Flowers, Stephen E., and Crystal Dawn Flowers. Carnal Alchemy: Sado-Magical Techniques for Pleasure, Pain, and Self-Transformation. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2013.
I encountered a reference to another book about the intersection between BDSM and spirituality in Ariane Cruz’s (no relation) excellent book The Color of Kink, and while reading about it online came across the Flowers’s book. Theirs sounded more interesting than the other one, so it is the one I ordered.
This and Serano’s book were acquired from amazon.com’s network of independent booksellers.
Foster, Clarise, ed. “Mennonite Poets.” Special issue of Rhubarb 40 (2017).
Although I normally do not document journal issues that I acquire, I am making an exception in this case because it is the first anthology of Mennonite poetry since Ann Hostetler’s 2003 A Capella. It has the potential to become a significant text in the field of Mennonite literature as the field continues to balance the importance of “first generation” authors who began publishing in the 1980s and 1990s and the younger “second generation” whose work has appeared in the past decade. Foster’s anthology is also fascinating because she herself is not a Mennonite, so it is interesting that Rhubarb (the journal of the Mennonite Literary Society) chose to get this outsider perspective on the field.
Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. 1935. New York: New American Library, 2005.
I came across this book while browsing at the Norfolk, Virginia, airport’s newsstand earlier this week. I had just finished reading Paula Rabinowitz’s book American Pulp and was thinking about how books used to be sold in many more places than they are today. This put me in the mood to buy a book to keep the tradition of buying something to read while one is traveling alive. I chose Lewis’s book because when I found out that it is about a Fascist regime taking over the United States I thought to myself that the way the current administration is going such books will not be legal for long.
Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2016.
I have been writing about trans fiction lately and have been feeling the need for more trans theory to help guide my thinking, so I decided to order the new version of Serano’s classic text.
Daniel Shank Cruz 