Hi and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
Things About Queer Books (And Other Books Relevant To Your Interests)
“In Sara Ahmed’s Living A Feminist Life, feminism is the process of gathering the shards that have been broken when we encounter walls,” writes Mahvish Ahmad at the New Inquiry. Ahmad also notes:
“Ahmed’s feminist call to arms is revolutionary because it recognizes that those who emerge as brittle in worlds not made for them may be our saving grace. Ahmed’s new book provides an explanation of the whole, of the dystopia that the West is today, as well as a political vision for the way forward — precisely because it is a book on how to live a feminist life and build a feminist world. As Ahmed says early on in Living a Feminist Life: ‘Feminism needs to be everywhere because feminism is not everywhere.’”
“Are things getting worse for women in publishing?” asks the Guardian.
“Poetry is fatal, especially to unmarried women.”
Know an unpublished author with a manuscript in need of a publisher? Feminist Press has a prize for debut books by women and nonbinary authors of color.
RIP, personal essay boom.
In queer literature, first-person writing can be a way to shift power, writes Ilana Masad at LitHub:
“What I’ve found, in reading such books, is queer narrators navigate the “I” and its relation to vulnerability in a particular way—in fact, they often subvert the supposed power imbalance, making themselves so open to the reader that the dynamic shifts. Like a sexual partner topping from the bottom, these queer books’ narrators become more powerful in their acceptance—and deliberate demonstration— of their most shameful, difficult, vulnerable moments”
Here’s how to speed read.
Obviously there are meme historians now.
Sometimes you are depressed and reading Joan Didion.
Read these eight books by queer authors from places where it’s illegal to be queer. Read these 100 queer YA books. Read these 9 forthcoming Iraqi books. Read these five poets on identity and migration. Read these five two-spirit and queer indigenous writers.
omg the emily dickinson biopic sounds TERRIBLE! that review was a lot of fun to read.
Yes, it sounds like Bad Decision Dino struck again. That review was hilarious. I will definitely be more careful when I write poetry to make sure that I have conveniently available swooning furniture.
Hm as someone who ‘naturally’ (nothing natural about reading, we all learnt it at one point unless we can’t) does the wider visualising thing, I find that using a finger actually slows me down.
I like to be slowed when I have the time for it though. Richer experience, more like being there & makes book last longer.
The wider visualisation thing comes in really handy in the sort of reading I don’t always consider reading, for example looking at a train timetable & knowing when/where our trains due instead of slowly reading through all of them one by one. Not sure I’m the usual one or my family is in that.
Okay so I had to click on the Harry Potter erotica link, and now I’ve learned that no one wants to be a Hufflepuff in the sheets, a statement which, as a Hufflepuff, I find very insulting.