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

In a review of The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi at Electric Literature, Apoorva Mittal writes about queer time, liminal spaces, and searching for something between domesticity and queer ideality:

“[Q]ueer time is magical. It doesn’t need to function linearly. Non-linear time and liminal spaces are often seen as purgatories, transitory spaces of suffering through which one must pass to reach the final destination but queerness finds safety in transition, in purgatory. The dominant construct assumes that everyone desires to be the center, but queerness expands into spaces where no center is needed.”

These librarians face possible charges for carrying sex education books:

“The County Campbell Public Library is doing their jobs, and there’s nothing illegal about carrying puberty education books or LGBTQ-friendly resources. The fact that they have received such intense backlash proves how vital these resources are: kids need to be able to access resources that can answer their questions about sex, puberty, and growing up. Without age-appropriate books on hand, they’ll likely turn to Google, which has less accurate and less age-appropriate answers.”

The Cory Book Service book club helped spark the gay rights movement in the 1950s, with a two-page newsletter and 3,000 subscribers who simply received titles. “Many subscribers to the newsletter were living in the closet, and, even though the service did not provide a clear way for them to communicate with one another, the mailings offered glimpses of community,” writes Michael Waters at the New Yorker.

Noname opened a library in Los Angeles dedicated to the Black experience.

“What is it about writers and emotional masochism?”

These are the odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year.

Here are the National Book Award finalists.

“The way that Rooney is often celebrated, or at least discussed, as the voice of her generation, has never existed in the same way for readers and writers of color,” writes Malavika Kannan at Electric Literature on how the myth of universality keeps white women at the center of the literary ecosystem.

Here’s how to write cinematically.

Here’s what’s up with the current book supply chain issues.

Read these books in October. Read these Indian women writers. Read these nine books set in the Caribbean. Read these eight goblincore books. Read these books that read like a club scene from the Sopranos. Read these books for scary season.

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