Book picks similar to
Anna by Gili Estlin Hirsch


poetry
lgbt
lgbtqia
written-by-women

feeld


Jos Charles - 2018
    “i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.” In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.” “did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer—making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.

Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag


A.K. Summers - 2014
    Teek wonders, “Can butches even get pregnant?”Of course, as she and her pragmatic femme girlfriend Vee discover, they can. But what happens when they do? Written and illustrated by A.K. Summers, and based on her own pregnancy, Pregnant Butch strives to depict this increasingly common, but still underrepresented experience of queer pregnancy with humor and complexity—from the question of whether suspenders count as legitimate maternity wear to the strains created by different views of pregnancy within a couple and finally to a culturally critical and compassionate interrogation of gender in pregnancy. Offering smart, ambitious art, this graphic memoir is a must-read for would-be pregnant butches and anyone interested in the intersection of birth and gender, as well as a perfect queer baby shower gift and conversation starter for those who always assumed they “got” being pregnant.

Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson


Emily Dickinson - 1998
    Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation.For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson's poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet's life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive.

Heatwave


Maggie McIntyre - 2020
    She is hired under the radar of the female CEO, Katherine Konrad, but within hours of starting, Cat discovers nothing about her new life is going to be straightforward.Raised by her hippy artist mother in Portland, Oregon, Catriona has never followed the crowd, and she certainly doesn’t fit in at Montpellier. Her colleagues dress and act like wannabe starlets, and seem to despise her on sight. Her line manager, Frankie, is a man whose career is in trouble, and it takes all her energy to keep him in his job in charge of “Montage”, Montpellier’s current affairs program. Cat begins to question why she stays.Maybe the answer lies on the top floor of the Montpellier building. Katherine Konrad, CEO, beautiful, quick-witted and a broadcasting legend, has played verbal mind-games with Cat from day one. But Katherine’s quips are often barbed and her wit acidic. She is unpredictable and her private life is a mystery.Events bind the two women together, literally as well as figuratively as they embark on a much closer relationship expected. It’s a struggle for emotional survival, but then Cat discovers the truth about Katherine. Will she run for the hills, or be drawn into the battle as her boss fights with her own past? Summer in the city, two women in love, and the heatwave is not the only thing sizzling. A seductive age-gap story of love and loss, danger and delight.

Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past


Martin Duberman - 1989
    Such notable researchers as John Boswell, Shari Benstock, Jeffrey Weeks and John D'Emilio illuminate gay and lesbian life as it evolved in places as diverse as the Athens of Plato, Renaissance Italy, Victorian London, Jazz Age Harlem, Revolutionary Russia, Nazi Germany, Casto's Cuba - and peoples as varied as South African black miners, American Indians, Chinese courtiers, Japanese samurai, English schoolboys and girls, and urban working women. Gender and sexuality, repression and resistance, deviance and acceptance, identity and community - all are given a context in this fascinating work.

Scout and the Lavender Girl


K.C. Littleton - 2019
    Not. Going. To. Happen.If it weren't for bad luck, Evie Koenig would have no luck at all. Her ex-husband stole thousands of dollars from her college fund, she's barely scraping by with three jobs, and now she's buried her car under the back end of a huge moving truck. Which, by the way, just happens to be driven by one of her sports heroes and the architect of her bisexual awakening. #fmlIt's too bad, really, that they keep on running into one another.81,000 words

The Dyke and the Dybbuk


Ellen Galford - 1993
    When lightning strikes and Kokos is released, she finds herself in the world of the 20th century -- as the disgruntled employee of the multinational corporation, Mephistco. In order to keep her job and fulfill an ancient curse, Kokos must hunt down the descendant of the woman she was instructed to haunt centuries ago. No easy task, as that descendant happens to be Rainbow Rosenbloom -- London taxi-driver, film critic, lesbian, and niece to a pack of formidable aunts.As the hilarious tale unfolds, both Rainbow and her dybbuk discover that History still holds a few tricks up her sleeve.

Mostly Dead Things


Kristen Arnett - 2019
    Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates—picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose—and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them.

Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels, 1950-1965


Katherine V. ForrestDella Martin - 2005
    In 1950, publisher Fawcett Books founded its Gold Medal imprint, inaugurating the reign of lesbian pulp fiction. These were the books that small-town lesbians and prurient men bought by the millions — cheap, easy to find in drugstores, and immediately recognizable by their lurid covers. For women leading straight lives, here was confirmation that they were not alone and that darkly glamorous, "gay" places like Greenwich Village existed. Some — especially those written by lesbians — offered sympathetic and realistic depictions of "life in the shadows," while others (no less fun to read now) were smutty, sensational tales of innocent girls led astray. In the overheated prose typical of the genre, this collection documents the emergence of a lesbian subculture in postwar America.

Choices


Nancy Toder - 1980
    In this straightforward, sensitive novel, Toder conveys the joys--and fears--of a woman coming to terms with her attraction to other women.

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf


Vita Sackville-West - 1985
    Their revealing correspondence leaves no aspect of their lives untouched: daily dramas, bits of gossip, the strains and pleasures of writing, and always the same joy in each other’s company. This volume, which features over 500 letters spanning 19 years, includes the writings of both of these literary icons.DeSalvo and Leaska established the chronological order of the letters and placed them in sequence, and they have also included relevant diary entries and letters Vita and Virginia wrote to other friends where they add context and illumination to the narrative. Annotations throughout the text identify peripheral characters, clarify allusions, and provide background. As the New York Times noted, "the result is a volume that reads like a book, not just a gathering of marvelous scraps."In his introduction Mitchell A. Leaska observes, "Rarely can a collection of correspondence have cast into more dramatic relief two personalities more individual or more complex; and rarely can an enterprise of the heart have been carried out so near the verge of archetypal feeling."

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows


Paula Gunn Allen - 1983
    "An absorbing...fascinating world is created...not only is it an exploration of racism, it is a powerful and moving testament..."--New York Times Book Review

The Fake Game


Kim Hartfield - 2020
    But the best thing about her job is Marie. The publicist is kind and supportive, not to mention drop-dead gorgeous, and Tabby is flattered to be able to call her a friend. When the two run into Tabby's asshole ex, they pretend to be dating as revenge. It's just a silly game - until he gets hired at their publishing company. Now the friends have to decide if they should quit their game. If they continue, they'll be playing to win. But what if the prize is more than either of them could imagine?

Night


Etel Adnan - 2016
    This striking new book continues Adnan’s meditative observation and inquiry into the experiences of her remarkable life.

Who Is Vera Kelly?


Rosalie Knecht - 2018
    Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns war makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she's forced to take extreme measures to save herself.An exhilarating page turner and perceptive coming-of-age story, WHO IS VERA KELLY? introduces an original, wry and whip-smart female spy for the twenty-first century.