Book picks similar to
Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties by Felicia Luna Lemus
fiction
queer
lgbt
lgbtq
Salt Fish Girl
Larissa Lai - 2002
Told in the beguiling voice of a narrator who is fish, snake, girl, and woman - all of whom must struggle against adversity for survival - the novel is set alternately in nineteenth-century China and in a futuristic Pacific Northwest.At turns whimsical and wry, "Salt Fish Girl" intertwines the story of Nu Wa, the shape-shifter, and that of Miranda, a troubled young girl living in the walled city of Serendipity circa 2044. Miranda is haunted by traces of her mother's glamourous cabaret career, the strange smell of durian fruit that lingers about her, and odd tokens reminiscient of Nu Wa. Could Miranda be infected by the Dreaming Disease that makes the past leak into the present?Framed by a playful sense of magical realism, "Salt Fish Girl" reveals a futuristic Pacific Northwest where corporations govern cities, factory workers are cybernetically engineered, middle-class labour is a video game, and those who haven't sold out to commerce and other ills must fight the evil powers intent on controlling everything. Rich with ancient Chinese mythology and cultural lore, this remarkable novel is about gender, love, honour, intrigue, and fighting against oppression.
Love and Other Thought Experiments
Sophie Ward - 2020
The couple spend many happy evenings together planning for the future.One night Rachel wakes up screaming and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. She knows it sounds mad - but she also knows it's true. As a scientist, Eliza won't take Rachel's fear seriously and they have a bitter fight. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question.Inspired by some of the best-known thought experiments in philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind, Love and Other Thought Experiments is a story of love lost and found across the universe.
Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing
Michelle TeaDexter Flowers - 2006
Fiction is matched in excitement by graphic novel excerpts and personal essays. Certain to become a literary touchstone for a new generation of writers and readers, Baby Remember My Name speaks to the broad range of queer girl experiences in work that is brave, irreverent, funny, sensitive, and hot.
Everything Under
Daisy Johnson - 2018
Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries.One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it.
Bad Habits: A Love Story
Cristy C. Road - 2008
In her circle, drugs are cheap, ubiquitous, and sometimes feel like the only way out, and Road’s street psychopharmacology results in experiences that are both revelatory and tragic. Writing in a tradition of some of the finest transgressive authors, such as Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, and Kathy Acker, Road depicts the damaged soul and psyche of her young protagonist with language as violent as the street and sex as raw as the language. Somewhere along this hyperreal tour, our heroine learns to leave her bad habits behind and emerge stronger and more independent, clean and open to love.
Last Night in Nuuk
Niviaq Korneliussen - 2014
Through monologues, emails, and text exchanges, she brilliantly weaves together the coming of age of five distinct characters: a woman who’s “gone off sausage” (men); her brother, in a secret affair with a powerful married man; a lesbian couple confronting an important transition; and the troubled young woman who forces them all to face their fears. With vibrant imagery and daring prose, Korneliussen writes honestly about finding yourself and growing into the person you were meant to be. Praised for creating “its own genre” (Politiken, Denmark), Last Night in Nuuk is a brave entrance onto the literary scene and establishes her as a voice that cannot be ignored.
Some Girls
Kristin McCloy - 1994
It's not until she meets her next door neighbor, the dazzling Jade, and begins to follow Jade's lifestyle that she feels connected to the city. As she continually needs to tweak herself to keep up with Jade, Claire is forced to make decisions and determinations as to who she is and how she wants to live her life
We Disappear
Scott Heim - 2008
. . . It’s not hyperbole to suggest that We Disappear is the eeriest Kansas-set story since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood." — Chicago Sun-TimesA dark and compelling novel of addiction, obsession, love, and family from the acclaimed author of
Mysterious Skin
The body of a teenage boy is discovered in a Kansas field. The murder haunts Donna—a recent widow battling cancer—calling forth troubling details from long-suppressed memories of her past. Hoping to discover more about "disappeared" people, she turns to her son, Scott, who is fighting demons of his own. Addicted to methamphetamines and sleeping pills, Scott is barely holding on—though the chance to help his mother in her strange and desperate search holds out a slim promise of some small salvation.But what he finds is a boy named Otis handcuffed in a secret basement room, and the questions that arise seem too disturbing even to contemplate. With his mother's health rapidly deteriorating, Scott must surrender to his own obsession, and unravel Otis's unsettling connections to other missing teens . . . and, ultimately, to himself.
Things a Bright Girl Can Do
Sally Nicholls - 2017
Enraged that she is expected to marry her childhood sweetheart rather than be educated, she joins the Suffragettes, and vows to pay the ultimate price for women's freedom.May is fifteen, and already sworn to the cause, though she and her fellow Suffragists refuse violence. When she meets Nell, a girl who's grown up in hardship, she sees a kindred spirit. Together and in love, the two girls start to dream of a world where all kinds of women have their place.But the fight for freedom will challenge Evelyn, May and Nell more than they ever could believe. As war looms, just how much are they willing to sacrifice?
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong - 2019
Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
I Can't Think Straight
Shamim Sarif - 2008
As Tala’s wedding day approaches, simmering tensions come to boiling point and the pressure mounts for Tala to be true to herself.Moving between the vast enclaves of Middle Eastern high society and the stunning backdrop of London’s West End, I Can’t Think Straight explores the clashes between East and West, love and marriage, conventions and individuality, creating a humorous and tender story of unexpected love and unusual freedoms.
Lunatic Fringe
Allison Moon - 2011
Lexie Clarion's first night at college, she falls in with a pack of radical feminist werewolf hunters. The next morning, she falls for a mysterious woman who may be among the hunted. As Lexie's new lover and the Pack battle for Lexie's allegiance, the waxing moon illuminates old hatreds, new enemies, and a secret from Lexie's childhood that will change her life forever.
Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme
Ivan E. CoyoteAnne Fleming - 2011
The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.