Joshua Whitehead’s Featured Book
Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction
This exciting and ground-breaking fiction collection showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories.
Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492.
Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderon, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah Tom
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Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books
Joshua Whitehead’s Recommended Book
I had to choose it because it’s set in Calgary. But he refused to call it Calgary and only refers to it as Moh-kíns-tsis and that was rare for me to see an entire Canadian city, especially a large one, fully referenced from a non-Indigenous writer with its Indigenous name. I loved that. I’m also a huge Indiginerd, so I love horror…and magical realism but all of that done from a BIPOC voice that doesn’t fetishize it as magical realism. Where, in fact, magical realism just becomes the real. I think Marc Herman Lynch does that so beautifully in Arborescent. I cannot praise it and recommend it enough. Specifically for those of us in YYC, I think it’s a little bit of essential reading for the immigrant experience, Indigenous livelihoods, and just badass Chinese oral storytelling.
Arborescent by Marc Herman Lynch
Ghosts, doppelgangers, and a man who turns into a tree: a startling fiction debut that strives to articulate the Asian immigrant body.
In the beltline of a run-of-the-mill Canadian metropolis, an apartment complex called Cambrian Court has become the focal point of an outlandish unfurling, where even the laws of physics are becoming questioned. Embroiled within this psychic plot are three neighbours – Nohlan Buckles, Hachiko Yoshimoto, and Zadie Chan – complete strangers whose ordinary lives have become rife with bizarre antagonists: an ogrish landlord, a fanatical romantic, a psychic horticulturalist. The further they are drawn into this otherworld the more reality becomes suspect: Nohlan is convinced he’s turning into a tree; Hachiko’s staging of a kabuki comes to life; and Zadie unwittingly begins to produce doppelgangers. Distant at first, they come to realize just how dependent and intertwined their lives are.
In Marc Herman Lynch’s debut novel, some people explode, and others come back to life, but at the heart of it all are the fleeting yet indelible connections we make with one another. Darkly funny, lyrically charged, and gothically absurd, Arborescent is a raw and brilliantly imagined depiction of our disconnected contemporary world.
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