But a genre that rejects the limits imposed by reality can go only so far in depicting the real. Though sci-fi remains her claim to fame, Russ, who died in 2011, published works of fantasy, drama, and criticism. She also wrote a single realist novel. In On Strike Against God, first released in 1980 and recently reissued, Russ directly explored and described sexism and homophobia as they existed within her milieu—forces depicted elsewhere in her fiction through the slanted lens of metaphor.
Jessica Anthony’s The Most is pitched as a one-sitting read, the story of a marriage pushed to its brink and a moment of shocking realization triggered by long hours in a pool. But distilling this novel down to just these elements misses its other dimensions, how it captures an anxiety both specific to its time and broadly relatable, how its narrator twists and diverts the story at will, and how in under 150 pages we are presented and taken through an incredibly nuanced conflict.
What is most successful in the novel is Birdy’s depiction of an immediately recognisable young manhood that will be familiar to readers far beyond the Liberties area in Dublin, where Ravelling is set. Birdy has a fantastic ear, and is meticulous in portraying the profoundly articulate inarticulacy of young people, the idiolects through which their lives are negotiated.
Be prepared to be awed, and maybe a little frightened. Be ready to have your own thoughts on life after death poked and prodded — and maybe changed. Be warned for “In My Time of Dying” to leave you breathless.
When Charles Darwin enlisted for his formative voyage on the Beagle in 1831, his role was primarily not that of a naturalist but a geologist. He developed his theory of evolution by natural selection with a keen eye on the interactions of the living and the geological world, recognising that life on Earth could transform the very environment that shapes it.
In Living on Earth, philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith takes up that theme, offering “a history of organisms as causes, rather than evolutionary products” to create “a picture of an Earth continually changing because of what living things do”. While the actors in this tale include bacteria, birds and octopuses, a substantial proportion of the book focuses on the creatures that are transforming the environment like no other: us.