Hello and salutations! I’m back with my metal detector and my pockets are stuffed full of finds from the literary internet the last couple weeks, and in a rare display of self control from yours truly, I have not mentioned Severance once. That show has taken over my life, and after saying on twitter that it felt like Orphan-Black-meets-The-Office, I’m rewatching the Gay Clone Show again too.
After finishing Laziness Does Not Exist, I’ve been curling up with Michelle Hart’s forthcoming We Do What We Do In The Dark, which arrives May 3, and it’s excellent. I’ve got Quantum Girl Theory on deck after this, and I’m also looking for more queer sports romance and experimental queer nonfiction recommendations if anyone’s got em. Sound off in the comments!
Anyways, let’s make like a boulder and roll. On this week’s Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:
Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note
- It’s the end of an era: after 25 years, Bitch Magazine is closing.
- The first patient-to-patient guide to Long COVID is here, and Autostraddle’s own Heather Hogan is a contributor!
- Today at 2pm ET, trans media scholar Dr. McKenzie Wark is lecturing on The Cis Gaze and Its Others for the New School’s Gender and Its Discontents series, and you can tune in for free here!
- The National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 are here, and congratulations to the honorees, including Alyssa Songsiridej and Joseph Han
- Congratulations to Brandon Taylor on winning this year’s Story Prize for his recent collection Filthy Animals!
- Happy pub day to Flung Out of Space – keep your eyes peeled for more coverage here on Autostraddle of this gorgeous graphic novel about Patricia Highsmith and the making of The Price of Salt aka Carol.
- Want more GAY SHORT FICTION? Check out this list of forthcoming LGBTQ+ collections from Publishers Weekly!
- We love seeing Autostraddle’s beloved B Nichols thrive, and their work on Abbott Elementary got an excellent write-up on Slate to celebrate the season finale!
- This essay about bugs from trans entomologist Dan Hoefele covers the double-edged-ness of empathy, anthropomorphism, gender, violence, projection, and scientific imagination, and it just took my breath away.
- Things continue to escalate for teachers and librarians working to support and educate LGBTQ+ students across the country — Lambda Literary Award winner Jules Gill-Peterson covered the intensity of the latest round of anti-trans legislation in this superb reported piece, and this roundup of LGBTQ+ books for young readers is a great resource if you want recommendations for the littles in your life!
- Relatedly, this piece in NYMag explains the ongoing stakes of the war against LGBTQ+ rights for the Christian Right
- Part detective novel, part ghost story, and 10000% my jam —I’m really looking forward to reading Quantum Girl Theory, which came out back in March!
- Adrienne Celt’s essay on accomplishment, competition, and regret in LitHub was so fascinating and evocative
- Why is everyone on the literary internet throwing around German literary terminology all of a sudden, and wtf is a kunstlerroman? Erin Somers in Gawker has the answers, thank god.
- Where T Kira Māhealani Madden leads, I will follow: “Samara Breger dazzles with Walk Between Worlds, a queer romance as bold as it is propulsive. An absolute joy of ecstatic storytelling, this atmospheric adventure will have you rooting for its characters, laughing out loud, rapt with the thrill of Breger’s luminous imagination.”
- CN: suicide – Amanda Oliver contributed this really moving piece to The Rumpus about the death of a young queer student she knew as a librarian, and it caught a very tender part of my heart.
- Oh hello, Gay Shakespeare YA — this one’s got “bisexuality and back-stabbing” 👀
“I’m really into thinking of writing and this book as a kaleidoscope. So it’s like, turning the lens off of me and onto other people. And each person’s passage is another turn of the kaleidoscope, seeing a new period in a new way through a new person’s eyes.”
Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!
- Analyssa spoke to Chloe Caldwell about First Periods, PMDD, and That Weird Blue “Blood” in Tampon Commercials
- For Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Dani’s collected more poetry collection recommendations
- Stef reviewed R/B Mertz’s memoir Burning Butch
- I talked about songwriting, our fav musicians’ taste in books, and folks who read on tour with Mal Blum!
Early Career Queer Spotlight:
Congrats to Kelly McLennon on the publication of her first short story in a literary magazine! You can read her story “A Chance” here at OpenDoor Magazine.
That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at [email protected] with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.
I have really started looking forward to these columns every fortnight – your enthusiasm for books is infectious, Yash!
Not to put a dampener on that enthusiasm, but after reading a few YA gender-flipped/queer retellings of famous literature/fairy tales etc. (there have been so many! do we need a list!) I am starting to temper my expectations. I will see if my library gets Take Her Down in, but if it does not deliver on the bisexuality and backstabbing, I will be devastated!
omg what if we make a Queer Retellings masterlist…
👀
I’m here for it! Book Riot has done a few lists that would make a good starting point.
https://bookriot.com/queer-fairytale-retellings/
https://bookriot.com/queer-retellings/
Can’t talk about queer Shakespeare YA without bringing up As I Descended by Robin Talley, my first introduction to Macbeth.
I LOVE THIS BOOK
gay shakespeare ya! i have a whole shelf for that on my book list! Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake is a book of my heart, and That Way Madness Lies is an anthology edited by Dahlia Adler that’s all retellings!
A couple people recommended Rachel Spangler for queer sports romance last time and I want to third that and plug my two favorites. The first is Thrust, an incredibly sweet and hot second chance romance set in the world of Olympic fencing.
The second is Fire and Ice which was my first WLW romance checked out of the library because the idea of a “curling romance” sounded so ridiculous it must be good. And it was! A disgraced sports reporter is sent to Buffalo for one last change to redeem herself, much to her dismay the assignment is covering a whole season of curling, something that is definitely not a sport. She antagonizes the whole team but the captain with a heart of gold doesn’t give up on her, romance ensues.
A good deal of my non basketball/football sporting knowledge comes from Spangler’s books because they are so talented at getting into details of sport without disrupting the narrative. There’s a scene early in Fire and Ice that I love where our bitter journalist insists curling must be easy cause it’s just sweeping a little broom on ice and insists on playing—without knowing the rules—to prove it. That scene gave me the basics but by the end of the book I was capable of explaining not just the rules but the strategy and physics of curling.