Amanda Leduc

"Challenges the ableism of fairy tales and offers new ways to celebrate the magic of all bodies. In fairy tales, happy endings are the norm - as long as you're beautiful and walk on two legs. After all, the ogre never gets the princess. And since fairy tales are the foundational myths of our culture, how can a girl with a disability ever think she'll have a happy ending? By examining the ways that fairy tales have shaped our expectations of disability, Disfigured will point the way toward a new world where disability is no longer a punishment or impediment but operates, instead, as a way of centering a protagonist and helping them to cement their own place in a story, and from there, the world. Through the book, Leduc ruminates on the connections we make between fairy tale archetypes - the beautiful princess, the glass slipper, the maiden with long hair lost in the tower - and tries to make sense of them through a twenty-first-century disablist lens. From examinations of disability in tales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen through to modern interpretations ranging from Disney to Angela Carter, and the fight for disabled representation in today's media, Leduc connects the fight for disability justice to the growth of modern, magical stories, and argues for increased awareness and acceptance of that which is other - helping us to see and celebrate the magic inherent in different bodies."--

On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

Disfigured

Amanda Leduc's brilliant new novel, woven with fairy tales of her own devising and replete with both catastrophe and magic, is a vision of what happens when we ignore the natural world and the darker parts of our own natures. Heather is sleeping peacefully after the birth of her twin daughters when the sound of the world ending jolts her awake. Stumbling outside with her babies and her new husband, Brendan, she finds that their city has been destroyed by falling meteors and that her little family are among only a few who survived. But the mountain that looms over the city is still green--somehow it has been spared the destruction that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Heather is one of the few who know the mountain, a place city-dwellers have always been forbidden to go. Her dad took her up the mountain when she was a child on a misguided quest to heal her legs, damaged at birth. The tragedy that resulted has shaped her life, bringing her both great sorrow and an undying connection to the deep magic of the mountain, made real by the beings she and her dad encountered that day: Estajfan, a centaur born of sorrow and of an ancient, impossible love, and his two siblings, marooned between the magical and the human world. Even as those in the city around her--led by Tasha, a charismatic doctor who fled to the city from the coast with her wife and other refugees--struggle to keep everyone alive, Heather constantly looks to the mountain, drawn by love, by fear, by the desire for rescue. She is torn in two by her awareness of what unleashed the meteor shower and what is coming for the few survivors, once the green and living earth makes a final reckoning of the usefulness of human life and finds it wanting. At times devastating, but ultimately redemptive, Amanda Leduc's fable for our uncertain times reminds us that the most important things in life aren't things at all, but rather the people we want by our side at the end of the world.

The Centaur's Wife

While seeking redemption, Sam and Lilah find themselves confronting a dark, unknown destiny that challenges all they know about life and pain, love and God.

The Miracles of Ordinary Men

Troy Palmer

Little Fiction/Big Truths

"A Mixtape Of Words explores every facet of how we interact with music and the many ways we turn to songs, albums, singers, songwriters, DJs, and musicians to help us get through love, death, divorce, and everything in between." —from the introduction by Troy Palmer A fiction and nonfiction anthology, A Mixtape of Words features a diverse collection of stories and essays from some of today's most exciting writers: Megan Steilstra, Wendy C. Ortiz, Mensah Demary, Leesa Cross-Smith, Sasha Chapin, Jay Hosking, Trevor Corkum, and more. Each piece takes a unique look at how we relate to and rely on music in all aspects of our lives.

A Mixtape of Words

A nonfiction anthology about our digital lives, Re-Coded features the work of sixteen daring writers, each giving us an up close and personal look at how technology and social media have shaped the way they live, love, and work. Their stories touch on everything from the dotcom boom and bust to social media fears and from video games as salvation to long distance relationships held together through networks and screens. To recode means to give something a new set of code. And that's how we see this anthology. It's the giving of new code, new meaning, to our lives in the digital age.

Amanda Leduc

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