Fiction

• Whitehead won his first Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his novel " The Underground Railroad ."
• A #1 New York Times bestseller, it also earned him the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal for Fiction.
• His second Pulitzer came two years later for " The Nickel Boys ," a novel inspired by the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida.
• In 2018, New York State named him its New York State Author, and in 2020 the Library of Congress awarded him its Prize for American Fiction.

• Alsym™ Energy , a leading developer of non-lithium rechargeable battery technology, announced that it has successfully developed the industry’s first high-performance, non-flammable battery storage technology suitable for warmer climates.
• Climates with abundant sun or wind are ideally suited to renewable energy production.
• This presents a generational opportunity to bring new, diverse industries to the Middle East; however, expensive, fire-prone battery technologies are serious impediments to ambitious plans for rapid growth.
• “The Alsym team has developed an entirely new battery technology that’s ideally suited to the needs of a rapidly changing climate.

• First Voices is a Grade 11 English course that replaces works by authors like Shakespeare and Fitzgerald with texts authored by Indigenous writers like Cherie Dimaline and Richard Wagamese.
• Over the summer, our Indigenous literatures lab, led by Haudenosaunee scholar Jennifer Brant at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, examined contemporary Indigenous-authored young adult texts that are well-suited for the First Voices course.

Importance of Indigenous perspectives

• With the replacement of long-read literature comes the task of selecting texts that centre Indigenous resurgence and what Indigenous literary scholar Gerald Vizenor refers to as survivance.
• We hope to see the stories in classrooms across the country that centre Indigenous community narratives from the voices of Indigenous Peoples.

Upholding responsibilities

• As Cherokee author and scholar Daniel Heath Justice writes, good stories are needed that give “shape, substance and purpose” to Indigenous Peoples’ existences and shed light on how to uphold responsibilities to one another and to creation.
• These stand in contrast to stories Justice discusses as “bad medicine,” stories often imposed from the outside, from the perspective of the colonizer.

Engaging with books

• We encourage educators to take a strength-based perspective when discussing Indigenous literature, and also to take an anti-racist approach.
• Anti-racist approaches acknowledge varied experiences of racism, and would help students think critically about their own lives in relationship to these books.
• Read more:
  Why you shouldn't be afraid of critical race theory — Podcast

  Books featured here are highly acclaimed, and show narratives of Indigenous resurgence.

• It is a story about a Métis-Anishinaabe teen and her family who are drastically impacted by a violent crime in Winnipeg.
• As investigations uncover many unknowns, readers get meaningful insights into the realities of various characters whose lives are intricately woven together.
• Maracle followed Ravensong with Celia’s Song, a finalist in the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

• Review: Wall – Jen Craig (Puncher & Wattmann) Wall is the third short novel Craig has published over the past 13 years.
• I only managed to get a copy when her agent Martin Shaw noted on Twitter that Craig herself would individually mail copies to interested readers.
• Craig even managed to secure an interview on Michael Silverblat’s KCRW radio show Bookworm – the on-air Valhalla of contemporary experimental novelists.
• Read more:
  In Bon and Lesley, Shaun Prescott has written an Australian horror story of uniquely local proportions

Whirling monologue

• The unnamed narrator is an Australian artist,
  who moved to London in the late 1980s to escape her difficult, estranged family in Sydney.
• Teun holds strongly critical views – at least, in the narrator’s account – of her family and old friends.
• The plot is more complex than it seems at first, because virtually all of its major events occur in the background and are reported second-hand in the narrator’s anxiously whirling monologue.
• She ultimately protests a public lecture by Lord, staging a “splattered body intervention”, which seems to be a decades-delayed response to the undergraduate happening.
• Read more:
  Enraged, tragic and hopeful: Alexis Wright's new novel Praiseworthy explores Aboriginal sovereignty in the shadow of the anthropocene

Trans-generational effects

• Craig’s exegetical writing on her own work is about anorexia, trauma, and trauma’s durational and trans-generational effects.
• For these characters, past trauma lives in the present and can only be repeated and responded to.
• This becomes clear when Eileen (yet another punning name) disappears and the narrator visits her family to track her down.
• It also invokes material that recalls, but does not quite replicate, the key scenario of Since the Accident.