Hi there and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit! Are you ready for this year to be done? I am so ready for this year to be done.
At LitHub, Emma C. Eisenberg writes about the bloody catharsis of femme revenge, and says:
“Somewhere around the beginning of October of this godforsaken year, I began to crave stories in which women and femmes got pissed off—got enraged. I was enraged, I discovered, and had been for a long time. And I was not alone. “We are seething at how long we have been ignored, seething for the ones who were long ago punished for telling the truth, seething for being told all of our lives that we have no right to seethe,” Lindy West recently wrote in the Times.
So I began to crave stories in which women and femmes were enraged, but more than this, I began to crave stories of revenge. Specifically stories in which women get revenge; specifically on men. Stories in which men were made to suffer in the same ways women and femmes have been suffering for all of time. It was no longer enough to be the bigger person. It was no longer enough to rise above. It was time to act.”
There is now a master list of queer poets of color.
Stop exploiting marginalized writers.
“I’m very interested in issues of passing and femme erasure in the queer community,” says Marriage of a Thousand Lies author SJ Sindu at the Rumpus.
“Feminism” is the word of the year.
These eight books center on disability and “provide a critical lens to look at how we—disabled and nondisabled alike—live, or might live, our lives.”
Read these 9 essayists of color.
Indie bookstores’ most-stolen books include Didion, Sontag, Murakami, and Nabokov.
Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian wrote about reading and re-reading Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, noting: “Reading Fall On Your Knees a second time was perhaps worse than the first time. I mean, the first time is awful, to be sure; and I don’t mean the reading experience is awful, because MacDonald does such an amazing job somehow weaving beauty out of darkness. But overall this is a dark book, full of people making horrible mistakes with gigantic consequences and making difficult choices and living under tough circumstances, not including the gut-wrenching reveal near the end.”
What do you do with a once-beloved book when its author is revealed to be an abuser? At Electric Literature, Jessica Jernigan writes about The Mists of Avalon, noting, “Discovering that powerful men are predators is disturbing, but not surprising. Learning that the author who introduced me to feminine spirituality and the hidden side of history abused children — girls and boys, her own daughter — was horrifying in an existential kind of way.”
Literary fiction isn’t doing super hot. Unicorns are, though.
These are the top books of 2017 by how many times each book appears on a “top books of 2017” list. Also: Read these under-the-radar feminist books. These Canadian books won awards. The Cut picked its best books by women. Maria Popova picked her seven favorite science books of 2017. Book Riot picked its best genre-bending nonfiction. The Guardian listed the best and worst books according to publishers. LitHub listed the best-reviewed short story collections of 2017 and the best-reviewed essay collections of 2017. These are LitHub’s favorite books of 2017.
Oh FUCK. I did NOT know that about Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Yeah, it’s pretty awful. The main problem in SF is still dudes, between pros (Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison), convention organizers/staff (Jim Frenkel), and the general atmosphere of entitled male fans and sometimes uneven/indifferent enforcement of anti-harassment rules. But Bradley’s abuses (some of which involved enabling her husband, Walter Breen, whose abuses were documented for decades and who died in prison) hit an awful lot of people very hard.
From the SJ Sindu piece:
“Nisha’s femininity allows her to pass. She never has to acknowledge her queerness unless she wants to. In some ways, this is a privilege. She is not micromanaged the way that Lucky is. She isn’t subject to the homophobia of her community in the form of rumors and gossip. But this ability to pass also becomes her cage.”
That last sentence!!!