Hello and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
Things About Queer Books (And Other Books Relevant To Your Interests)
Bookstores are responding to Trump’s presidency by prioritizing resistance:
“Many stores have distributed information for customers who are mobilizing against Mr. Trump’s actions: his cabinet choices, his threat to cut off funding for sanctuary cities and his immigration bans on refugees and many Muslims. At City Stacks, a bookstore in Denver, employees printed out forms with elected officials’ contact information in a gentle nudge to customers. On Inauguration Day, Broadway Books in Portland, Ore., handed out free copies of ‘We Should All Be Feminists,’ a book-length call to arms by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the novelist. […]
“A lot of people are saying, ‘We’ve turned our store over to the revolution,’’ said Hannah Oliver Depp, the operations manager for Word, which has bookstores in New Jersey and New York. ‘I do think that it is going to fundamentally change bookstores and book selling.’”
“The next queer artists are virtuosos of swoon, and swish, and style. They are fabulous—divine. Glamor in art does not belong to power,” reads an introduction at Ignota.
Lumberjanes is going to be a book seriessssssssssss.
The zine Whatever You Do, Don’t Talk to the Police is now available as a pdf and discusses police interaction in protests and how to avoid it and look out for each other.
Preview of America Chavez written by Gabby Riviera and art by Joe Quinones via Comics Alliance
At Bookforum, Melissa Gira Grant reviewed Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, and discusses a (brief) history of feminism, feminism in the media marketplace, being a feminist killjoy (in Ahmed’s coining), marginalized feminisms creating themselves outside of mainstream walls and why feminist stories should be less about the past and more about the present and future:
“The usual feminist origin story unfolds as a series of firsts: first feminist book read, first feminist action attended. Or a series of wounding rites of passage: first grope, first shaming, first rape. But a better and more challenging question than ‘What made you a feminist?’ might be ‘What makes you a feminist?’ Sara Ahmed’s new book helps put the feminist origin story into the present tense. […] Ahmed has no interest in packaging tales of personal achievement and the intimate costs of being a feminist in an unfeminist world in order to burnish her credentials, nor in producing a blueprint for a supposedly correct feminism. She uses everyday experience to complicate and interrogate the assumptions and certainties of feminist theory rather than to shore them up.”
Pair with Jia Tolentino’s case against contemporary feminism with its empty radicalism and misinterpretation of “the personal is political,” and why we need a shift away from capitalism and individualism.
Niviaq Korneliussen is Greenland’s queer literary star who departs from traditional themes and is “perhaps the territory’s most widely read living novelist.” In a profile at the New Yorker, Alastair Gee writes, “Suddenly, here was a new kind of voice telling the stories of Greenland. ‘I tend to maybe forget the way modernity also influenced Greenland,’ Pedersen said, and how ‘also young people from Greenland, they drink and rave and fuck and kiss.’”
Most book clubs are created and attended by women, and have been for five centuries.
Alana Massey, author of All The Lives I Want, discussed patriarchy, celebrity, getting or not getting what we want and more at the Millions.
Fictional characters’ voices haunt you.
“Would all those folks who lulled their children to sleep with Goodnight Moon rest easy if they knew the little prayer was birthed by a lesbian consciousness?,” writes Mary Cappello at the Millions.
Mary Gaitskill is as worried as any of us.
Read these 15 books by contemporary Mexican writers. And these poems about sex. And these five books by Canadian Muslim authors, as well as these nine Muslim Canadian authors. And these books about freedom of expression that aren’t 1984 (though feel free to read that, too). And these horror short story collections by women. And these 15 books by and about refugees. And these graphic memoirs. And these 11 memoirs by 20th-century American radicals.
See you at LitFest Los Angeles.
And Mariko Tamaki is writing the Lumberjanes novels, which is fucking perfect!!
thanks for the lists of books at the end! reading list expanding exponentially
Lambda Litfest Los Angeles!!!!!! Thanks for posting, without your link I wouldn’t have even known that my attendance is required at Giving Tongue: A Celebration of Lesbian/Queer Poets. :D
That Jia Tolentino article is mainly a review of Jessa Crispin’s book “Why I Am Not a Feminist” more than an article in it’s own right. But still really great and worth reading.