Hello and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
“The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror” is new original fiction by Carmen Maria Machado and you can read it at Granata right now.
Author and Autostraddle contributor Kai Cheng Thom talked to Vice about the inner workings of queer community, intra-community callout culture, and the hope that queers will be able to operate from a place of love:
“Society as we know it might be coming to an end, but that society depended on the exploitation and oppression of a marginalized underclass. Perhaps its end could lead to something new, Thom offers: a future where all the people just fighting to survive the present might finally be able to thrive, where communities can form around a love free of dependence, abuse, or exploitation. Communities are difficult to build and maintain, and there are no fixed structures set in stone. What they are and how they function entirely depends on the people within each one, and people—as the author reminds the reader over and over in I Hope We Choose Love—are fallible and capable of making mistakes.”
Myriam Gurba, the author whose review of American Dirt was both beautiful and helped spark the outage against the appropriative, stereotype-based novel, was recently placed on administrative leave from Long Beach Polytechnic High School, where she teaches, for what seem like not real reasons. Students are protesting in support of her.
“I have lost faith in the idea that there might be anything any individual can say or write that will change the minds of people who, consciously or subconsciously, believe that women matter less than men,” writes Emily Gould at the Cut in an essay on shame, being shamed, her past at Gawker and more.
Are novels trapped by the present moment?
Italicizing “foreign” words is an exercise in linguistic gatekeeping.
Here’s why corporations talk the way they do.
Check out the Biodiversity Science Library for pubic domain science illustrations.
Here’s why it’s hard to fact-check and how fact-checking and reporting mix.
“The Witch House,” original fiction by Ariel Gore, was published at the Rumpus.
Here’s how to write a surprising yet inevitable ending.
Read these books if you like speed. Read these books when it’s freezing out. Read these books about Black Appalachia. Read these memoirs by Latinx authors.
