Contribute

General Contributions to our Blog

We welcome guest and regular blog post series from our students, staff and friends.

Please submit any proposals to sed-web@qmul.ac.uk.

How to submit a book recommendation to our new What We’re Reading feature

What We’re Reading is a series of blog posts on the All Things SED website. The idea is to provide a space where students, staff and friends can share what they’ve been reading in short, snappy reviews.  

The books can be from a module, your research, or something you’ve read in your free time, and they can be of any genre and style.  

All that matters is that you found the book engaging in some way and that you want to share it with other members of our community.   

Please submit any book recommendations for the feature which we aim to publish once a month via: sed-web@qmul.ac.uk

Guidance for What We’re Reading Submissions 

General Style Guidance 

  • The reviews should be focused (150 words maximum) 
  • Write in the third person 
  • Stick to present tense (e.g. ‘the book is’…) 
  • Try to emphasise what’s different and why people should read it 

Suggested Structure:  

  1. Book Title and Author (not included in wordcount) 
  2. Key Line: One Line of Summary Killer Copy (for social media and heading) 
  3. Review: 2-3 Paragraphs of Review 
  4. Summary: 1 final line summary of key points 
  5. 3 Tags (key words): 3 categories or keywords that quickly place the book (not included in wordcount) 

Examples

  1. plain bad heroines by emily m. danforth 
  1. Plain Bad Heroines is sapphic, macabre and delicious.  
  1.  Complex female characters emerge and twist all expectations in the wonderfully layered narrative. lf you like your queer ghost stories with lashings of jet black humour and saucy surprises you’ll love it! 

Initially the 600 pages was daunting when it arrived but Emily M. Danforth’s tale is a dark queer thrill ride from the spooky setting of Rhode Island’s Brookhants windswept school to the glossy magic hours of LA. It’s being republished in Feb 2021 but you can get the original version via Amazon sellers or US stores and who knew Emily M. Danforth is the writer of The Miseducation of Cameron Post too. 

  1. Plain Bad Heroines is an eery triumph to the power of multidimensional queer storytelling across centuries.  
  1.  lgbtqia+ queer supernatural 

Another Example with Looser Structure: 

If You Should Fail: A Book of Solace by Joe Moran 

If Adam and Eve had been around today, they would be encouraged to regard their Fall from grace as a learning curve. For failure, as motivational lectures and podcasts tell us, is just another opportunity to get it right. 

Joe Moran’s very persuasive and personal book tells a different story about failure.  While modern capitalism, with its unceasing demands to be productive, would have us think of failure as a series of setbacks that individuals must learn to overcome, even in a system that ensures most of us will always struggle, Moran consoles us that failing is a constant and inevitable aspect of our experience.    

Learning to live with failure is not, Moran says, about learning to succeed, but about coming to terms with our vulnerability and appreciating that the sometimes messy, largely improvised lives we lead are good enough. A welcome message for our times.  

Nonfiction, society, memoir