#LGBTQ book review

[thequeereview]

Book Review: Mona of the Manor by Armistead Maupin ★★★★★

A decade after the publication of The Days of Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin returns to his beloved Tales of the City with a delectably satisfying new addition—the tenth book in the series—Mona of the Manor. Transporting us to Gloucestershire, England in 1993, we’re reunited with Mona in her late forties, ten years after she became Lady Roughhton as the not-so-blushing mail-order bride of Lord…

[floral-ashes]

My favourite part of the Cass Report is where she goes: “Florence Ashley and others have shown that gatekeeping doesn’t work and should be abandoned. We disagree, not based on any evidence but because it’s incompatible with the way we’ve already decided we wanted to do things.”

[mxjackparker]

Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology is officially out today! We're published!

Those who've been watching this book through its creation may be tired of hearing me hype up all the contributors for this, but it's worth repeating. All of the 20 transmasculine sex workers in addition to myself who wrote about their experiences for this are amazing and have incredibly worthwhile stories to read.

"I genuinely think anyone who wants to talk or form an opinion about sex work needs to read this book, since it not only offers thoughts about transmasc people but also reflects about what sex work means in a society like ours and what reasons does someone have for engaging in it."

The book includes many kinds of sex workers, from those who sell sex in-person to professional dominants to Onlyfans creators. You can read the experiences of Felix Mufti, Dakota Nevaeh (18+), Eddy (18+), Sunan, Trip Richards (18+), Liam, Arc D, Julian Yang, Mister Saul (18+), Ron Beastly (18+), and many others!

"This is a diverse collection of work - from cutting analysis of the camming industry, statistics on violence against transmasculine sex workers, to personal stuff that reads like prose poetry. Care was taken to include minorities within the minority, especially people of color."

Such a huge proportion of transmasculine people have done some kind of sex work, yet awareness of this is low! As a sex worker myself who often struggles to be understood and has become frustrated with the lack of resources out there or things to read describing feelings and difficulties like my own, I'm so happy to have been able to put together this anthology. When I transitioned whilst selling sex and making porn, I'd have strongly appreciated a book like this.

"The "multiple texts" format is really easy to apprehend for people who's primary language is not english (like me, so sorry for the typos and such), compared to a huge essay in one block."

You can order a copy from most online book stores, or get an e-book here.

[xiaq]

Ok, I just finished A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall and I am ashamed I waited so long to read it purely based on the cover (I don't like covers with real life humans on them, no matter how pretty).

Listen. I would die for Alexis and also his characters. This book wrapped my love for Austen with queerness and doubled down on the banter. I loved every word from start to finish and people on Goodreads complaining it was too long or the plot was too unwieldy need to take several seats; I gladly would have read 500 more pages about these characters. Anyway. I highly recommend ALFAD if you want historical fiction with trans rep and happy endings for everyone.

This may be the best book I read this year.

[lakecountylibrary]

If you liked Camp Damascus, try Hell Followed With Us

and vice versa!

There's a lot to love in both Camp Damascus by @drchucktingle and Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. As horror novels about queer youth with, shall we say, complicated relationships with religion, they have a lot in common - if you liked one you very well may like the other. Let's take a closer look.

Characters:

Both books feature queer, autistic youth fighting back. The characters are trying to survive in a world created for them by abusive adults and religious institutions that hold power over them.

In Camp Damascus we follow Rose (autistic, lesbian). In Hell Followed With Us we follow Benji (neurodivergent, trans) and Nick (autistic, gay).

Genre:

Both books are horror, but with two distinct flavors. Camp Damascus has more of a creepy factor, while Hell Followed With Us leans more toward gore. In Camp there is some mystery to the evil, but in Hell the evil has a name, a face, an address - and a to-do list.

Both books deal with Christian cults and the horrors of indoctrination. They deal with the characters' complicated relationships to Christianity as an institution and God as a concept. They also both quote Christian scripture heavily.

Vibes:

While both books are horror, they do feel very different, largely because the primary emotion that drives each story is different. In Camp Damascus, it's love. In Hell Followed With Us, it's rage. You'll certainly find both emotions in certain quantities in either novel, but what they primarily put forward distinctly changes the vibe of both books.

-

So there you have it! Two fantastic reads in close thematic conversation with each other - but still quite distinct. If either sounds good to you, do yourself a favor and check out both today!

See more of Robin's recs

[jesncin]

I wanted to doodle a celebration illustration for Lunar Boy making it to NPR's Books We Love 2024 curated list!! Out of about 350 books, only 20 of the books are comics and graphic novels- I can't believe our little moon boy made it in!

[galina]

Anyone's Ghost, August Thompson – enjoyed this advance review copy way more than I expected, it broke through my cynical shell and turned me into a soft wobbly mess. An angsty cheesy beautiful queer love story that will be a perfect crying-on-holiday read, comes out in July.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Emil Ferris’s long-awaited “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two”

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Seven years ago, I was absolutely floored by My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a wildly original, stunningly gorgeous, haunting and brilliant debut graphic novel from Emil Ferris. Every single thing about this book was amazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

The more I found out about the book, the more amazed I became. I met Ferris at that summer's San Diego Comic Con, where I learned that she had drawn it over a while recovering from paralysis of her right – dominant – hand after a West Nile Virus infection. Each meticulously drawn and cross-hatched page had taken days of work with a pen duct-taped to her hand, a project of seven years.

The wild backstory of the book's creation was matched with a wild production story: first, Ferris's initial publisher bailed on her because the book was too long; then her new publisher's first shipment of the book was seized by the South Korean state bank, from the Panama Canal, when the shipper went bankrupt and its creditors held all its cargo to ransom.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters told the story of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There's the landlord – a gangster and his girlfriend – the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.

Karen narrates and draws the story, depicting herself as a werewolf in a detective's trenchcoat and fedora, as she tries to unravel the secrets kept by the grownups around her. Karen's life is filled with mysteries, from the identity of her father (her brother, a talented illustrator, has removed him from all the family photos and redrawn him as the Invisible Man) to the purpose of a mysterious locked door in the building's cellar.

But the most pressing mystery of all is the death of her upstairs neighbor, the beautiful Annika Silverberg, a troubled Holocaust survivor whose alleged suicide just doesn't add up, and Karen – who loved and worshiped Annika – is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Karen is tormented by the adults in her life keeping too much from her – and by their failure to shield her from life's hardest truths. The flip side of Karen's frustration with adult secrecy is her exposure to adult activity she's too young to understand. From Annika's cassette-taped oral history of her girlhood in an Weimar brothel and her escape from a Nazi concentration camp, to the sex workers she sees turning tricks in cars and alleys in her neighborhood, to the horrors of the Vietnam war, Karen's struggle to understand is characterized by too much information, and too little.

Ferris's storytelling style is dazzling, and it's matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen's life – including Karen herself – are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.

These monster-comic throwbacks are absolute catnip for me. I, too, was a monster-obsessed kid, and spent endless hours watching, drawing, and dreaming about this kind of monster.

But Ferris isn't just a monster-obsessive; she's also a formally trained fine artist, and she infuses her love of great painters into Deeze, Karen's womanizing petty criminal of an older brother. Deeze and Karen's visits to the Art Institute of Chicago are commemorated with loving recreations of famous paintings, which are skillfully connected to pulp monster art with a combination of Deeze's commentary and Ferris's meticulous pen-strokes.

Seven years ago, Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters absolutely floored me, and I early anticipated Book Two, which was meant to conclude the story, picking up from Book One's cliff-hanger ending. Originally, that second volume was scheduled for just a few months after Book One's publication (the original manuscript for Book One ran to 700 pages, and the book had been chopped down for publication, with the intention of concluding the story in another volume).

But the book was mysteriously delayed, and then delayed again. Months stretched into years. Stranger rumors swirled about the second volume's status, compounded by the bizarre misfortunes that had befallen book one. Last winter, Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston published an article detailing a messy lawsuit between Ferris and her publishers, Fantagraphics:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/

The filings in that case go some ways toward resolve the mystery of Book Two's delay, though the contradictory claims from Ferris and her publisher are harder to sort through than the mysteries at the heart of Monsters. The one sure thing is that writer and publisher eventually settled, paving the way for the publication of the very long-awaited Book Two:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

Book Two picks up from Book One's cliffhanger and then rockets forward. Everything brilliant about One is even better in Two – the illustrations more lush, the fine art analysis more pointed and brilliant, the storytelling more assured and propulsive, the shocks and violence more outrageous, the characters more lovable, complex and grotesque.

Everything about Two is more. The background radiation of the Vietnam War in One takes center stage with Deeze's machinations to beat the draft, and Deeze and Karen being ensnared in the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The allegories, analysis and reproductions of classical art get more pointed, grotesque and lavish. Annika's Nazi concentration camp horrors are more explicit and more explicitly connected to Karen's life. The queerness of the story takes center stage, both through Karen's first love and the introduction of a queer nightclub. The characters are more vivid, as is the racial injustice and the corruption of the adult world.

I've been staring at the spine of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One on my bookshelf for seven years. Partly, that's because the book is such a gorgeous thing, truly one of the great publishing packages of the century. But mostly, it's because I couldn't let go of Ferris's story, her characters, and her stupendous art.

After seven years, it would have been hard for Book Two to live up to all that anticipation, but goddammit if Ferris didn't manage to meet and exceed everything I could have hoped for in a conclusion.

There's a lot of people on my Christmas list who'll be getting both volumes of Monsters this year – and that number will only go up if Fantagraphics does some kind of slipcased two-volume set.

In the meantime, we've got more Ferris to look forward to. Last April, she announced that she had sold a prequel to Monsters and a new standalone two-volume noir murder series to Pantheon Books:

https://twitter.com/likaluca/status/1648364225855733769

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/01/the-druid/#oh-my-papa

[0thello]

“No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it. Little sparks cause fires too.”

Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark (2020).

[franticvampirereads]

This was so cozy and warm that I didn’t want it to ever end! I loved the sleepy little beach town, the bookshop, the bakery, just… everything about this book made my heart so happy. Getting to see a younger Viv finding her footing in the world and planting the seeds for a far off dream was one of those things that really made this book shine. I loved getting to see Viv defying expectations and making friends and falling in love. This is the kind of book that you can curl up with a cup of tea and a snack and just get lost with in its pages for hours. Bookshops & Bonedust is getting a solid four and half stars!

[maggiegrace]

It has been a LONG TIME in the making, the curse of ADHD 😒, BUT I DID IT!

I FINISHED my first book of poetry! 🎉💕

HONEYBEE

📖🐝

Help me celebrate!

Available now at:

Amazon.com

Hard copy and Kindle

Honeybee https://a.co/d/65dtsDr

It’s currently available in four languages.

Thank you for the support. 🙏🏻🥰

[oracleofmadness]

This was such a delight! Gwen is a princess at Camelot, years after Arthur Pendragon has turned to myth. Arthur is her betrothed. However, neither is looking forward to their future together because both are queer.

Gwen has spent years falling for the one and only female knight that takes part in the tournament every summer while Art is falling for Gwen's brother. This story is not only romantic but is full of meaningful moments. The dialogues, the banter, is so funny and enjoyable.

The ending completely surprised me. I thought this would never get too serious, but the ending is intense!

Out November 28, 2023!

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!

[randomgirl005]

A Timid Light/ Una Llum Tímida

Both precious and tough at the same time, the same book has the power to make you feel incredibly good at times and, simultaneously, to break you and leave you in pieces at others.

Una Llum Tímida (A Timid Light), an original text written and performed as a theatrical play by Àfrica Alonso, based on real events, takes us to Spain during the last fifteen years of Franco's regime. It tells a love story between two teachers in a small village in Valencia called Manuel.

This 2024, the same author has published the work as a novel, a text written with the same delicacy and dedication as the theatrical play that preceded it. With extensive research behind it, Àfrica Alonso traveled to the small village of Manuel to immerse herself firsthand in the world of the two protagonists. There, she visited the little apartment where the teachers lived and even spoke with people who had the privilege of knowing them during their lifetime.

It is a harrowing story that, thanks to the author’s incredible writing, makes you turn the pages without realizing it, sometimes needing to stop to reflect, or even reread a paragraph, a sentence, or an entire page to process all the emotions these words manage to convey.

From the very beginning, a feeling of tenderness and love toward Isabel and Carmen takes hold of you. Àfrica Alonso has achieved a narrative that makes you feel everything that happens to them as if you were present in that small apartment in Manuel alongside them.

The good moments, the bad ones... You feel it all as if it directly affects you, creating a bond with the protagonists that leads you to reflect and think about how harsh and unfair life was for them. Despite the love they shared, due to the conditions and beliefs—partially imposed—of the time, they broke the societal norms of love; a love as tender and genuine as theirs. This ultimately shattered the happiness and mental integrity of two young women whose only wish was to be happy and love each other freely, without harming or bothering anyone.

The book brilliantly portrays the guilt that plagued the young women because of a love that, according to the closed-minded society of the time, was an abomination. With tears in your eyes and goosebumps, the book shows you, in a fictional yet very realistic way, how the feeling of guilt consumed them, how self-hatred and rejection of who they were became a constant presence in their lives, always clashing with the pure and sincere love they had for each other.

This internal struggle between the ideals you were raised with and what you have become is present throughout the book. The inability to embrace who you are due to incorrect, instilled values that go against everything you truly are—and deep down, you know that nothing you feel could be as wrong as they make you believe. Even though you’re aware that what you’re doing harms no one, a deeply ingrained part of you cannot let go of this sense of what is "right" and "normal." Is it perhaps out of fear of losing those we thought we loved once? Or maybe out of fear of losing who we thought we were? Whatever the case, what do we have to lose if we don’t have love?

[vampiremacncheese]

Looking for some fresh new sapphic reads👀🌈?

Here's a roundup of everything from heart-melting romance 💕 to spine-chilling horror stories that'll linger long after the last page 👻.

[jessread-s]

✩🕯️📜Series Review:

Core concepts

⋆ The Atlas Six - Physics

⋆ The Atlas Paradox - Psychology

⋆ The Atlas Complex - Philosophy

“The Atlas” series is so much more than dark academia or romance. This series studies what happens to human beings when they are promised access to infinite knowledge and power. It is about how quickly we turn on each other and abandon our own morals to gain. said knowledge and power. Each installment blew me away as I watched Blake’s six protagonists gradually find and/or destroy themselves. My mind was continuously expanded by her prose and it made me question my every decision. It’s a soul crushing read, but perhaps also a necessary one.

Cross-posted to: Instagram | Amazon | Goodreads | StoryGraph

@torpublishinggroup @olivieblake