Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior does all that a great work of eco-fiction should, addressing the issues (climate change) without sacrificing the story (a woman whose small-town world is broken wide open by a mysterious act of nature). Dellarobia Turnbow, married at seventeen due to a pregnancy in which she lost the baby, is a decade later …
Exodus 2022 by Kenneth G. Bennett (author of the young adult novels, The Gaia Wars and Battle for Cascadia), succeeds nicely as an eco-lit foray into the thriller category set in the Pacific Northwest. It follows genre conventions well by moving along at a nice clip, ending each short chapter with a hook, and teasing …
Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century by Stephanie LeMenager is an academic book and priced accordingly. In other words, this is not the sort of book you’d find in an airport bookstore. Perhaps it should be. This book provides historical and cultural insights into our complex relationship with oil — from the “peak discovery” period of the …
The world needs more romantic comedies and more books with vegetarian protagonists and The Green and the Red (May 2014) responds delightfully. Add this to your summer reading list for the beach, plane or train. It’s a fun, quick read. As a bonus, Le Vert Le Rouge, by Armand Chauvel translated by Elizabeth Lyman, is …
I enjoyed this recent New York Times article on universities using fiction (or “cli-fi”) to teach climate change. I particularly enjoyed seeing our own University of Oregon represented. Go Ducks! From the article: University courses on global warming have become common, and Prof. Stephanie LeMenager’s new class here at the University of Oregon has all …
We are thrilled to hear the news that Karen Joy Fowler (our judge for this year’s Siskiyou Prize) is the winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for her amazing novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. As the Washington Post writes, “With its disturbing portrayal of the abuse that chimps endure, We Are All Completely …
As children, we read short fairytales and fables in which animals joined humans on quests or spoke and explored together. As adults, we may have turned to a reading life of ponderous nonfiction and novels with nary an animal. If so, it’s time to reconsider. To add one good animal story to your reading diet, …
I stumbled on Elliot Schrefer’s young adult novel Endangered while searching my library’s catalog for fiction about endangered species. Other than two genre novels, this was the only hit and it felt, well, a little too obvious. I probably should have noticed this title when it was released in 2012, or at the very least …
Ashland Creek Press has just announced its new book award, The Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature. The 2014 prize will be judged by New York Times bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler, whose most recent book is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. (Check out Shel Graves’ review of the book here.) The contest is open to unpublished, full-length prose …
On a bookshelf or reading list, this classic of vegetarian thought belongs beside Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Originally published in 1990 and reprinted in a 20th Anniversary Edition The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory describes the intersection between feminism, pacifism and vegetarianism (conversely male dominance, war and meat-eating). It examines the use …
Seeing Trees Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees. Timber Press, 2011 By Nancy Ross Hugo Photography by Robert Llewellyn “The most effective way to save the threatened and decimated natural world is to cause people to fall in love with it again, with its beauty and reality.” Author Nancy Ross Hugo quotes British naturalist Peter …
