Hi and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
“As much as I would like to use these strange circumstances to focus on my passion projects, I can’t. For starters, I just don’t have the time. (See above.) If you don’t either, all that means is that you live in the real world, like everyone else,” writes Rachel Fairbank on why it’s okay if you suck at working from home right now.
No one knows how online-only events will impact book sales.
Now is a good time to read Weather. It’s also a good time to read Severance, unless you will get anxious reading about an airborne pandemic apocalypse in which N95 masks are not effective, in which case maybe file it away for later.
You can still order books from many local bookstores. Queer bookstores and archives too!
The LA Art Book Fair was cancelled, but you can still check out its workshops and exhibitors online.
At the Rumpus, Samantha Irby discussed her secret snack stash (peppermint patties first), not seeking out reviews of her work, humor as coping mechanism, relatable writing and more:
“[W]riting is such a solitary process—well, at least the way I do it is (at 2 a.m., in a ratty sweatshirt, listening to dad rock), and it can feel like I’m shouting into a void. Or maybe not even that, maybe it’s more like, “Who cares about this?” So it’s a good feeling when someone I’ve never met tells me that they’ve read something I wrote and recognize themselves in it. Everyone likes to pretend that they’re special, that despite this large planet we are coexisting on they are somehow having a singular experience, but I think we are all working through a lot of the same universal shit and it’s nice to make that connection.”
Here’s “how Édouard Louis, a working-class gay man from the provinces, became France’s latest literary sensation — and its political conscience.”
In a pandemic, what is essential journalism?
“You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone, but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear,” writes at the New Yorker.
If you don’t already, it’s time to keep a journal.
Read these three recent feminist books. Read these novels about multicultural families. Read these queer comics in quarantine. Read these books in April. Read these books about women in the desert.
