Category: reviews
A record of interactions with material experiences.
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Monk reviews Don’t Look Up
Originally written for CineSPEAK journal as No Imagination: A Working Class Sci-fi Writer’s Read of Don’t Look Up **Spoilers Alert** During the first great plague of the 21st century, Hollywood took to producing Don’t Look Up, an engrossing film about a comet striking the Earth and all of humanity too caught up reacting to their…
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Monk Reviews Blue-Collar Conservatism by Timothy J. Lombardo
The postwar United States has experienced many forms of populist politics, none more consequential than that of the blue-collar white ethnics who brought figures like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump to the White House. Blue-Collar Conservatism traces the rise of this little-understood, easily caricatured variant of populism by presenting a nuanced portrait of the supporters…
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Monk Reviews Demystification #2
A collab between Ambroze Nzams & Paula Martinez. Through the mystery of social networks, I had been mutually following Paula Martinez online for a few years–someone who I never met but seemed cool and was part of a bunch of interesting and fun collab zine projects with friends of theirs. They approached me when volume…
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Monk Reviews the Amphitheater of the Dead by Guy Hocquenghem
Translated by Max Fox About a year or two ago I cooked up a string of words to function as promotional slogan for my work, particularly for my business card and table signage at zine & book fairs: “sci-fi magic smut survivor memoir.” AMPHITHEATER OF THE DEAD is a scifi survivor memoir. It’s set in…
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Monk Reviews Portland Diary by Jamie Berrout
The promotional description of this book is good and apt. Portland Diary is a collection of short stories about women faced with impossible situations. Each of the seven narratives unfolds its heightened, speculative version of the impossible everyday reality we find outselves in as racialized people, queer and colonial and mentally ill subjects, enemies or…
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Monk Reviews Doc and Fluff by Patrick Califia
My copy of this book has a foreword from the author more or less calling critics out over the violence in the book, chiding them to basically get real. I realize many people out there don’t bother to read the forewords or introductions to books, but I’m not one of them and reading that on…
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Monk Reviews Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
For years I’ve been told that DHALGREN is an experimental novel, that it’s maybe not the best first book to read by Delany, that lots of people start it but few finish it. I started reading it like seven years ago and then got bored and put it down. Then a friend said they were…
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Monk Reviews Future Pleasures edited by Rin Kim
Germantown artist and event planner Malachi Lily was one of the first to submit their incredible squish-slime smut myth The Violet Island during the open call for Venus Saturn Square, and it was through them that I learned of Other Publishing and their QPOC scifi fantasy smut anthology, FUTURE PLEASURES. They had what looked like…
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Monk Reviews Bitch Goddess edited by Patrick Califia and Drew Campbell
The spiritual path of the dominant woman This review was first posted on goodreads in 2016: On a personal level, this book struck me as a relic of what I’ll casually call the (lgbt) BDSM scene of the 90s. Being able to effortlessly order it at my convenience and days later read the collection in…
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Monk Reviews The Leather Daddy and The Femme by Carol Queen
I ordered this book alongside DOING IT FOR DADDY. I read that one first and when I got to Carol Queen’s contribution in the anthology and it was a chapter from this book, I jumped immediately over to read Queen’s entire book from there. THE LEATHER DADDY AND THE FEMME is so good and hot…
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Monk Reviews Doing It For Daddy edited by Patrick Califia
“Read me a story, Daddy.”Oh, I think I can manage that … just take your pick. In between these covers you will be able to find just about any kind of daddy your heart desires. There’s a biological father whose gay son shows him that there’s more to sex than procreation; a leather daddy who…
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Monk Reviews Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr
A brutal meditation in a hefty short story collection. Tiptree wrote dark and fatalistic sci-fi that lingers on today as something of a passed over and forgotten writer of the 70s speculative and feminist sci-fi waves (well this book is still in print so it’s not that forgotten). At one point Tiptree was lauded as…
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