Lists with This Book. Aug 07, Nikki rated it it was ok Shelves: Not sure how long this one has been on my TBR, but long enough. Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
Hoffman writes these stories in a voice similar to that of Zenna Henderson. I can easily compare this story collection to "The Anything Box". Permeable Borders has a quiet voice, it slips the chains binding down your sense of wonder.
See a Problem?
It allows you to view the reality of the stories from outside the box. One paragraph caught at my heart.. What a beauty she was. How could any ma Hoffman writes these stories in a voice similar to that of Zenna Henderson. Did she ever know she was loved for her own self? Even the view of the granddaughter of the wizard who has aged into dementia.. These stories are lyrical, dark, sweet, and compelling.
I heartily recommend the works of Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Feb 09, Chris rated it really liked it Shelves: I love NKH's work, and this collection is no exception. Like much of what she writes, it combines the ideas of magic and finding home. It starts out a little slowly, but I enjoyed most of the stories.
The Permeability of Borders
As you get further in, characters start to reappear and stories become more intertwined. Such a treat for NKH fans to have her older stories collected in a volume. Now I think it's time for me to reread her novels. Jul 24, Susan rated it it was amazing Shelves: Oct 05, kvon rated it it was amazing. If you loved Red Heart of Memories as much as I did, you must read this collection. Various short stories, many with the characters from RHoM and it's sequels, including Edward and Matt, filling in the gaps I've always known were there. Beautiful, sometimes sad stories, with a theme of home and kin.
I particularly liked the retelling of Cinderella. Note that her first collection, Courting Disasters, is really hard to find these days, and scoop this one up.
translation and definition "permeable border", Dictionary English-English online
And if you have a copy of that you are If you loved Red Heart of Memories as much as I did, you must read this collection. And if you have a copy of that you are willing to lend out, please contact me. Aug 12, Ron rated it liked it. If you are new to this author like I was , this seems a terrible place to start. While the writing is certainly capable and the story ideas are interesting, I felt like I was getting the "B sides" of the discarded ideas from things that didn't fit into her novels. Which might be great if you were already invested in these characters.
I did enjoy a few of the stories, but by the end of the collection I was regretting my commitment to finish it. There was a good short story posted on tor dot com If you are new to this author like I was , this seems a terrible place to start. There was a good short story posted on tor dot com called "The Ghost Hedgehog".
I do recommend checking that one out. Oct 20, Corinne added it Shelves: July, some will be re-reads and others, new reads. This may have been my first NKH story and I still love it. Edmund is an adult. Edmund has been visiting with his sister Abby, in the city and needs to get back to nature and "open himself to the green". Following his "stick" he finds a woman who could use his help.
July 12, Trees Perpetual of Sleep new read. A story about Matt and Terry Dane who is a witch. While Terry is doing her July, some will be re-reads and others, new reads. While Terry is doing her summer solstice ritual, Matt can hear the tree talking to her. Trees don't usually talk to Matt. She connects better with human-made items.
We meet Lewis, a male witch. He promises to help Matt root herself and she promises to teach him about roaming. July 12, Home for Christmas re-read. Love, love this story. Matt finds a wallet on Christmas Eve and instead of spending time in people's heads seeing their memories. The wallet owner invites her home and she spends the time making new memories and reliving some of her own. Thankfully they meet a "supernatural character" that likes to help.
After the events Caleb the supernatural asks "Where are you now? Caleb says, "That is what I feared. That this event has cast you out of the places you've lived all your life, and you can't find a road back. I don't know how to get back their either Even with the keys to the gate" Interesting. Here We Come A'wandering I'm going to skip, this was expanded into a full novel.
But I'm going to skip those for now and read all the stories not in the Matt Black World. I am very happy I read this book of short stories. I got to meet some fascinating new characters that I would love to spend more time with. I'd say the book ended with a bang.. Oct 21, Bob Nolin rated it really liked it Shelves: A fine story writer in the mode of Bradbury and Kelly Link. Loved her novel A Red Heart of Memories. Some of the stories here are related to that book.
Near normal and eerily lovely Suspense, yes, but no horror. Tersely lyrical and a fast and very human read, with series references popping up RE her other books. Feb 09, Mitchell rated it it was amazing Shelves: I read this book for the Endeavour Award - actually I asked the library to buy it and they eventually did. But the reality is I will buy it eventually anyway - first because I love this author's work and secondly because it really is a great book.
This is a collection of short stories - and it is a fairly small book - there are no novellas here - just 16 short stories. But just enough of them are interconnected that you can almost see them as being in the same universe. In fact it kind of has a I read this book for the Endeavour Award - actually I asked the library to buy it and they eventually did. Contingency decreed that the artist with the Argentinian passport at the Spanish destination airport was waved out of the waiting line for non-EU citizens and subjected to a special control and disciplining. Already assigned to the crowd of those counted in the negation of EU citizenship and thus categorized and classified as a potentially dangerous other, an additional questioning took place in the contingent extra control of a few by several police officers about the reason for the stay and the letter of invitation from the host.
For over two hours it remained unclear whether entry would be granted.
Permeable Borders by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
During this time, a self-control took place among those entering the country, so that in the unforeseeable moment of the decision about their potential dangerousness, they would contribute nothing to being judged a danger after all and deported. It is not only in the moment of crossing the border from Latin America to Spain that a postcolonial logic is inherent to this violence of police selection.
The movement of traveling overlaps with the regulation of migration and thus the experience of the contingency of being exposed to this kind of legal and mental precarization. However, this border regime is not repressive by itself, the contingent power of decision of the police not described with sovereignty alone. Indeed, the repressive control is part of a flexible border regime that uses sovereignty-logical tactics, among others, to regulate the circulation on the porous borders that in the form of migration is necessary to the survival of the political community to be secured.
The European border regime is never about complete isolation against migration, but rather a process of step-by-step incorporation, which generally demands the subordination of the needed non-European labor force. The regulation of the permeable border produces hierarchicized inclusion processes, which mean, not least of all, an accordant differentiation of the legal status of the immigrants. Rather than securing an existing collective, the border contributes to the production of a heterogeneous population. This Europe existentially needs immigration. When this news was announced to the highest level European security officials, Spain had a biopolitical reproduction rate of 1.
To further increase this biopolitical rate, in Autumn the government headed by Zapatero introduced a so-called baby check of 2, Euro for every legal birth or adoption in Spanish territory. This bonus could be claimed until the end of , then the baby check was withdrawn again by the same government in the course of a comprehensive austerity package to eliminate state debt. She was pregnant with a patrilinear potential Spanish citizen. Upon entry, she was categorized as a possibly threatening Other, who is exposed to the contingent police estimation of the degree of her dangerousness.
In the logic of the Spanish border and migration regime, as a pregnant woman she became a pharmakon for the precarious national bio-security. This biopolitically immunizing border dynamic is variable and depends on the dose of the domesticable other as well as on the respectively necessary mixed dose of the endangerment and security of a population, in order to keep each individual governable and ultimately to prevent revolt. On one extremely pregnant belly that these adaptations show, handwritten black letters can be seen announcing: Does this have to do with the mediatized ambivalence of the biopolitical pharmakon?
Or with stealing ideas and plagiarism? The adaptations can be understood in any case as an example of ideas that circulate around the world and can be re- appropriated, in contrast to the limited freedom of movement of individuals classified as dangerous; they can be read as an example of the ambivalence between freely circulating creativity and the restrictively regulated circulation of persons.
Cultural racisms are inscribed in the governing of the permeable borders of Europe, which manifest themselves within the territory of communities as a lasting, latent criminalization and as an obvious subordination of migrants. In the EU, these patterns of order increasingly correspond to neoliberal governing through social inequality and an insecurity becoming normalized. It appears that an above-average number of people appearing in court are primarily those who find themselves increasingly in extremely precarious living and working conditions, and who evince non-conformist counter-reactions to the current economic order of obedience and segregation in different ways.
These kinds of high security residential areas symbolize, not only in neoliberal Argentina of the s, a further component of the increasingly global security logic that permeates the social, a logic based on the segregation of space and the hierarchization of circulating persons and, at the same time, on far-reaching precarization. In these often highly indebted arrangements of private property and the privileged lifestyles of the middle and upper class, the borders must remain permeable to establish security and guarantee reproduction.
In a pharmakological biopolitical logic, the residents seek specifically to protect themselves potentially from the very people they hire as security personnel, who take care of their households, look after their children, and pass the borders and cross through the terrain for other services. The privileged are potentially afraid of the subordinated, often precarious laborers who first keep the private neighborhood running at all.
Permeable Borders
Within the framework of this assemblage of security dynamics and precarious working and living conditions, conducting a collaborative photo workshop with inmates in the penitentiary of Murcia only under the condition that the participants — not by chance, mostly migrants of Latinamerican and Eastern European origin — should be paid for their work was a provocative intervention in several respects.
Not only because no monetary transactions are permitted in prison. The fee also covered the — contractually regulated — use of image rights, an agreement that is by no means conventional in these kinds of collaborative art projects. Country Europa contextualizes and problematizes current practices in the biennialization of the global art system and thus also the opening of art institutions into the social field.
In this incorporation specific to the art field, the social field is the pharmakon , a revitalizing medicine within the in- security logics of biopolitical immunization going far beyond the art field.