New in May: Michael Cunningham, Rebecca Coffey, Kate Fagan, Christopher Isherwood, and Don Bachardy

Author: Edit Team

May 1, 2014

New month! New books! May is upon us and so are a slew of new and noteworthy LGBT books.

Award-winning author Michael Cunningham’s new book, The Snow Queen, is being released this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book delves into the lives of two brothers as they search for transcendence and grace in an emotionally fraught modern world.

From Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

It’s November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesn’t believe in visions—or in God—but he can’t deny what he’s seen.

At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett’s older brother, a struggling musician, is trying—and failing—to write a wedding song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a song that will be not merely a sentimental ballad but an enduring expression of love.

Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon.

Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each travels down a different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the core of the human soul.

Novelist Rebecca Coffey’s new book, Hysterical (She Writes Press) provides a riveting fictional portrait of Anna Freud, the lesbian daughter of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

From the publisher:

There are several serviceable biographies about child psychoanalyst Anna Freud, who lived from 1895 to 1982. But as a fictional memoir, Hysterical is the first novel to reveal Anna’s secrets—and two are blockbusters: 1) At around the time that the young Anna began having intense “friendships” with other women, her father Sigmund began psychoanalyzing her—dissecting her dreams, memories, and, most disturbingly, her sexual fantasies, and writing about them; 2) While Anna publicly supported her father’s “wisdom” about lesbianism and remained his favorite family member, she enjoyed a monogamous relationship with Tiffany fortune heiress Dorothy Burlingham for fifty-four years. Weaving a good story out of a pile of crazy facts, Hysterical lets Anna freely examine the forces that shaped her.

This month, sports writer Kate Fagan details her experience playing basketball for a Christian college in her new memoir The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians (Skyhorse Publishing).

From the publisher:

It’s hard enough coming out, but playing basketball for a nationally ranked school and trying to figure out your sexual identity in the closeted and paranoid world of big-time college sports—that’s a challenge.

Kate Fagan’s love for basketball and for her religious teammates at the University of Colorado was tested by the gut-wrenching realization that she could no longer ignore the feelings of otherness inside her. In trying to blend in, Kate had created a hilariously incongruous world for herself in Boulder. Her best friends were part of Colorado’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes, where they ran weekly Bible studies and attended an Evangelical Free Church. For nearly a year, Kate joined them and learned all she could about Christianity—even holding their hands as they prayed for others “living a sinful lifestyle.” Each time the issue of homosexuality arose, she felt as if a neon sign appeared over her head, with a giant arrow pointed downward. During these prayer sessions, she would often keep her eyes open, looking around the circle at the closed eyelids of her friends, listening to the earnestness of their words.

Kate didn’t have a vocabulary for discussing who she really was and what she felt when she was younger; all she knew was that she had a secret. In The Reappearing Act, she brings the reader along for the ride as she slowly accepts her new reality and takes the first steps toward embracing her true self.

This May, the relationship between writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy is exposed in stark detail with the release of their collected love letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited by Katherine Bucknell, tells the love story of Isherwood and Bachardy in their own words.

From the publisher:

Christopher Isherwood was the celebrated middle-aged English author of Goodbye to Berlin when he met the Californian teenager Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. Defying convention, the two created an enduring relationship out of that initial spark—living as an openly gay couple for more than three decades in the closeted world of Hollywood. The Animals is the testimony in letters to their extraordinary partnership, which lasted until Isherwood’s death in 1986—despite a thirty-year age gap, affairs, jealousies, the pressures of literary fame, and the disdain of twentieth-century America for love between two men.

In romantic letters to each other, they invented the private world of the Animals. Chris was Dobbin, a stubborn old workhorse; Don was a rash, spirited white kitten named Kitty. The ability to create a world, a safe and separate milieu, was a great talent of Isherwood’s—and a necessary one as a gay man in mid-twentieth-century America. But Isherwood knew how to spread hay around his stable and attract beauty. He drew Bachardy into his semi-secret realm and together they invented a place for their love to thrive. Bold, transgressive, and playful, The Animals shows us the devotion between two creative spirits in tenderness and storms.

Quentin Crisp famously stated, “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.” This month, Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon’s new book Gender Failure (Arsenal Pulp Press) explores the wonderful ways the LGBT community often “fail” upwards.

About the collection:

Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted “gender failures.” In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all.

Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across Canada and the US and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae’s personal journeys from gender failure to gender self-acceptance. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it’s a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes.

As always, if we missed an author or book, or if you have a book coming out next month, please email us.

Fiction

Anatomy of a Girl Gang by Ashley Little, Arsenal Pulp Press
The Genealogy of Understanding by Daniel M. Jaffe, Lethe Press
Give it to Me by Anna Castillo, The Feminist Press
Hysterical: Anna Freud’s Story by Rebecca Coffey, She Writes Press
Letters from a Seducer by Hilda Hilst, Nightboat Books
Junior Willis by Richard Natale, Bold Strokes Impressions Editions
Saints+Sinners 2014: New Fiction From the Festival 2014 edited by Paul Willis and Amie Evans, Bold Strokes Books
The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Thief Taker by William Holden, Bold Strokes Books
Vitamin Q by Jim Brogan, Equanimity Press
Wonderland by Stacey D’Erasmo, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Nonfiction

The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy edited by Katherine Bucknell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East by Benjamin Law, Cleis Press
Gender Failure by Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon, Arsenal Pulp Press
In a New Century: Essays on Queer History, Politics, and Community Life by John DEmilio, University of Wisconsin Press
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth, Oxford University Press

LGBT Studies

Families – Beyond the Nuclear Ideal edited by Daniela Cutas and Sarah Chan, Bloomsbury Publishing
Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders by Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff, University of Hawaii Press
Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature (New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies) by Mehl Allan Penrose, Ashgate Publishing
The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV by David Caron, University Of Minnesota Press
Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela by Marcia Ochoa, Duke University Press
Queering Fat Embodiment (Queer Interventions) by Cat Pause, Ashgate Publishing
The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality by Suzanna Danuta Walters, NYU Press
Viral Voyages: Tracing AIDS in Latin America (New Directions in Latino American Culture) by Lina Meruane and Andrea Rosenberg, Palgrave Macmillan

Romance

The Complete Package by Ann Roberts, Bella Books
Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour, Dutton Children’s Books
Frenemy of the People by Nora Olsen, Bold Strokes Soliloquy Editions
Nightingale by Andrea Bramhall, Bold Strokes Books
No Boundaries by Donna K. Ford, Samhain Publishing
Saugatuck Summer by Amelia C. Gormley, Riptide Press
Sacred Fire by Tanai Walker, Bold Strokes Books
The Treasure Seeker by Frankie J. Jones, Bella Books

Erotica

Slave Girls: Erotic Stories of Submission by D. L. King and Rose Caraway, Cleis Press

Speculative Fiction

Ashes of the Day by P. G. Forte, Samhain Publishing
Butcher’s Road by Lee Thomas, Lethe Press
Community Service by Vaughn R. Demont, Samhain Publishing
Fairs’ Point by Melissa Scott, Lethe Press
The Flesh Cartel, #16: To the Victor by Rachel Haimowitz and Heidi Belleau, Riptide Press
Highfell Grimoires by Langley Hyde, Blind Eye Books
A Kingdom Lost by Barbara Ann Wright, Bold Strokes Books
Sacred Fire by Tanai Walker, Bold Strokes Books
Running Toward Home by Lou Harper, Bella Books