Hi and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!

adrienne maree brown wrote about call-out culture in the age of covid, opening the piece (following a trigger warning) with:

“what do we do with unthinkable thoughts?

who are we in our unthinkable thinking moments?

how do we adapt together if the clues to our next pivot are unthinkable?

maybe sharing these unthinkable thoughts will help?”

“Queer time is not linear, it is hardly anything at all, in fact, it may not even exist,” writes Sam Bovard in a review of T. Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through.

“Flexibility can make it hard to draw boundaries around paid employment, and difficult to disaggregate work from the rest of the day.”

Crime fiction is complicit in police violence. At Electric Literature, Aya de León writes about whether it’s too late to change:

“The ‘crime’ in crime fiction usually refers to instances when poor and working class people break the laws that are more likely to be enforced. Stories about crime and punishment of the wealthy are often boring. ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ was the exception—the rest of these stories are just rich people, paying lawyers and financial consultants to rip off the public and avoid any consequences. There’s no pulse-pounding action in watching lawyers write up long briefs. Ethics hearings don’t make good TV. The privileged are rarely prosecuted for their crimes, because other privileged gatekeepers let them get away with it.

But more traditional cops-and-robbers are ultimately working class and poor people who get pitted against each other. Crime fiction is where we all get to watch them fight it out to the death — gladiator style.”

Here’s “an inside look at the feminist publisher that upended the literary world.”

Cancel rent.

Esmé Weijun Wang talked to the Cut about how zines taught her about herself.

The Millions released its massive second-half 2020 book preview. See you in a few hours.

Outlaw translation has a long, fraught history.

Check out the 2020 Booker Prize long list. It looks… very good this year? What is happening??

So you wanna write? Doing it in cafes is probably dead. America once paid its writers. And former Autostraddle writer and friend of the pod A.E. Osworth is teaching a first-draft classing at Catapult that looks like it’s gonna be a joy.

No, I will not lend you my book.

It’s okay to abandon books.

I miss eavesdropping.

At Slate, Alison Bechdel reflects on the legacy of Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby.

At Lit Hub, Leïla Slimani wrote about her first novel Adèle, sex, liberation under repressive politics and more.

Here’s a peek into Edith Wharton’s private library.

Feminism has a complicated impact on incarceration.

Here’s what 100 writers have been reading in quarantine.

Screwing up is human.

Read these Black queer fiction authors. Read these 17 books in July. Read these writers this fall. Read these books when you’re homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. Read these nine books where women of color tell their own stories about mental health. Read these Black queer authors. Read these translated graphic novels about inequality. Read these Black fantasy authors. Read these anti-capitalist sci-fi and fantasy novels. Read these books that celebrate Black joy. Read these eight books about occult mysteries. Read these intersectional books about the environment. Read these queer witch books. Read these fun books about data visualization. Read these books to go back to the 1980s. Read all the books mentioned in Clueless.

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