Hey there and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
At the Rumpus, jamie hood talks about how to be a good girl, hybrid genres, speaker-subjects and the cultural imagining of the good girl:
“The title itself is a kind of joke; that is, I like this feeling of staging the book in its very premise as an instruction manual—the joke being that I have no answer, and the project is in part about the aimlessness and indeterminacy of woman-ness, especially in relation to the spectacularity of femininity, its function as a category often conceptualized through a being-for-others. In other words, if “the” good girl is a formulation without ontological certainty—if the cultural imagining of the good girl is one who is comprised of (male) fantasy and a coalescence of subordinations under misogynistic systems of power and thought—there is no such thing as a good girl, for the ‘girl’ in question is a phantom from the jump.”
“This book celebrates love stories by and for women of color.”
What’s it like to relearn your native language during the pandemic?
What would it be like to not read anything for a week?
A few books thoughtfully placed in the bathroom as reading material? Sure. But full-on bathroom book cases?
In a recommendation of Sam Cohen’s Sarahland, which I enthusiastically agree with, Andrea Lawlor writes:
“In the title story, ‘Sarahland,’ we meet a college student Sarah, and then a pack of maybe interchangeable other Sarahs, default-friends our own Sarah sort of hates. The first astonishment: every sentence casts a little spell, reminds what a sentence can do. Another, arguably related, astonishment: Cohen treats all these Sarahs with the same tender scrutiny. We might be rooting hardest for Dr. Sarah, our Sarah, but we can’t dismiss any of the Sarahs because Cohen’s authorial solidarity won’t let us—they’re wrong but they’re not bad; they’re multiple but specific. It’s a femme power-move, Cohen re-writing even the newest narratives.”
Read these new books in the sunshine. Read these occult books. Read these mystery novels set by the sea. Read these books about long-distance relationships. Read these books on unrequited love. Read these books on obsessive female relationships in literature.
