Hi and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit! Let’s talk quarantine reading. I recently read Weather, which two weeks ago I found to be absolutely perfect and which I think now would be… a bit much.
Here are some books about pandemics. Here are some New Yorker pieces about pandemics. I cannot say whether you should read them.
Black women poets will start the revolution.
At Electric Literature, Eva Recinos writes about wanting to speak for herself, rather than for her whole community:
“It’s hard enough for memoir writers to figure out their relationship to “truth.” Our memories are faulty, and our real lives rarely offer tightly-plotted stories or clear lessons—so is your responsibility to the reader to be scrupulously accurate, or to give them some kind of insight into themselves, even if the details are blurry? (And can you really be scrupulously accurate, anyway?) This conversation gets even more complicated for memoir writers from underrepresented communities like Latinx folks. I’m not just trying to figure out how to tell my own truth. I also often feel responsible (or am made responsible) for representing my community.”
“The tech world is so embarrassing.”
Here are eight female mystics in literature.
“Rachel Rabbit White is a free and empowered descendant of Sappho singing a siren’s song. Her debut poetry collection simply tells it as it is, as it has been, and as it will be—no puritan morals allowed!,” writes Shy Watson at the Rumpus on Porn Carnival.
Read the 2020 Lambda finalists. Read these stories about the anxiety of settling down. Read these new books by women on mental health. Read these book about being trapped on an island. Read the 2020 Booker Prize longlist. Read these novels by contemporary Japanese women writers.
