Hello hi and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
Things About Queer Books (And Other Books Relevant To Your Interests)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha interviewed Kai Cheng Thom at Bitch on her new novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, dangerous stories and more:
“Dangerous stories are the only kind of stories I know how to tell because my life has never been a safe story. The supposedly ”safe” stories and ”safe” spaces have always been the ones that have shut me down, locked me out, erased or attacked my body and my voice—and this includes queer stories and spaces too. Storytelling has always been my savior by allowing me to tear open the truth of my own experience when no one else would do it for me. Telling the truth is always dangerous, however, because truth exposes you to repressive violence and also to the vulnerability that comes from acknowledging your own flaws.”
Adrienne Rich died five years ago this week. Read her thoughts on how to best live at Lit Hub.
Read these 10 transgressive fairy tales for grownups. Read this black girl YA. Read these seven Canadian and indigenous Lambda finalists that Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian is into. Read these books with unlikeable women. Read these 10 Slovak women writers (or covet their eventual translation into English). Read these 10 books with twist endings. Read these 100 books if you liked Sassy magazine. Give these 14 books that teach intersectional feminism to a kid you know.
Want to get into queer romance novels? Start here.
AP style has caught up to the singular “they.”
There’s a Buffy reboot in novel form coming soon.
Punctuation is important.
The cover of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood has evolved since its initial publication in the 80s. Also, did you know the Autostraddle book club is reading it this month?
“The choice to use contraception (or not) can reveal character, drive action, and hijack plot,” writes Ellen Feldman in her brief history of birth control in literature at Lit Hub.
Here’s a q+a with Mallory Ortberg.
“Canadian English, like other varieties of the language, is decidedly a real entity, despite a certain perception among Americans (and even some Canadians) that it is more or less an exaggerated version of Minnesota speech, peppered with ‘eh’ and a funny way of saying ‘about,’” writes Jesse Sheidlower in the New Yorker, on the recently updated “scholarly and scrappy” Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles.
At Lit Hub, Victoria Newton Ford writes about Get Out, Claudia Rankine, racism as horror story, surveillance, white supremacy and more.
“In our current political climate with its rampant animosity towards immigrants, Arimah offers a humanizing portrait of both the Nigerian citizen and first generation young female immigrant,” writes Liz von Klemperer in a review of Lesley Nneka Arimah’s short-story collection What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.
Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers, talked to the Millions about the language of novels, the cultural moment, horizons for black storytellers, and more:
“It’s sad that there’s something unique about depicting black girls who have interior lives. I think that’s telling of the state of literature. That’s not to say that I’m the only person who does this, but the fact that there are so few of us bums me out. Showing black people with complex emotional lives in the contemporary moment, not during slavery, or the Civil Rights Movement…the fact that this is unique reveals a lack of certain types of stories in the literary world.”
Check out this short story, “Visiting the Snow Queen,” to see some Austrian-American lesbian lit in translation.
@carolyn how do you manage to read so much?? and still live life? well, it’s inspiring =)
RT
Thanks for the queer romance link – really good, well rounded list.