shado’s bookshelf presents: Love Beyond the Binary Sept – Nov 23 shado’s...
BOOK CLUB
World Building and Re-Imagination:
How Fiction Can Free Us
March - May
In shado’s sixth bookshelf cluster, join us on a literary journey of re-imagination and world-building as we engage some of the best speculative and political fiction of past and present.
An anthology of short stories set in 2048 Palestine will show us how some of the best sci-fi is descriptive, not predictive. A counterfactual retelling of the Haitian Revolution allows us to remix history as it should have been. And an ambiguous utopia gets us to approach the one question we avoid all too often: so what happens the day after liberation?
The three core texts are:
Palestine+100 - Stories from a Century after the Nakba - edited by Basma Ghalayini . Anthology of sci-fi and speculative fiction, posing a question to 12 Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048.
Begin the World Over - by Kung Li. A counterfactual novel about the Founders’ greatest fear - what would have happened if the Haitian revolution had spread throughout the United States.
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia - by Ursula K. Le Guin. A book which helps answer the question of what happens 'after' the revolution happens? What would our desired utopias actually look like? How can we present them in their wholeness rather than just perfection?
Past Book Clubs
