News first:

• I will be reading at the Brooklyn Books & Booze series with Jeff Somers, Seamus Sullivan, and Cecilia Tan on Tuesday, June 16. More info here: https://randeedawn.com/bonus/brooklyn-books-booze/

• ICYMI, my last newsletter had a cover reveal for my next YA horror novel, Every Room a Hunger, out in Feb 2027. Signed copies are available here. I’ll be making some kind of preorder merch - probably a zine and a print.

• Please also mark it as “Want to Read” on Goodreads and Storygraph if you use either platform. This is a very easy and free way to help raise its profile.

• I have zines for sale at my ko-fi shop. Most recent is “They Cut My Hair and I Cried” about being genderconfused in the woods. If you’d like to get a quarterly package of zines/prints/handwritten letters, I just opened a Patreon tier for that.

The Takes

0. The hottest possible take I have is that ongoing efforts to censor books by and about queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian people are an existential threat and should be treated as such. It is part and parcel of cementing a white Christofascist power in this country and in others. Sorry to start this clickbait with a real fucking downer! But if you’re in the US, please make some noise about the federal bookbanning bills stewing in Congress, and support efforts by Authors Against Book Bans and other organizations that fight for the freedom to read.

Okay, time for some actual hot takes:

1) I kinda miss the blobby abstract expressionist covers.

I admit it, I liked them! As far as book cover trends go, it was decent. I could pick up a book with some colorful blobs that vaguely hint at a human figure and know, “this is probably about a queer friend group going through it.” There’s something so very 2018-2022 about them, a bit of pre-Dobbs naivete in their saturated hues.

2) More people need to read like sickos on public transportation. People will side-eye you reading something innocuous like The White Guy Dies First onto the train. So you might as well start bringing How to Fuck Like a Girl or The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions on your commute. If someone asks what you’re listening to, just tell them it’s a tender act of sexualized cannibalism or whatever. If it’s all degenerate art, inflict it on the masses as much as possible.

3) There’s this microtrend I’ve noticed in queer horror that feels like “femmes who grew up on Sex and the City dealing with Problems” and where ten years ago the problems might have been about an antagonistic boss or workplace rival finding out about the protagonist’s private bitchy instagram, now the problems are about, like, demonic cannibal cults. Does this count as a hot take if I’m not roundly condemning it? It’s fine, I’m just not that into it.

4) Both can be true: the tenderqueer discourse is often so fucking disingenuous, but also, queer and trans readers engaging in bad faith criticism is annoying as hell. For me, the absolute nadir of this was being in a reading group with two other transmasc people. We were discussing a short story collection by a third transmasc person, and someone said “I just hate to think about what young trans people might learn from this.” They also called Lote masturbatory, which like, the point of that book is about how pursuing aesthetic pleasure as a queer or non-white person will cause the state to view you as dangerous and—

5) Actually, that’s my last hot take. Everyone go out and read Lote by Shola von Reinhold. It’s weird and erudite and difficult and, according to that one reviewer, “masturbatory.” It’s also one of the most trans books I’ve ever read without being explicitly about transexual characters. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Pride.