Fiction

The six women of the Knitting Circle meet every week to chat, eat cake, and make fabulous sweaters. Until the night they realize that they’ve all survived rape—and that not one of their assailants has suffered a single consequence. Enough is enough. The Knitting Circle becomes the Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad. They declare open season on rapists, with no licenses and no bag limits. With needles as their weapons, the revolution begins.

A cop is stabbed through a doughnut hole and into his heart. A country-western singer is found with knitting needles jammed into both ears and his no-means-yes hit song playing. A pedophile priest is killed in the sacristy. As the Circle swells, perpetrators learn to shudder at the sight of business women with knitted briefcases, students with knitted backpacks, roller derby queens with knitted kneepads. They also push back, as organizations of men—from the Chamber of Commerce to the Department of Agriculture to the Autonomous Federated Association of Coalitions of Anarchists for Spontaneous Insurrectionary Sexual Freedom (the AFACASISF, with their unique musical style: deathvomitnoise)—issue statements against the Knitting Circle. More sinister is MAWAR (Men Against Women Against Rape), with their Bible Scrabble and their beefcake Jesus calendar—and a plot to stop the Knitting Circle.

Will the Knitting Circle triumph? Or will Officer Flint learn to knit in time to infiltrate it? Will Nick the male ally brave Daisy’s Craft Barn to secure more weapons for the women? Will Marilyn put down her teenage attitude and pick up her knitting needles? Will Circle member Jasmine find true love with MAWAR’s Zebediah?

At the heart of a city, a river is dying, children have cancer, and people are burning with despair. From the safe distance that wealth buys, a corporation called Vexcorp counts these lives as another expense on a balance sheet. But that distance is about to collapse.

Malia is an activist who has fiercely fought the everyday atrocities of environmental racism. After years of watching countless children die, she’s lost faith in the possibility of systemic reform. Dennis is a lawyer who still believes that if enough people have the correct information they will do the right thing. Dujuan is a young street thug torn by a chaos of grief and rage at his little sister’s death. And Larry Gordon is Vexcorp’s CEO.

Their lives converge when Dujuan mugs Malia. Her scornful comparison of Dujuan to Vexcorp triggers a storm inside him. That storm only clears when he identifies the real agent of his pain: Larry Gordon. Injury requires justice, so Dujuan kidnaps Gordon and assembles a rough court to try him for murder. He picks Malia to be the judge because she knows the facts and because, as Dujuan says, “You want this as bad as me.” As bystanders become involved and time runs out, Malia is forced to make grueling moral decisions between survival and loyalty, safety and courage, agency and despair.

Derrick Jensen has written a novel as compelling as it is necessary: with our planet under serious threat, Malia’s decisions face us all.

Monsters is an illustrated collection of wild, weird, and whimsical tales with a twist. These stories are not about mythical creatures; here, the creatures speak for themselves. There’s an orc who hates Tolkien, a young demon awash in teenage angst, an angel abandoned by Jesus who finds the Fates. Jensen creates a world both delicately dreamlike and all too real, where the villain is sometimes the victim and evil is not always what we thought.

If stories teach us how to be human, then the stories in Monsters are the ones we need now. These are fractured fairy tales for grown-ups, where the roots of sadism are laid bare and the horrors of human supremacism are firmly faced. But as in all of Jensen’s work, love is both always possible and also a call to action. By turns macabre, melancholy, and magical, these stories and their accompanying images will leave you wondering who the real monsters are and how they can be defeated.

A serial killer stalks the streets of Spokane, acting out a misogynist script from the dark heart of this culture. Across town, a writer named Derrick has spent his life tracking the reasons--political, psychological, spiritual--for the sadism of modern civilization. And through the grim nights, Nika, a trafficked woman, tries to survive the grinding violence of prostitution. Their lives, and the forces propelling them, are about to collide.

Derrick’s current project is a book called Possession, which asks the ontological question of who is responsible for the culture of domination that’s destroying the earth. Who actually benefits from a dead planet, the endgame that’s fast approaching? What if the answer is something way bigger than humans? Meanwhile, with motivations opposite to Derrick’s, the serial killer is asking much the same question of the women he kidnaps as his final act of possession--and Nika is next.

Derrick’s metaphysical explorations suddenly take on more urgency as visions both terrifying and sacred begin to intrude, and past and future collapse without warning. All Derrick knows is Nika’s name and her impending death. The only person who believes him is his partner Allison, a woman with both strengths and scars, whose past has led her to a commitment to justice no matter what the cost. As the visions intensify and the killer draws nearer, Derrick and Allison are compelled to act, making themselves the next targets. Derrick must learn to negotiate a world of spirits and demons, living and dead, before it’s too late. And what hangs in the balance is not just their lives, but also the fate of life on earth.

With Songs of the Dead, Derrick Jensen has written more than a thriller. This is a story lush with rage and tenderness on its way to being a weapon.

One yellow April morning, a 17 year old girl asks herself, “Do I dare to eat a peach?" Three different answers will send her down three very different paths.

That morning is long past. Now she is 41.

Kitty Trevelyan has been happily married 23 years. Happily enough. Until her professor asks her for coffee and kisses her.

Dr. Katherine North's memory of two lovers chafes her like a hair shirt. After reading one has died, she contacts the other—only to discover that she has been renounced for God.

Ántonia searches the sea-horizon every evening. In the last light, she can glimpse it: a feminist Utopia built on an abandoned oil rig, led by her charismatic and bipolar lover. Her lost Eden made by Eves.

Who are we? Who haven't we been? Have we dared? Three of one woman's possible lives are about to collide.