Lez Liberty Lit: Drown Me In Best-of Lists

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Hey there and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!

The Bad Sex Awards were an unfortunate loss of the pandemic, but Electric Literature has saved the day by running its own.

Here’s how to be bored.

What’s up with lucky numbers?

What do we want from poetry in times of crisis?

Bookstores are still taking a hit.

Is there still a role for literature in 2020? (Yes.)

Our love is nothing like the apocalypse.”

Bluestockings is one of the few remaining queer bookstores, and recently moved to a new location at 116 Suffolk Street. As one volunteer told them, “‘We’re not responding to this horrible situation and collective trauma with fear and scarcity,’ [Sammie] Sachs added. ‘We’re really leaning into our wildest dreams, making the most of it, and loving ourselves and our communities more through this time.'”

Roxane Gay is starting a book club.

Giving up capitalism doesn’t mean giving up pleasure.”

In case you need it, here is Carmen Maria Machado’s cheese ball recipe.

At Electric Literature, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, author of A Girl Is a Body of Water, discusses shame, the language that surrounds women’s bodies, the idea of permission and more.

“Patti Smith redefines memoir by way of seamlessly merging dreamscape, external circumstance, perception, imagination, and intuition,” writes Lily Arnell in a review of Smith’s Year of the Monkey at the Rumpus.

Here’s how to be a girl detective.

One last wave of the best books of 2020? Why not! Here are Jezebel’s. Here are some favorite indie books.

Here are the best-reviewed lit in translation of 2020. Here’s the best reviewed fiction Here are the 10 best book reviews of 2020 and here are the most scathing . If you don’t want to read all that, here’s the ultimate best books of 2020 list. And here were the biggest literary stories of the year.

Read these new poetry collections that highlight the diversity of Latinx identity. Here are the worst literary adaptations of the century (so far). Read these eight 2020 young adult novels.

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Ryan Yates

Ryan Yates was the NSFW Editor (2013–2018) and Literary Editor for Autostraddle.com, with bylines in Nylon, Refinery29, The Toast, Bitch, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, and elsewhere. They live in Los Angeles and also on twitter and instagram.

Ryan has written 1142 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. I read that ‘giving up capitalism’ title as ‘giving up cannibalism’ three times before my brain would finally admit that it was misreading it but also, brain, you’re not wrong.

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