Hey there and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!

How do plague stories end?

How can you learn to become freer in your work?

What if literature wasn’t turned into self-help?

Literary translations are kind of like crosswords.

Here are the worst/best codependent relationships in literature.

What’s the language for non-binary in Italian?

At Lit Hub, several contemporary novelists discussed how to confront climate change in fiction.

“A Modern Feminist Classic Changed My Life. Was It Actually Garbage?”

Writing letters in 2021 is kinda great.

In a review of Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin, Maggie Lange writes:

“Gay Bar, the new cultural-history-memoir hybrid by American-born, London-based writer Jeremy Atherton Lin, is concerned exactly with this quality. The gay bar has a distinctive magnetic push-pull allure to its congregants, and the book contains an almost grueling level of ambivalence. ‘The gay bar has this cultural presence that’s sort of a joke,’ says Atherton Lin over a video call. ‘It’s passé.’ The book reminded me, again and again, even before the gay bars were closed, there was something about them that felt like they were already over. Gay Bar reinforces one of the most comforting positions about the gay bar I’ve ever encountered — that it’s disappointing.”

I enjoyed this piece on the Tamagotchi cemetery.

“When I Grow Up I Want To Be A Genderless Mollusk.”

“How do writers without access to books develop a craft?”

Here is a helpful guide to book TikTok from someone who is under 25 if you, like me, learned that there is book TikTok during this sentence.

In a review at Bitch, Stephanie Buschardt calls Melissa Febos’s Girlhood “a raw, intimate elegy for an innocence that was never hers to begin with and a recovery of the self, both divine and corporeal.”

Read these seven books of poetry by Arab American women. Read these eight nonfiction books about women trailblazers in men-dominated fields. Read these 12 nonfiction books about Black identity. Read these eight novels in translation about living under Italian fascism. Read these six books about American labor and minimum wage. Read these 10 stories about self-destructive women. Read these queen women’s graphic memoirs.

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