Citlalli's Reviews

The best science fiction transforms us into actors in their world and in ours. It makes us invest in a future that we have the potential to (un)make. In this cyber-feminist, totally punk, time-travelling tale, Newitz uses her quick-paced storyline and captivating characters to introduce us to a world that could be ours. Not only will this book make you want to wear fishnets and mosh to Grape Ape, it’ll make you lucidly see your own role in revolution. — Citlalli

Ceremony, reverence, recollection, an ode to Blackness in motion, all in a brief but expansive 160 pages. Ntozake Shange, best known for her choreopoem For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, illuminates her own intimacy with dance through testimony, interviews with oft-overlooked Black icons of movement, and deeply gorgeous photo inserts. Shange communicates the intergenerational inheritance of Black dance and movement with prose true to her prior writing. A love letter and veneration of the Black diaspora, especially Black women. — Citlalli

Arundhati Roy’s writing consistently alters and advances the world it is given to. Azadi is no different. Through this collection of essays, Roy interrogates, illuminates, and inspires worlds to come—deliberately dissecting our world’s underbelly, Roy leaves nearly nothing untouched and everything expanding. She writes of the ongoing pandemic, the continuing struggles for freedom in Kashmir, and what can, does, and will exist in the spaces between freedom. Azadi, meaning freedom in Urdu, feels a little closer after reading this book. — Citlalli

This monumental new book, the culmination of nearly 30 years of work by Les Payne (continued after his passing by his daughter, Tamara Payne), crafts an expansive vision and remembering of the man who brought us all a little closer to freedom. Written with immense care, detail, and dedication and drawing on interviews with people ranging from FBI informants to childhood friends of Malcolm, The Dead Are Rising is a necessary companion to the Autobiography of Malcolm X for understanding Malcolm X and his contribution to Black liberation. — Citlalli

As the nation revolts in protest to the police’s extrajudicial execution of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, and sleeping Black woman, Breonna Taylor, police and prisons are being challenged. In Prison by Any Other Name, Schenwar and Law call for abolishing prisons. Using lived experiences and well-researched statistics, they illuminate how “alternatives” to mass incarceration, like parole and mandatory treatment, expand the state’s power to incarcerate in our everyday lives. A must-read to understand what it means to destroy the ever-expanding cages threatening us all!   —Citlalli

adrienne maree brown wrote the book we all needed. Rooted in and expanding on Black radical tradition, brown crafts a whole new understanding of resistance and world-changing. Revolution is not some catastrophic moment, it is a way of living your life in embodied resistance — one that is so beautifully explored in Pleasure Activism. - Citlalli

As fry bread has become a cherished staple for indigenous peoples across Nations, this book will become a staple for Bookshop families. It’s a sweet story about the making and meaning of traditions that will resonate with children from the Oklahoma Seminole Nation to the neighborhoods of Santa Cruz. The book, like fry bread, is born from necessity—speaking of, from, and to being uniquely at home and loved through tradition and adversity. Perfect for families forming traditions! - Citlalli