Uterish Book Club Picks of the Year 2024
Did you tune in every month and read our Uterish Book Club Picks on The Provocateur? Is this the first you are hearing of it? Welcome to our full round-up of each book we selected and wrote about on The Provocateur, our monthly newsletter, in 2024!
JANUARY
Allie’s Pick —
Seasonal Associate (by Heike Geissler and translated by Katy Derbyshire) is a novel about one woman’s experience as a temporary worker in an Amazon warehouse. From doomed workplace romances to cycles of physical and existential fatigue, the novel explores the everyday burdens of labor, resistance, and solidarity within a failing economic system.
The novel’s protagonist, a struggling German writer, accepts the warehouse job as a last resort that she halfheartedly justifies as an intellectual project...
Read the rest of Allie’s Book Club review here.
FEBRUARY
Alex’s Pick —
In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson offers “queer of color critique,” a mode of analysis that bridges gaps left in canonical sociology and Marx’s historical materialism to attend to the experiences wrought by racial capitalism in a heteronormative society. Ferguson sees a paradox in these methodologies: the production of epistemological conditions where universality is regulated occurs simultaneously with the creation of difference. Queer of color critique identifies this paradox and uses it as ripe ground from which to imagine a way out.
I love how Aberrations in Black opens new pathways of imagination for liberatory movements and politics despite being dense, academic theory. Moreover, I think Ferguson’s interventions are in important conversation with reproductive justice!
MARCH
Greta’s Pick —
Foster (by Claire Keegan) is a short, striking novel that begins with a young girl being dropped off with two adults she doesn’t know, the Kinsellas. Her parents––overworked, stressed, and disinterested in her––are enlisting the Kinsellas to care for the child for an indiscriminate length of time. Foster is told from this nameless child’s perspective as she gets to know her new guardians. It is a book concerned completely with questions of accountability, agency, and care. Told through the limited perspective of a young child in a manner equally matter-of-fact and crushing, Foster explores the infrastructure of love.
APRIL
Greta’s Pick —
How to Get Over the End of the World (by Hal Schrieve) is a YA novel following James, Ian, and Orsino, three queer teenagers in Olympia, Washington, working on creating a punk space opera to save their local LGBTQ+ support group. As they work through the usual tribulations of belonging, self-expression, and desire that occur in high school, an unusual complication arises: Orsino has an encounter with an alien race that can communicate only to him.
This is a sweet, heartwarming book that while celebrating young love and friendship also deftly handles the serious traumas that can arise for queer teenagers as they move toward independence. This book is an ode to community spaces and staying weird, and I loved it!
MAY
Alex’s Pick —
Entangled Life explores what we know about the world of fungi and its influence on our ways of being. The book is engaging and accessible while remaining informative, moving from discussions of mycorrhizal networks to psychedelic epiphanies to the wonders of yeast. Merlin Sheldrake uses the scientific subject matter as a lens to explore interconnectedness: as an evolutionary advantage, a biological imperative, and a politic. He shares the growing theory of radical mycology that is imminently relevant in movement organizing, transforming social structures, and mutual survival. Entangled Life provokes us to reconsider with whom we are in community (and to perhaps even include mushrooms!).
(Image: @thearch1111ves)
JUNE
Michael’s Pick —
As a longtime fan of The Provocateur, I’m honored to finally write for it! This month, I published my (Michael Waters’) first book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, a nonfiction history book that chronicles the forgotten, fascist origins of the anti-trans and anti-intersex policies at the Olympics. But at its heart, the book is about a Czech track star named Zdenek Koubek, who publicly transitioned gender and began living as a man in 1935.
With this book, I really wanted to scramble our timelines of the queer past. It’s easy to assume that queer history is, largely, a linear story of progress. But what struck me while doing this research is that Koubek—in the 1930s, decades before, say, Stonewall—was widely embraced by society. Publications like TIME Magazine and the New York Times wrote with curiosity about his gender transition. He brought to the public a new understanding that sex categories were imperfect and permeable. And it all happened during this era when we wouldn’t typically expect such queer possibilities.
(Image: Joan Didion’s Facebook page)
JULY
Koreb’s Pick —
Spanning decades, Let Me Tell You What I Mean features pieces written about anything from defunct underground papers and college admissions to public figures like Nancy Reagan and Martha Stewart.
As both a love letter to writing and the perfect place to become acquainted with the famously incisive perspective Didion maintains throughout her body of work, the collection is full of gems. While reading “Everywoman.com,” an essay written about Martha Stewart, I couldn’t help but think about 22-year-old influencer Nara Smith who embraces domesticity, receiving criticism for showcasing an “unrealistic” and “tradwife” lifestyle… Read more of Koreb’s review here!
AUGUST
Greta’s Pick —
In Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr!, poet Cyrus Shams is desperately searching for meaning. He is in the midst of working on a book about martyrs, inspired by his mother’s death at the hands of the U.S. government. At the urging of a friend, Cyrus makes his way to witness a performance art piece by the artist Orkideh, who has chosen to spend her final days battling breast cancer speaking with museum patrons. Cyrus’ conversation with Orkideh challenges his conceptions of martyrdom and sacrifice.
Martyr! is a novel that uses its messy, ambitious, confused main character to explore vast and disparate themes, such as nationality, belonging, addiction, and islamophobia. Though heavy, the book is more often funny than not, and is fundamentally concerned with digging into the absurdities hidden in trauma.
SEPTEMBER
Greta’s Pick —
Gay Bar (Jeremy Atherton Lin) merges memoir, history, reportage, and ethnography to pay homage to the gay bar as a site of history-making and community building. Using the significant gay bars from his own life (in San Francisco, LA, and London) as touchpoints, author Jeremy Atherton Lin turns the focus toward himself, reflecting upon the ways he embraced and rejected his own gay identification throughout his life. The core of the book is dedicated to gay history, both in the sense of archival record and in the sense of interpersonal memory. It’s a surprising, often delightful, collection of essays that strikes an engaging balance between personal and cultural histories.
OCTOBER
Alex’s Pick —
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) revolves around Victor Frankenstein, a relentless scientist whose dark obsession with mortality drives him to reanimate dead tissue, giving rise to a monstrous creation. An achievement in Gothic literature and considered by some to be the first science fiction novel, the story is preoccupied with the anxieties produced by the Industrial Revolution and humankind’s increasing capacity to manipulate nature.
Shelley’s timeless parable questions Western epistemological values of mastery, control, individualism, and greed and resonates deeply in the Anthropocene where technological advancements within extractive capitalism have posed an existential threat to all Earthbound life. The analogy of Frankenstein’s monster is easily seen in the world around us today, and the book is in conversation with contemporary feminist texts such as Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline and Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto.
NOVEMBER
Christine’s Pick —
The plot of Olga Ravn’s The Employees unfurls like a new-age Agatha Christie mystery. This book is at once thin in size but weighty in content. Set on a spacecraft in an undisclosed future period, Ravn imbues each page with a short burst of clues about an unfolding power struggle between humans and robots. Ravn most certainly draws on complex themes explored in Arthur C. Clarke’s prescient 2001: A Space Odyssey, written nearly sixty years ago. An experiment gone awry, where the line between biology and technology becomes undecipherable, this novella will inspire rich book group discussions on artificial intelligence in the 21st Century. A must-read for both sci-fi devotees and newbies to the genre!
DECEMBER
Alex’s Pick —
Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim examines how states use maiming as a tool of colonialism, warfare, and statecraft through the calculated imposition of vulnerability – within systemic ableism – to exert political control. Puar differentiates the broad label of disability (often co-opted into neoliberal, rights-based frameworks) from debility, a process of violent and often strategic disablement. The concept of debility is especially relevant in colonial contexts like Israel’s occupation of Palestine, “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history.”