Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!

Jude Doyle and A.L. Kaplan’s MAW is out September 15 from Boom! Studios and is a perfect weird horror comic in five issue that “explores the anger of those trapped by society’s expectations and the monsters born from that collective rage.” I am “not a horror person” and personally I had a GREAT time, just saying! Ask your local comic shop to order it (even if you missed the deadline for the first issue, make sure to get the rest) and check out a preview here.

Novels that offer easy lessons aren’t worth reading, writes Jo Hamya at Lit Hub:

“I don’t mean to advocate reading for reading’s sake, though there is nothing wrong with reading for pleasure. Nor do I mean to suggest that texts should never be extended to their reader’s personal and social context. But there is, perhaps, an unhelpfulness in the way naturally occurring attitudes within reading culture are exacerbated by the internet — reward-seeking, tribalism, binary thought which tends to either over-identification, or apathy where such a process cannot be carried out. Under such pressure, most books dry up. Worse still, they become boring. The type of book which would successfully thrive under such criteria could form no reciprocal relationship with its reader, could only impart what its recipient is already willing to accept as knowledge, or else stamp information onto a blank slate unchallenged, must structure itself on linear and context-specific premises. It could only teach you the same thing once before its value is exhausted. Such reading glorifies “likable” or “relatable” characters; didactic plot or dialogue; effortless transmission of information.”

“Is the digital age costing us our ability to wander?”

You can read any book as a sacred text.

Here’s how to get into daily verbal affirmations.

A new Octavia E. Butler biography explores her early life.

What are dreams and why are they essential?

Here are 18 memorable trees from literature.

Here’s what to do when things feel scattered.

Here’s how to write your first comic book.

What makes a comfort read?

“It’s impossible to make money for most writers and artists in comics.”

Stop using language to self-sabotage. You do have time, you do know how, and you are brave enough.

What makes a great first sentence?

Read these books about death and dying. Read these books to recover a sense of the scared. Read these Indigenous memoirs. Read these fantasy books. Read this Black lesbian fiction. Read these books about the Y2K era.

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