‘Roving Pack’ By Sassafras Lowrey

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Sarah Burghauser in Fiction, Reviews

The coarse, hard-nosed, levelheaded, and altogether loveable Click has been schooled by years of abuse and homelessness.  With a recently-expired restraining order against hir mother, a spying grandmother, and a slipshod father, Click has had to make it on hir own from a young age.  Now 19, and as an active participant in the Portland, Oregon queer youth resource center, QYRC, a genderqueer zinester, and straight-edge leather boy, Click sees being alone as both a blessing and a curse.

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‘Three’ by Annemarie Monahan

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Sarah Burghauser in Fiction, Reviews

One morning, a 17-year-old girl opens her high school English textbook to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and reads her favorite lines aloud:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

She lifts a peach from the fruit bowl in her kitchen and considers it: “Do I dare eat a peach?”  Three possible answers to this simple question spur a trinity of parallel lives in Monahan’s sparkling new novel. (more…)

‘Letters to Kelly Clarkson’ by Julia Bloch

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Sarah Burghauser in Poetry, Reviews

“Everyone wants music that transports them,” writes the speaker in Julia Bloch’s new book of prose poetry, Letters to Kelly Clarkson.  While one need not possess a discerning ear for musical talent to appreciate the cultural meaning of a pop star like Clarkson, Bloch’s collection of poetic epistles pricks the barrier between the actual and the illusory.  (more…)

‘Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds’ By Neil De La Flor and Maureen Seaton

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Sarah Burghauser in Poetry, Reviews

In their collaborative, experimental poetry collection, Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (Firewheel Editions ), Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton explore subjects ranging from hurricanes to Jerry Seinfeld to the devil, with cool humor, sparkling wordplay, and sharp wisdom.   (more…)

Allison Moon: Sex, Werewolves, and Self-Publishing

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Sarah Burghauser in Features, Interviews

“I love writing sex. And I love talking sex. A lot of writers feel stymied or scared of writing sex because it’s like, ‘Oh I can totally reveal myself through all these horrible violent things I’m writing, but when I reveal myself through sex it’s like too personal’ or something. Maybe it’s because I am confident around it, but sex is this place full of senses.”

Allison Moon is the author of Lunatic Fringe (Lunatic Ink), the sexy, fast-paced, first book in her lesbian werewolf trilogy. Self-publishing pioneer and 2011 Lambda Literary Fellow, Moon has published with Not For Tourists, Nerve.com, McSweeney’s, and Psychopedia.com.  She teaches an arsenal of workshops ranging in topic from “Self-Publishing 101” to “Pegging 101.” I met with Moon in her Oakland home to talk about her book, sex writing, and the state of self-publishing today. (more…)

‘The Last Nude’ By Ellis Avery

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Sarah Burghauser in Fiction, Reviews

In 1927, Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempika meets American fledgling Rafaela Fano as she drives along Paris’ Boise de Boulogne.  Dazzled as much by Tamara’s wealth as by her glamour, Rafaela goes home with her to pose for paintings in exchange for a much-needed one hundred francs.  Ellis Avery’s sumptuous second novel, The Last Nude (Riverhead Books), imagines the life and death of Tamara and Rafaela’s relationship, which blooms from this historical chance encounter.

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Susie Bright: Mapping the Erotic and the Revolutionary

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Sarah Burghauser in Features, Interviews

“I look in the paper and see how feminism is discussed in either this really elitist dilettante sectarian way, or now the Christian fanatics are into it. I can’t help but think about the time when radical feminists started making allegiances with Evangelicals and the damage done because of that…”

Susie Bright, writer, teacher, performer, and activist, is the author of more than a dozen books and editor of over twenty.  She has written for dozens of mainstream and independent magazines and hosts the popular Audible podcast “In Bed With Susie Bright.”  Bright taught the first university course on pornography and is a pioneer of sex-positive feminism and women’s erotic publishing. (more…)

Lesbian and Bisexual Literary Showcase

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Sarah Burghauser in Features

Bluestockings Books hosts a reading across genres featuring Lambda Literary Award winners and featured writers:

Ellis Avery is the author of two novels and a memoir.  Her first novel, The Teahouse Fire, set in the tea ceremony world of 19th century Japan, has been translated into five languages and won the Lambda Award for lesbian debut fiction and the Stonewall Fiction Award.  Her second novel, The Last Nude, inspired by the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, is forthcoming from Riverhead in January. Avery lives in Manhattan and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Sarah B. Burghauser is a Lambda Literary Foundation contributing writer, and has been awarded fellowships with the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat, The MacDowell Colony, and Vermont Studio Center.  Sarah publishes with A Café in Space, the Anaïs Nin literary journal, and her essay “Learning To Be In A Skin” appears in the anthology, Queer Girls in Class (Peter Lang 2011).  Currently Sarah works on her first book, a lyrical autobiographic novel about reincarnation.

Donna Minkowitz won a Lambda Literary Award for her 1998memoir Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God and Fury. She was a columnist at the Village Voice and the Advocate, and has also written for The New York Times Book

Review, Newsday, Salon, New York Magazine and The Nation. She recently completed a new memoir, The Marvelous Toy, which combines approximately 87% true memoir with the fantasy that her mother created her as a golem.

Rachel M. Simon is the winner of the 2005 Transcontinental Poetry Prize and the recipient of a 2011-2002 Purchase College Writers Center Fellowship.  She the author of the poetry collections Theory of Orange and Marginal Road.  She teaches writing, gender studies and film at SUNY Purchase College, Pace University, Poets House, and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

Alison Smith‘s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, The London Telegraph, The New York Times, The Believer, Glamour, Best American Erotica , and other publications. Her first book, amemoir titled Name All the Animals, was published by Scribner. Name All the Animals won a Lambda Literary Award, was shorted-listed for the Book-Sense Book-of-the-Year Award, and was named one of the top ten books of 2004 by People Magazine.

Aoibheann Sweeney was raised in Massachusetts and attended Harvard University and the University of Virginia’s MFA Program, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Her first novel, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, was published by Penguin Press in 2007 and was an Editor’s Choice at the New York Times Book Review and the recipient of a 2007 Lambda Literary Award.

Thursday, June 23rd @ 7PM – $5 Suggested

172 Allen St.
New York, NY 10002

‘Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender’ by Nick Krieger

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Sarah Burghauser in Reviews

Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender (Beacon) is the memoir of one San Francisco queer, Nick Krieger, who makes his way from the world of his affluent, femme, lesbian friends, to the sexually permissive and gender-variant world of his new Castro crew.

Krieger explores the rites, rituals, and nomenclature of the SF trans-male community to which he finds himself drawn.  But his personal account is not so straightforward; Krieger tells his story in a way we have not seen before in transgender narratives of self-realization.

Reading Nina Here Nor There is like taking a tour through San Francisco’s transmale culture by the most charming guide you could hope for.
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‘Ivan & Misha’ Wins the Northern California Book Award

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Sarah Burghauser in Features, News

Ivan and Misha stories by Michael Alenyikov (TriQuarterly Books) won the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Fiction and is now in the running for a Publishing Triangle Award in the Fiction category.

Alenyikov’s debut novel, Ivan and Misha, follows the experiences of a set of twins when they travel from Kiev to New York after the fall of the Berlin wall in this poetic, labyrinthine tale. [Litseen]