The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
Latest editorial
Navigating fatphobia
ROSIE NELSON applauds a graphic novel that asks what does it mean to exist as a fat person in a fatphobic society?
ALEX HALL is intrigued by a detailed history of Gaza that demonstrates its historic resilience and changing economy
RON JACOBS welcomes the long overdue translation of an epic work that chronicles resistance to fascism during WWII
MAYER WAKEFIELD is chilled by the co-dependency of two lost souls as portrayed by German communist playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz
The Star's critics BRETT GREGORY, JOHN GREEN, MICHAEL BONCZA and ANGUS REID review The Stimming Pool, Misericordia, La Cocina, Irena’s Vow, and The End
CHRIS MOSS welcomes a radical history that brings marginalised stories and overlooked people and agencies to the centre
ANDREW HEDGECOCK relishes visual storytelling with no respect for genres, movements or styles
Shrink
Rachel M Thomas, Graphic Mundi, £20.95
WHAT is it like to move through the world when everyone tries to change who and what you are? This is the fundamental experience that the graphic novel Shrink explores in its stylistic depiction of the author’s autobiographical experience of being fat.
The book opens with the author hospitalised. Even while lying in bed with oxygen tubes, Rachel M Thomas’s mind is racing — will people think that she’s there because she’s fat? How are others judging her? This sense of claustrophobic, understandable paranoia persists through the novel.
As Thomas shows, to be fat is to be judged. Herein lies the most interesting contribution of this book: what does it mean to exist as a fat person in a hugely fatphobic society?
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While the group known as the Colourists certainly reinvigorated Scottish painting, a new show is a welcome chance to reassess them, writes ANGUS REID
ANGUS REID recommends an exquisite drama about the disturbing impact of the one child policy in contemporary China
The phrase “cruel to be kind” comes from Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Prince didn’t go in for kidnap, explosive punches, and cigarette deprivation. Tam is different.
ANGUS REID deconstructs a popular contemporary novel aimed at a ‘queer’ young adult readership
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