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

This year’s Booker prize is all about translated works. At lot of other book prizes this year are following suit.

Keah Brown, Esmé Weijun Wang and Jillian Weise discussed disability and writing at Electric Literature. Weise notes:

“I do not believe in an able-bodied audience. If the audience is larger than five people, then the audience certainly includes disabled and nondisabled people; whether Deaf or Hearing; neurodivergent or neurotypical; in chronic pain or, for the present, pain-free. Likewise, I doubt that most editors are nondisabled. They may be disabled but not willing to claim the identity; their own internalized ableism may prevent them from claiming; or they may have concerns about safety and/or stigma.”

And at Hazlitt, Nicola Griffith writes about having MS and writing MS.

Sometimes you can see your queer self reflected in Murakami’s magical realism, writes Kristen McDeavitt at Book Riot.

Here are 32 women writers on the life-changing books they read in their 20s.

At Atlas Obscura, Natasha Frost writes about Ann Bannon and how lesbian pulp fiction saved lives:

“In her introduction to the anthology, Forrest describes chancing upon Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out for sale in Detroit, Michigan. The year was 1957, and she was 18. ‘I did not need to look at the title for clues; the cover leaped out at me from the drugstore rack: a young woman with sensuous intent on her face seated on a bed, leaning over a prone woman, her hands on the other woman’s shoulders,’ she writes. ‘Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air.'”

You can read an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s long-lost Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, based on interviews with Kossula, “the last survivor of the last slave ship to land on American shores.”

“If I was going to make 2018 the true twenty-gay-teen of Hayley Kiyoko’s dreams, I would have to be more active and conscious about reading lesbians.”

At the Millions, Anne Korkeakivi writes about Uganda’s literary culture, noting, “Cultivating a new generation of writers and readers in Uganda, rated the 25th-poorest country in the world by the IMF in 2016, is a complex task.”

If you’re a writer, do you want dates to read your work?

Here’s how to make a book.

“I’ve read most of Tea’s books lying on my back and hypnotized until the end. How to Grow Up: A Memoir made me understand that I probably needed to go on Lexapro, among other complex realizations. Black Wave helped me see a structure for my own novel-in-progress, amid its hypnotic decaying, lush garden of sex, drugs, and San Francisco gentrification. Her most recent book, Against Memoir, works a similar kind of magic, but here we see Michelle as an essayist at full-tilt, working with ethnography, personal experience, research, data, and a constellation of written, sonic, and visual texts to create a queer counter-history,” writes Carley Moore at Lit Hub to intro an interview with Michelle Tea.

Proust’s gay love letters are up for auction.

Why not rank the Goodnight, Moon parodies?

What counts as “well read”?

How much time does Barnes & Noble have left?

“When I was young, in the 80s, I read a wonderful report on why we should teach art in schools, and one of the arguments was that there is no right answer in art. There might be good ways to do things, but there’s no simple one right answer. Two plus two might be four, but the way a bird flies can be represented in innumerable ways,” says Rebecca Solnit in conversation with Paul Holdengraber on skipping high school, subtle culture shifts, California and more.

Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian reviewed All Violet by Rani Rivera, calling it “an incredible, stunning book.”

Read these 10 books by Nigerian authors with feminist themes. Read these books about grieving. Read these books if you’re a new boss. Read these eight novels about national traumas. Read these mystery novels. Read these 21 books by queer women of color. Read these books by Asian American authors. Read these books to understand happiness. Read these short-story collections. Read these 46 books this summer.

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