Helloooooo and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
Things About Queer Books (And Other Books Relevant To Your Interests)
Librarians cannot be neutral. (I take issue with “remain.”)
Calling it “confessional writing” is sexist.
Mallory Ortberg interviewed Patricia Lockwood about her new book, being Weird and Female Online, “Dad Internet” and “Daddy Internet,” religious childhoods, forgiveness and not, and more.
“The novel is a hysterical house of mirrors.”
There are a lot more comic book memoirs.
In The Perils of “Privilege”, Phoebe Maltz Bovy “makes a compelling argument that many of us on the left end up using accusations of “privilege” to discredit, silence, and tear each other down,” writes Wendy Elisheva Somerson in a review in Bitch.
Here is a copy editing quiz if you’re into that sort of thing.
“For much of the past, a woman walking alone may have been spectacle, but it also appears to have been dismissed as not especially significant. The paradox is something Lauren Elkin confronts early on in her recent book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London: ‘[I]f we’re so conspicuous,” she asks “why have we been written out of the history of cities? It’s up to us to paint ourselves back in the picture in ways we can live with,’” writes Kate Wolf in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“Fat girls are rarely granted space in fairytales,” writes Evette Dionne in Bitch. She continues:
“In her honest memoir, This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare, Gabourey Sidibe completely upends and rewrites this fatphobic script. Over the course of 18 essays, the Academy Award-nominated actress presents the subversive notion that plus-size women, especially plus-size Black women, are enough. We’re deserving of love, especially in a weight-biased culture that makes assumptions about the health and worthiness of our bodies. Whether that’s detailing how she landed her title role in Precious or explaining how she’s honed her fashion instincts by hiring a plus-size stylist who understands her body, Sidibe is full of the happiness we should all be guaranteed—no matter our size.”
Read these five new and forthcoming queer and trans Canadian books. Read these writers of color discussing the craft of writing. Read these books for resistance. Read these 15 new and forthcoming middle-grade books featuring kids of color and these 14 queer middle-grade books. Look at these 30 risqué book covers.
