Feature image via shutterstock.
Things About Queer Books (And Other Books Relevant To Your Interests)
These are the last feminist bookstores. There are only 13 of them.
Lesbian. Poet. Trading. Cards.
Captive Genders is an anthology about LGBTQ people and the prison system and how that system polices genders. At the New Yorker, Grace Dunham writes:
“In the twentieth century, critiques of the prison system’s impact on queer and trans people primarily came from those with first-hand experience—poor queer and trans people of color, often navigating homelessness and the survival economies of sex work. “Captive Genders” includes essays on pre-“Gay Rights” movements in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, where queer street youth organized to protect themselves against police harassment and understood that the state itself was the primary source of violence in their communities. These movements present a stark contrast with modern gay-rights groups that work in tandem with the state, lobbying for legal protections such as hate-crime legislation. Throughout “Captive Genders,” writers contemplate a feeling that the mainstream L.G.B.T.Q. movement has forgotten how many of their people are living within prisons.”
“How Can People Be Authentic Without Winter? They Can’t. Also They Throw Too Many Parties Here,” and every other noir story set in Los Angeles.
Friendship often exists in the public sphere; love often exists in the private one. Does this mean love is apolitical?
Dazed has collected girl power zines, including Sister, Period, Champ and more. (Also check out these 50 zines by people of color.)
Sylvia Townsend Warder wrote a novel about a spinster witch and it holds up.
Pennsylvania’s Moravian Book Shop, founded in 1745, is probably haunted.
The covers given to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique over time get pretty interesting.
by annie spratt at unsplash.com
Poetry can be art.
It’s fun to read for fun. Just in case you forgot or something. And reading paper books might be better for your brain, mostly because you’re less likely to get distracted.
Bildungsroman novels aren’t all about boys.
The real reason we should all use Oxford commas: “On one side of the debate, we have the tireless, dedicated, and clarity-promoting heroes who want sentences to be straightforward, lists well-defined, and paragraphs pristine. On the other side: the people who are wrong.”
Gay men had a lot of sex in the ‘70s, but they did a lot of other things, too.
Did you know Anne of Green Gables outsold The Hunger Games? On some level I find this very reassuring. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, unsurprisingly, outsold everything. (And of course, YA overall remains “tragically heterosexual,” but there are some neat trans titles to check out.)
A series of asexual romance novels is coming soon from Less Than Three Press.
People respond differently to personal writing according to the author’s gender, writes Gila Lyons:
“As an essayist who often writes from personal experience and who’s working on a memoir, I believe deeply it is a feminist act for women to tell their stories. But I, too, am guilty of rolling my eyes or skipping the page when I see a female-authored story about an eating disorder, one’s relationship to her body and beauty, or abortion, decidedly feminine topics. Yes, these topics are written about all the time, but so are love, betrayal, jealousy, family, and I don’t glaze over at these. Why? Sexism or realism? Misogyny or objectivity? Propriety or prisoning?”
At Autostraddle, we’re all obsessed with Juliet Takes A Breath. Siham Karami discussed The Lillian Trilogy. Mey wrote about the Fresh Romance kickstarter.
library in Queensland c. 1898 via flickr
Book Things To Do In Person
6 March, Los Angeles: LA ZineFest is back! (I’m going to be there, come say hi at table 93.) (650 S. Spring St.), 11–6.
15 March: Power & Magic: A Queer Witch Comics Anthology, is accepting submissions until 15 March.
1 April: Submissions for Best Women’s Erotica are open until April 1. The editor is looking for more queer stories, looking for stories starring trans women and open to a wide variety of stories featuring queer sexuality as long as they fit the guidelines.
Ongoing: Help Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto build a library for Canada’s first LGBTQ2S youth shelter.
Ongoing: For Books’ Sake is looking for unpublished short stories from self-identifying women (especially women of color, queer women, women with disabilities and other marginalized voices) for its weekly Weekend Read. Submit any time.
Know of a queer event with literary merit? Send it to us! The Liberty Lit is bi-weekly.
I recently emerged from a cloud of work that seemed never-ending for weeks, and I’m glad one of the first things I did with my free time was read this! Thanks (:
Well, now I’m dying to read If I Was Your Girl (the only book in the YA trans titles that the article’s author actually recommended) as well as all of those girl power zines. Thanks, Carolyn! I don’t comment much, but I really love this column.
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