Hi and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
Edwidge Danticat spoke to Karissa Chen at Electric Literature on Everything Inside, her first collection of short stories in 20 years; short stories as a form; generational gaps; immigration and migration; the Haitian diaspora; and more.
Read Clarice Lispector’s “The Egg and the Chicken,” translated by Katrina Dodson, right here.
“beestung is a quarterly online micro-magazine for non-binary and two-spirit writers and readers, with an emphasis on intracommunity sensibilities.” Here’s how to submit.
At Electric Literature, Leticia Urieta interviewed Lilly Dancyger, editor of Burn it Down, on women’s anger:
“Many women are tapping into and reclaiming anger that they have been repressing or explaining away that they didn’t know was there. I think that collectively we are angry. Women are so conditioned not to get angry or not to show it when we are. We are supposed to be nice and sweet and kind. So for a lot of people who are experiencing this cultural and communal anger, it is an uncomfortable and confusing experience and they don’t know what to do with it or even if they are right to express it.”
Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In The Dream House, comes out 3 November. But she also recently edited The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 and, at the Millions, discussed the collection and genre fiction as a form:
“Genre is a mix of expectation and rules. If I tell you a story is realist, and then a dragon shows up, I’ve broken those expectations and rules. The same is true of SF/F and horror. Genre is a taxonomy. It’s a way to describe a story. People assign value, but there is no inherent value. Commercial fiction delivers plot-driven stories; what they are on the face of it is what they are. Literary fiction is concerned with language, and with psychology. You can have commercial realism and literary science fiction. They don’t exist in tension with each other. I’m really interested in sentences and language, and when I see that an author isn’t, I bounce out of the work. The conversation around this is exhausting. It’s endless. It’s no longer 1993, why are we still focused on it?”
You can also read Machado on the meals of her 20s.
Read these new queer books. Read these books in October. Read these books by queer Korean Americans. Read the literature of incarnation. Read these queer historical romances. Read these books when your life feels bifurcated. Read these novels about Americans of color living abroad. Read these books for Halloween nightmares. Read these books if you miss being a horrible goose. Read the National Book Award finalists.
