Put it in my eyeballs: new(ish) trans and queer books to be excited about
I’m still buried deep in novel rewrites and wedding planning, so no essays or reviews are forthcoming for now. Instead, this is just a quick round-up of links of queer and trans books that are making me excited this month.
I’ve been hearing amazing things about Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night. It’s been nominated for a Lambda and won a Stonewall Book Award from the ALA. I picked up a copy yesterday at Book Culture (an indie chain here in NYC) and read the first fifteen or so pages in a sort of humming trance; the prose has a dreamy, golden-hour quality to it, with a narrator whose senses seem to be honed with grief.
I also picked up a copy of The Unbroken by C.L. Clark, which came out in March. I am very weak for Touraine’s Arms, and also stories that examine war from a postcolonial perspective I also recommend pre-ordering We’re Here: the Best Queer Speculative Fiction of 2020, which Clark edited.
Elly Bangs’s Unity came out last week. I freelance with Tachyon Books, so got to read this last summer. It’s post-apocalyptic science fiction that follows a woman who has been cut off from her powerful hive-mind, and teams up with a mercenary to reunite with them. It’s a harsh, brilliant exploration of identity, trauma, and healing amid a society wrecked by warfare and climate change.
Happy book birthday to Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, which is out TODAY. Faer previous books, An Unkindness of Ghosts and The Deep examine survival against the backdrop of collective trauma and oppression; the first set on a generation ship, the second in the ocean, amongst the descendents of people who jumped from slavers’ ships and transformed in the water. Sorrowland is, in Solomon’s words, “is a gothic-horror-thriller frankenbeast about monstrous dykes & how utterly fuckin debased the USA is.” Fucking SOLD.
LASTLY! There are two Kickstarters that deserve your attention this week.
LET ME OUT is a horror graphic novel written by Emmet Nahill and designed and drawn by George Williams.
Columbiania, NJ, 1979 : “Satanic Panic” is beginning to sweep the nation, and people are disappearing. When the pastor’s wife turns up dead, four friends (Mitch, Terri, Jackson, and Lupe) are caught in the menacing grip of a bigoted, increasingly dangerous town by the law enforcement who’ve picked them as convenient scapegoats. As a satanic conspiracy involving secret government bureaus and blood rituals unravels, things take a turn for the hellish… literally.
LET ME OUT is about how marginalized folks are sacrificed on the altars of power, and what happens when a group of queer & trans friends are given the supernatural means to fight back. It is also about found family and the joy one finds in one’s friends, even amidst seemingly inescapable darkness.
There’s a free excerpt to read here on Gumroad.
Finally, queer-owned press par excellence Neon Hemlock is Kickstarting their 2021 novella series, which includes work by Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Premee Mohamed, E. Catherine Tobler, and Wendy N. Wagner. They’ve already reached their goal, but will still be taking pre-orders, and have some awesome perks for supporting their KS, including scented candles, pins, and other Neon Hemlock books and zines.
Nothing like a fresh crop of queer stories to drain the wallet and enrich the spirit. Happy spring to all of us. (Except to folks in the southern hemisphere, in which case, happy autumnal reading.)
Be good to yourselves, and be good to each other. <3