Topics include the Okanagan, Marlowe and Shakespeare and, yes, Gay Dwarves
Anne Fleming, Gay Dwarves of America (Pedlar Press)
Actually there are no dwarves in Gay Dwarves of America, but in the collection of short stories there is a mother of a teen with dwarfism who worries he might be gay, and there’s a parasitologist named Edna who’d rather not hear the words “gay” or “lesbian” but longs for the love of a certain young woman, and a boy on a unicycle — there is always a boy on a unicycle — and a hockey mom in Toronto who pretends to be Swiss. Hut, hut, hut, she shouts in the stands, ringing her cowbell like she was at a ski hill.
There’s a story that’s a musical (numbers include “You Can’t Leave a Man in a Coma” and “The Total Quality Management Waltz”) and a story that’s one family’s puke diary. With a nod to the circus and a wink at the kitchen sink, Gay Dwarves of America is like a mixed tape made by your pirate radio DJ friend who never quite grew up, and who shelters, behind that fun shiny nerdy schtick, the tenderest of tender hearts.
Grisel García Pérez, Training Spanish Speakers to Perceive and Pronounce English Vowels: A Theoretical, Practical Approach (Edwin Mellen Press)
Grisel García Pérez’s book looks at some crucial aspects of learning a foreign language and discusses the methods and results of her experimental research into training native Spanish speakers in a regular classroom setting over a three-week training period.
In the book, García Pérez outlines the work she did to help a group of 32 Spanish speakers identify and produce English pairs of vowels. The results were significant and make an important contribution to the understanding of second-language pronunciation. The book also serves as a guide to instructors on effective pronunciation.
Nancy Holmes, The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems (Ronsdale Press)
Nancy Holmes has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems (2012). This collection of poems is about the place, people, plants and animals of the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia where she has lived for the past 20 years.
Sean Lawrence, Forgiving the Gift: The Philosophy of Generosity in Marlowe and Shakespeare (Duquesne University Press)
Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even necessity of radical generosity, of gifts that break the cycle of economy and self-interest.
While proposing new readings of works of Renaissance drama, Forgiving the Gift also questions the model of human life from which many contemporary readings, especially those characterized as new historicist or cultural materialist, grow. In so doing, it addresses questions of how we are to understand literary texts, but also how we are to live with others in the world.
Marianne Legault, Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Ashgate Publishing)
Marianne Legault’s recently published a book is about literary discourses on female friendship and intimacy in 17th-century French literature.
The book takes as its premise the view that unlike men, women have been denied for centuries the possibility of same-sex friendship. Legault explores the effect of this on female friendship and homoerotic relationships as thematic narratives in works by male and female writers in seventeenth-century France.
Legault’s work in this book adds to the research in lesbian and queer studies, fields in which pre-18th-century French literary texts are rare.