QUEER SQUARE MILE: Queer Short Stories from Wales Edited by Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan and Huw Osborne This ground-breaking volume makes visible a long and diverse tradition of queer writing from Wales. Spanning genres from ghost stories and science fiction to industrial literature and surrealist modernism, these are stories of love, loss and transformation. In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father's place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus 'utopia'. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one's place in the world. Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or north Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings – a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places. The first anthology of its kind in Wales, which finally sheds light on a largely hidden queer cultural history with the careful selection of over 40 short stories (1837-2018). New translations of Kate Roberts, Mihangel Morgan, Jane Edwards, Pennar Davies and Dylan Huw make available their compelling stories for the first time to a non-Welsh speaking readership. Previously unpublished works by writers such as Margiad Evans and Ken Etheridge appear alongside better known favourites.

This ground-breaking volume makes visible a long and diverse tradition of queer writing from Wales. Spanning genres from ghost stories and science fiction to industrial literature and surrealist modernism, these are stories of love, loss and transformation.

Bringing together the best of Wales' review-essays, including a comparison of new editions of nature classics, 'Back to the Land' by Pippa Marland. The books under review, Thomas Firbank's I Bought a Mountain and Margiad Evans' Autobiography take contrasting blustering and humble approaches to stepping over the sub/urban doorstep into nature. A showcase of new nonfiction, previewing forthcoming titles from some of Wales' key English-language publishers, exploring books on anti-Welsh media vitriol covering the early Manic Street Preachers, and historical flooding and the riches of an Eton-owned Benedictine fishery on the Gwent Levels. In original fiction: a wonderful story about a teenage boy on the cusp of bodily and emotional change, 'Trout', by Satterday Shaw, and a second, finely crafted story about the effect of geographical dislocation on teenage identity emergence, 'Another Place' by Philippa Holloway, set on Crosby beach. Plus Editorial by Gwen Davies and a new opinion feature, Last Page, by Richard Lewis Davies, in which the writers note that magazines in Wales are undergoing a transition, during which readers and subscribers will need to step up to the plate if a commitment to expressing – without interference - our particular place and time, is to be maintained. EDITORIAL Half-in, half-out Gwen Davies NONFICTION Bears at the Fridge: From Goldcliff to Whitson Preview extract from This Stolen Land by Marsha O'Mahony The Kinnock Factor: The Manics and Anti-Welshness Edited abridged preview from International Velvet by Neil Collins FICTION Another Place Story by Philippa Holloway Trout Story by Satterday Shaw ESSAYS Dark Formula Timothy Laurence Marsh on why reckless travel writing matters Books for Alien Girls JL George's personal and practical reflections on the role neurodivergence can and should play when writing fiction REVIEW-ESSAYS Back to the Land Pippa Marland on two nature memoir classics, one of hubristic bluster, the other humbly receptive 'Queer Old Codgers' Claire Pickard on the portrayal of highly nuanced gay identities and history in recent nonfiction titles and a major short story anthology THE LAST PAGE Back to the Future Richard Lewis Davies on how a culture with ambition needs critics and readers

'A wonderful collection stemming from a hugely important project keeping young Welsh writers connected to Europe despite all attempts to sever these crucial cultural ties.' – Rachel Trezise 'Anthologies such as this one are the footings of the recently-burnt bridges that we need to rebuild. They help to tear down the walls put up around us. Always important, they are now vital.' – Niall Griffiths Ulysses's Cat brings readers the work of some of the most outstanding authors of the younger generation from Croatia, Greece, Serbia, Slovenia and Wales who participated in a project of exchange residencies originally launched on the Croatian island of Mljet, where, according to legend, shipwrecked Ulysses found shelter. As Britain becomes metaphorically unmoored and drifts away from Europe, keeping connected through reading and dialogue provides us with new perspectives on our place in the world and on the tumultuous times we live in. The works of poetry, prose and essays included here offer a snapshot of the concerns and preoccupations shared by young writers from a region with a rich literature that rarely reaches English-language readers and at the same time confirms the vitality of the bilingual Welsh literary scene.

This collection is focused on the possibilities for unbinding people from gendered expectations in and around educational spaces, and accounts for the ways gender is reconstituted in and through education. This book presents a broad interpretation of gender, of what education might mean, and where educational experiences manifest. It explores more conventional schooling spaces to communally generated inclusive spaces, families and marginalised sites where gender is realised and contested. Alongside more familiar framings, the book incorporates decolonial and Indigenous contestations, theoretical innovations and methodological experiments that pry open the ways that gender binds and limits individuals. The chapters are organised in smaller conceptual clusters, offering multiple and overlapping reading paths according to the interests of the reader. A mapping of clusters and potential reading paths is included at the opening of the book, designed for instructors to expand course content. Written to enrich reading for preservice teacher education students and to challenge researchers, postgraduate and doctoral candidates, this book provides essential new perspectives on gender, education and the various ways in which they are un/bound together and apart.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

*Get your copy of Crystal Jeans' deliciously funny new novel, ACCIDENTAL DARLINGS, now!* 'An absolute *blinder* ... so so funny and sexy. So excited now to read everything by Crystal Jeans' Caroline O'Donoghue, author of Scenes of a Graphic Nature 'A glorious celebration of queer friendship and all kinds of love. Funny, outrageous, heartbreaking and so much fun' Kate Davies, winner of the Polari Prize 'Hilarious, fresh and sexy, with a tale that takes the reader from Egypt to Hollywood' Irish Independent 'Funny, filthy and phenomenally good' Matt Cain 'Filthy and hilarious, this is a gloriously naughty romp of a read that also has something serious to say about queer love. I didn't want it to end' S.J. Watson 'Perfect for fans of Tipping the Velvet and Gentleman Jack... a delicious and diligent piece of fiction that will provide you with enough great comebacks to last a lifetime... This is a delightful book I wish to fling at my friends with affectionate abandon' DIVA 'By turns raucous and poignant, hilarious and shattering this is a wonder of a story' Jess Kidd 'This delicious romp is the sort of thing Nancy Mitford might have written if she'd been gay... wonderfully blithe, witty and moving' Rowan Pelling, DAILY MAIL 1921: a boy, a girl, a moonlit midnight kiss. A terrible, repulsive kiss. Bettina and Bart have grown up as best friends, so surely they will end up together? After all, Bettina is young, rich, headstrong.... and gay. Bart is young, rich, charismatic... and also, definitely, gay. Any doubts are dispelled by, in short order: that ghastly kiss; a torrid encounter for Bettina in the school boiler-rooms; and an eye-opening Parisian visit for Bart. Society will never stand for it. What else can they do but enter into a 'lavender marriage' and carry on indulging their true natures in secret? As the '20s and '30s whizz past in a haze of cigarettes, champagne and casual sex, Bart and Bettina have no idea that they are hurtling, via Hollywood and Egypt, Paris and London, towards tragedy and bloodshed...