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Rainbow Reading: Jeopardy’s Amy Schneider Is Writing a Memoir!

feature image photo of Amy Schneider by Jean Catuffe / Contributor via Getty Images

A book in faded colors of the rainbow is open, and the words RAINBOW READING are on top of it.
illustration by A. Andrews

Hey hi, y’all!

I haven’t gotten as much reading done as I’d like the last few weeks — my brain has not been braining as well as I’d like, so I’d love your recommendations in the comments for older/unappreciated books that you think might be my literary jumper cables. I know there are so many amazing backlist titles I’ve missed, and I bet y’all know em!

As far as upcoming “frontlist” titles, hoooooboy, do we have a lot of treats in store for us. This one’s gonna be a long one, and I apologize in advance to your wishlists, TBRs, preorder budgets, and library holds. (Not. 😉)

Okiedokie, let’s make like hockey and breakaway. This week on Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:


Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note

  • New Melissa Broder alert! Fans ofMilk Fed and The Pisces will be delighted to know that her next novel, Death Valley, will be coming out this October! Isn’t that cover rad as hell????)
  • Next on my TBR —The Weeds has ROCKETED up my list at a rate you won’t believe! Between a mostly-reformed thief in 1854 writing yearning-filled letters to her lady lover, a grad student in 2018, and a plant catalog, this book is billed as “richly rendered historical fiction that also manages to be fresh, subversive, and darkly funny; a novel of love, ghosts, murder, and botany” GHOSTS, MURDER, AND BOTANY???? Take my money. Take it.
  • Remember that queer urban fantasy fairytale detective story genre explosion I told y’all about last week? It’s out now! The Winter Knight is a mystery with a delicious Arthurian twist and I’m particularly intrigued by its 90s Vancouver setting!
  • “Gleefully anachronistic and spectacularly queer”? Hell yes! Alexis Hall’s latest romance, Something Spectacular, is out next week!
  • Mattie Lubchansky, beloved cartoonist at The Nib, has a new graphic novel coming out this June! Boys Weekend is a trans “final girl” horror riff on a bachelor party gone very very awry, told with Lubchansky’s signature sly whimsy. I wanted to shout out one or two of its many rave-review blurbs, but it is literally blurbed by a full roster of my favs so I gave up on trying to choose. Go read the blurbs for yourself and you’ll see what I mean.
  • Forget Me Not is a queer YA Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the solo debut of Alyson Derrick, coauthor of She Gets the Girl — this one’s gonna be a big one!
  • Lambda finalist Chana Porter returns with The Thick and The Lean, starring “an aspiring chef, a cyberthief, and a kitchen maid” in “a startling fable of the entwined perils of capitalism, body politics, and the stigmas women face for appetites of every kind” – I’m already smitten with this description, which has speculative-horror-Milk Fed vibes, and you can enter the Goodreads giveaway for an early copy here!
  • “On the bookshelves, there was plenty of stuff on being gay, and much needed, joyous accounts of what it is to be trans, but nothing really that encapsulates what is it to be both – to exist in the hazy terrain between.” Harry Nicholas’s memoir A Trans Man Walks Into A Gay Bar, out this May, steps into this gap.
  • I got the best email in my inbox — Caro Perny, a publicist at Tor, introduced me to The Archive Undying by asking “Dear Yashwina, Do you find yourself craving more giant robots?” WELL NOW I DO! The Archive Undying sounds awesome: giant robots, profound questions, and the tyranny of having a body.
  • Fake Dates and Mooncakes is being billed as Heartstopper meets Crazy Rich Asians, and it sounds like such a treat! This YA rom com comes out next month, to savor just in time for summer.
  • Jen St Jude’s debut If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come is a YA adventure about queer love at the end of the world, and as a longtime fan of Jen’s writing, I can’t wait to love this one.

Forget Me Notmade me believe fate is real.”

Sa’iyda on Forget Me Not

Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!


That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.

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Yashwina

Yashwina Canter is a reader, writer, and dyke putting down roots in Portland, Oregon. You can find her online at @yashwinacanter.

Yashwina has written 53 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. Even more books I’m excited about and that I’m hearing about for the first time here than usual! Compare someone’s writing to Jesmyn Ward and I am THERE!

    Backcatalogue I’d recommend:
    -Any book ever by Dorothy Allison, but let’s go with Cavedwellers
    -Affinity by Sarah Waters (overshadowed by it’s more famous fellows but so good!)
    -Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead
    -Dahlia Season by Myriam Gurba
    -Shapes of Native Nonfiction ed. by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton (this one is my most top recommendation of all)
    -We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner

    I’ll stop myself now but I love this invitation for books! It’d be so fun if you closed these posts with a book rec challenge or something: cover colour, from a certain country, published in specific year…

  2. Mercury Stardust (the Trans Handy Ma’am) has a book coming out called Safe & Sound, and it’s a guide for renters to be able to take on small repairs and whatnot around their homes (good for homeowners, too, but geared towards renters)!

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