Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Buzzard by Inez Ray: A dystopian future where exploitation never ends

Inez Ray’s Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian novel about reproductive control, corporate power, and the terrifying possibility that our technological future could look very different while the fundamental structures of human exploitation remain exactly the same.

Set in 2086, Buzzard imagines an American future in which the United States no longer exists, abortion is illegal, fertility is closely monitored, and corporations have effectively replaced government. Midwife Mae Bastet has spent seven years imprisoned in Buzzard, a private prison in the Sonoran Desert operated by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan. She was arrested for providing reproductive health care to women and separated from her two sons. Now she is trying to survive long enough to get back to them.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Hunger by Choi Jin-young: A brutal, unforgettable descent into love, poverty, and desperation

There are books that entertain, and then there are books that settle somewhere in your body and refuse to move—Hunger by Choi Jin-young is firmly the latter, a slim novel that opens with a shocking act and only grows more unsettling from there. If the premise alone—compared to Parasite as a kind of dark, romantic counterpoint—sounds extreme, the reality is even harsher. This is, at its core, a tale of absolute misery. And it’s almost a relief that the book is so brief, because lingering in its world for too long would be difficult to bear.

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The story begins with Gu’s death, though the cause is initially unknown. Dam, his lifelong counterpart in a relationship defined by separation and reunion, is inconsolable. The idea of losing him—not just emotionally, but physically through burial or cremation—is unbearable. So she makes a choice that is as horrifying as it is, in her mind, logical: she will consume him, ensuring they are never apart again.

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