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

This website generates weird short stories about phone numbers.

If you’re in Southern Appalachia, check out Firestorm Books & Co-op.

“The truth is, the cultural sphere has been remembering and forgetting royal queerness for centuries. The stories we choose to tell say much more about about us and the cycle we’re in than they do about the past,” writes Chloe Foussaines at Town and Country.

Turn off your phone to write.

Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias, talked to The Creative Independent on what it’s like to work with limitations and legacy:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about legacy in the last two years, particularly because of illness and illness leading to musing about mortality. I started to think about legacy as something not only related to having a statue made of you, but also just related to the idea of having an impact. If one can think of legacy as having an impact, one can have an impact at almost any time, including with other people. Interactions are great opportunities to leave a small legacy, to have a small impact.”

Also at The Creative Independent, Sarah Schulweis discusses what it takes to financially sustain a creative life. Related: read Carmen Maria Machado on writing a book while having a day job.

“How do you solve a problem like the Western?,” asks Krithika Varagur at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“What is a feminist Western? It’s not a Western that merely “contains a woman,” which is how Lindy West memorably panned the 2015 film Jane Got a Gun. After all, what seems like the “most salient fact about the Western,” writes the literary critic Jane Tompkins, is that “it is a narrative of male violence.” It’s hard to watch their ostensible heroes when intractable manhood has so disrupted our social fabric. But what if those intractable heroes were women?”

Read these books to celebrate Black history. Read these books about Hollywood. Read these books about time loops. Read these books about time loops. Read these books about time loops. (Gotcha.) Read these books about worlds within worlds. Read these books about infatuation. Read these dinosaur books. Read these books before The L Word comes back.

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