Touching the Art – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Today, few know the name Gladys Goldstein. She may not have achieved the renown of the abstract expressionist giants like Jackson Pollock, but she’s the star of Touching the Art.
Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex – Juana María Rodríguez
How does our obsession with narratives of despair obscure moments of pleasure that also shape sex workers’ lives?
Everything I Never Wanted to Know – Christine Hume
The experience of reading Hume’s essays powerfully mimics how it feels to live in a world saturated with sexual violence.
Unbound: A Book of AIDS – Aaron Shurin
Intimate and rangy, Unbound’s sixteen essays offer not only a nuanced portrait of the AIDS era but also a priceless guide for how to write about catastrophic collective and personal loss.
Love Me Tender – Constance Debré
Love Me Tender channels the performative masculinity of Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie and the restless thirst of Jane DeLynn’s lesbian cruising novel Don Juan in the Village. In other words, Love Me Tender is hot.
Bright Unbearable Reality – Anna Badkhen
Without awe, how can we dream up a different reality? Without wonder, the dark matter of possibility, how do we find the courage to zoom in on our unbearable humanity?
The White Mosque – Sofia Samatar
Who hasn’t wanted to swallow whole the stories we love?
These Dark Skies – Arianne Zwartjes
A powerful antidote to loneliness, apathy, and the myth of perfect politics.
Revenge of the Scapegoat – Caren Beilin
Darkly comedic and wildly inventive, REVENGE OF THE SCAPEGOAT explores childhood trauma, medical exploitation, art making, and the ethics of fleeing our pasts.
Lee’s novel is a representative of a new wave of apocalyptic literature where ecological and societal collapse do not automatically displace personal trauma and toxic social hierarchies, but rather, complicates them, allowing us to fashion new worlds for ourselves in the cracks of our collective disenchantment.