mention correct their initial bias.

And the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement. Caroline Hunter and her husband both worked at Polaroid when they discovered the company's involvement with South Africa's apartheid system. Polaroid's ID-2 camera facilitated the system of passbooks that controlled the movement of black South Africans. The creation of the PRWM and her continued protests would cost Caroline her job but her efforts would eventually lead to the complete withdrawal of Polaroid from South Africa.

Not all the chapters are equally strong but it was fascinating how Ramirez chose to come at particular stories from Edison to Muybridge and broaden their scope.

I loved this read. The island patois of Trinidad quickly becomes familiar and intimate, it feels as if this story could be told in no other way. It's been awhile since I felt so much love for a collection of literary characters and was as devastated by their various trials. Betty Ramdin, newly a single parent after the death of her abusive husband, her son Solo finding his way in the world and Mr. Chetan, the boarder who enters into a platonic partnership with Betty to raise and give a home to Solo.

Persaud excavates a rich mine of feeling here without dissolving into soap opera parody despite wild emotional climaxes. To distill this plot into its individual beats you could be excused for dismissing it as a juicy telenovela but there is so much here at its heart. There is the struggle against loneliness, bigotry, prejudice and our past mistakes while forging a path forward against it all. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

Love After Love (from the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott)

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Edie is 23 and embarking on a probably ill-advised date with a middle-aged and married man who decides they'll meet at Six Flags. The writing is sharp and funny. Edie is a bit of a mess, a lowly functionary at a publishing company living in a roach infested apartment and making horrible choices, branding herself the “office slut.” And I get stopped up short, suddenly this starts reading like she's being written by Eric the affluent digital archivist. Like the prose has suddenly been infected by the same white middle aged men it seemed ready to lampoon, and the sharp wit of the story is suddenly blunted and mired in MFA workshopping. Of course Edie is into some casual, sometimes brutal sex with a controlling and aloof older man - but she's also an artist!

And Rebecca the wife is some weird amalgam, thrashing topless in mosh pits and excavating bodies in the morgue, she feels less like a person and more an interesting idea. Fine with her husband's extramarital affairs while raising an adopted black girl, she's what the manic pixie dream girl becomes after 20 years of marriage, countless miscarriages and the numbing comfort of wealth.

So maybe all these sharp edges and the full on dumpster fire of choices Edie continues to make in increasingly improbable scenarios is speaking to some millennial angst that I can't quite tap into. Still, can't wait to see what Raven Leilani has in store next because the writing, when it isn't contorting itself to fit the convoluted meanderings of the story, is incredible.

It's been seven years since Allie Brosh's incredible Hyperbole and a Half. Turns out she's been going through some things. A cancer scare revealing a fruit salad of tumors, the loss of her younger sister to suicide, a divorce and the subsequent struggling with loneliness. Hardly fodder for hilarity.

But this is warm and funny and somehow avoids maudlin sentiment. Drawing yourself as an ambulatory tadpole with anime eyes really manages to leaven the mood. But don't dismiss the drawings as completely juvenile, Brosh with a deft line manages to invoke cringey awareness, reckless glee and stunned confusion. Somehow her Vegas party-bros are spot on and she most certainly deserves the most prestigious of awards she has given herself for “fanciest horse drawing.”

We are all stupid, serious, mad little animals, and that is nowhere more on display than in these crazy cartoon caricatures where a dozen or so pages of this can just break my heart.



...seriously, you've been warned.

This is Nishnaabeg storytelling that isn't worried about making concessions to me. But there's enough here to grapple with, familiar snippets of Southern Ontario wrapped in beautiful poetry.

This is American Gods where the ancient deities move among us, not as rarefied icons bathed in golden light and imbued with glamour, but trudging among us looking for tarps to go on sale at Canadian Tire, cutting coupons, struggling with sobriety, hoarding knick-knacks. But still bigger, containing deeper histories.

There's sly humour here too, playing up stereotypes, winking at my need to see Indigenous peoples as tuned to the natural world, reading about trees ability to pull stress out of a body. But there's also riding around on a grey ten-speed Supercycle pulling an old kid's trailer to hold old toilets and sinks collected from rich neighbourhoods to place randomly on the reserve.

This isn't for me, but I loved it just the same.

Alexander Paine Wilson is a pompous, hypocritical, super closeted dick. Coincidentally he's the Republican incumbent in the first congressional district in Virginia against the pantsuit wearing Nancy Beavers. He's a Ronald Reagan superfan, low key bigot, unconscious misogynist and a conspicuous consumer who knows exactly how much his Kohler vibrant Brushed Bronze WaterTile Ambient Rain Shower or ten-layered, California King–sized Kluft Palais Royale mattress costs - because of course.

And so it's not for nothing how delightful it is to see everything go monstrously wrong with the arrival on one stuffed aardvark whose provenance can be traced back to a richly moustachioed zoological naturalist, Sir Richard Ostlet of the Victorian Era. He has sent the recently captured aardvark to his taxidermist acquaintance, and sometimes secret lover, Titus Downing who makes up the other half of the book.

And of course it's almost painfully quaint to think an aardvark owned by some very fine people could render one so low given the cavalcade of crime on persistent display in the news from withholding military aid, insider trading, armed insurrection and jaw-dropping levels of credulity. But still, it feels like Jessica Anthony is having fun, revelling in words, poking in quaint digressions and, to top it all off, writing in the second person no less - so she gets my hearty vote.

It's a short story collection that brings together the worm pickers, nail technicians, bus drivers and farm workers at the edges of society. New immigrants creating space for themselves while struggling to retain their strength and dignity. And the following generation who are watching the world with sharp eyes, more conscious of the unsaid rules, attuned to how “other” they really are and their growing awareness of the gap that separates them.

I spent a lot of my time growing up paying attention. Coming from immigrants and surrounded by people who didn't look like me, I was obsessive about observing the world, paying attention to the social cues, the unsaid rules, the hurdles I had to face by being other. The characters here are doing the same thing, and yet still find themselves always a step behind. Without the benefit of a family network born and raised here for generations, or an easy familiarity with the language and WASPy customs they constantly stumble. Without the easy grace of seeing yourself reflected everywhere you look, they struggle to define themselves. And it's coming up hard against oblivious white mediocrity that wins the red yo-yo, gets the front office job, the manager position. Never done with malicious intent, just a willful blindness to the privilege they possess, certain in the fairness of this new world meritocracy.

These stories just hit me where I live.

What a drop-dead gorgeous debut!

This is a sensual love letter to our time before Covid. Where you could cook dinner for a stranger with the promise of something more. Where people could still traverse the globe, hopping from Lagos to Halifax and France. Quaint cafes invited close conversation over the steaming scent of tea and restaurants didn't reflexively evoke notions of failing hole-in-the-walls, roped off booths to maintain social distancing, and waitresses wearing facemasks and shields to take your order while you ponder viral loads and aerosol particles.

Here is catfish vindaloo, kimchi stew with pork belly, salted caramel chocolate cake, puff-puff, empanadas, overripe plantains, and egusi soup filling up your senses. This is musical prose that envelopes you. And much like the character Kambirinachi in the story, this is about wanting to live.

You see, Kambirinachi is an ogbanje - a spirit so tied to the other world they are born into ours only to die in moments, leaving anguish and tears in their wake. But Kambirinachi wants to live. She raises twin girls Kehinde and Taiye who are torn apart through horrifying trauma. After nearly a decade apart, the family finds their way home to Lagos.

From the small Canadian independent Arsenal Pulp Press, it's nonetheless an absolute crime this isn't getting broader acclaim. This book should be invoked when speaking of Yaa Gyasi, Bernardine Evaristo and dare I say, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Don't sleep on this one!

Deacon Cuffy “Sportcoat” Lambkin walks out into the plaza of the Causeway Housing Projects, bombed on homemade King Kong and shoots 19 year old drug dealer Deems Clements' ear clean off. Despite not remembering a thing about the incident, Deacon “King Kong” is clearly a dead man walking.

Despite its pulpy start, this is really a golden hued memory of growing up in the projects in the late 1960's. While Spielberg defined the 80's in suburban America, this is McBride's recollection of growing up in Red Hook Brooklyn where his parents founded the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church.

It's a vibrant multi-cultured community where the Irish cop is honest and in love with the black minister's wife, where the Italian smuggler wants nothing more than to settle down with a plump wife but still lives with his mother who gardens with the drunk black deacon. Where the Dominican numbers runner is honest and the drug dealers leave the plaza empty till noon so the churchgoers can gossip around the flagpole.

It's also about second chances late in life and the possibility of love. It's a far warmer story than the opening would have you believe and in McBride's hands that's still a great thing. Throw in a McGuffin or two, some botched assassinations, some miracle cheese and an army of red ants and you've got a rose coloured recollection of growing up in the Brooklyn projects from an accomplished storyteller.

It's a near future dystopian Toronto that finds the white colonizers backed into a corner after a devastating flood which prompts the Renovation. Politicians couch their words in the dog whistle rhetoric of only being concerned with protecting the interests of “True Canadians.” There is a symbolic joining of hands with Americans under the slyly subversive mantra “Two Nations, One Vision.” Soon a jackbooted militia referred to as Boots brings their heavy-handed “order” to bear with thuggish tactics that target people of color and those with disabilities or on the LGBTQ2S+ spectrum.

Forced into work camps or sent into hiding, these “Others” rely on each other, with the help of allies that aren't trying to center their own voices or white knight their way into some kind of cathartic redemption. It's a powerful story that provides countless moments that feel all too horribly plausible.

But what was bothering me about the story was clarified when I found out that author Catherine Hernandez is a dramaturge. That theatre background shines through. The beats are bigger and boisterous - the emotion front and center and always out loud. There's a clear eye to the physicality of many scenes and you can imagine certain lines being expelled from the diaphragm to play to the cheap seats. Her intersectionality informs the casting and we're careful to check all the boxes from the obvious racialized communities as well as queer, trans, and gay to the neurodivergent, disabled and deaf. You're building to that big theatrical payoff at the end where these “othered” take the stage, spotlighted and proudly defiant in all their diversity in a rousing chorus that builds to an epic crescendo, hold for the requisite triumphant bars, and then the curtain falls as the house lights go dark. Beat. Roaring applause.

First published in Japan in 1951, it gets a ton of leeway in my reading. It's akin to the badly dubbed, Sunday afternoon, kung-fu movies of my youth that I absolutely loved in all their over-the-top, cheesy glory. The book can be a tad extra - I mean there's just so much nervous sweating going on! Every other chapter is the literary equivalent of the dramatic hamster meme turning his head in wide-eyed wonder accompanied by a musical sting. The author never tires of reminding us how beautiful young Tamayo is and even as the story resolved I admit I'm still not exactly sure what Sahei had in mind with his will. But it doesn't matter! It was a distracting and fun romp.

You have the incredibly wealthy Silk King of Japan, Sahei Inugami, who has died. Detective Kosuke Kindaichi has been called to the reading of the will which will surely will be an “event soaked in blood” according to on of the estate's lawyers Toyoichiro Wakabayashi ...who is immediately discovered dead from poison. Dun, dun, duuuuunn.

It's yet another intriguing case for Kosuke Kindaichi who has been featured in over 75 novels and feels like a progenitor to Columbo with his disheveled attire, wild hair, which he is prone to nervously scratching, while stuttering from excitement. And the plot is very Knives Out as the extended family descend like vultures vying for the family wealth. The body count mounts and we are left to wonder who will be the last one standing? It's got that old school, Agatha Christie classic mystery vibe but at the same time it just goes for it. What's not to like?

My first multi-level-marketing thriller or more existential agony from the Land of the Morning Calm?
Yes.

Se-oh returns to find her house in flames, her father dead inside - perhaps a suicide to escape his mounting debts. Ki-jeong gets a call that her estranged sister has been pulled from the river, dead of an apparent suicide. Slowly these two stories begin to converge but not in traditional Western thriller fashion, unveiling sinister cabals, lurking evil and grand designs.

It is more interested in illuminating how powerless we can be in the face of horrible events. How the world takes advantage of the naivety and vulnerability of youth. That these lives of grey shadows are only sharpened to a focus through tragedies that surface feelings of guilt, loss and anger. That under those heavy burdens does one struggle to move forward.

Maybe it's just I've been on a huge Korean works in translation jag as of late that colors my perception but it just feels like Korean works are tuned a little differently. That life is hard and there are no pretty answers to its endless struggle.

Libertarians descend on the small New Hampshire town of Grafton to launch what they will call the “Free Town Project.” There is a hope that like-minded libertarians across the nation will come to help build this shining beacon of logic and reason. A city vehemently opposed to government overreach and taxes. There's a lot of room for interpretation and would extend beyond the God given right to bear arms, to trafficking in organs, holding bum fights, and accepting consensual cannibalism. While they pared down services to the bone, forgoing road repairs, capable fire stations, and even a drivable police car for the lone full-time officer, the city saw an increase in sex offenders, homicides, lawsuits and, as the title suggests, bear attacks.

Dunking on credulous firebrands intent on battling government overreach against their own self-interest and well-being is by now a wearying pastime. There's little humour to be had now that it's become such a pervasive part of our world. Charismatic ideologues proffering their vision of some ideal future state, positioning themselves as noble vanguards pushing against reigning norms has given us anti-vaxxers, QAnon, the manosphere, and Elon Musk. Chuckling along at their antics with an exasperated “oh you” and pandering to some imagined leftwing reader feels like the writing of an older, gentler time and lacks the teeth you'd want in this increasingly partisan world that demands blood - or at least a scathing hot take.