New in September: J. Jack Halberstam, E.J. Levy, Michal Witkowski, and Michael Lowenthal

Author: Edit Team

September 2, 2012

Put on your reading glasses and get happy! September is chock-full of fantastic new LGBTQ books.

Pop star Lady Gaga is used as a jumping off point for an examination of recent gender and sexual cultural shifts in J. Jack Halberstam’s new book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press).

From Beacon Press:

Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies?

In Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, J. Jack Halberstam answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, Sponge Bob Square Pants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real lived experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage.

Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why[…]

This month, University of Georgia Press is releasing Lambda Literary Award-winning author E. J. Levy’s new short story collection Love, in Theory. This much buzzed about collection takes a sly look at modern romance through the prism of academic theories.

From the publisher:

E. J. Levy takes readers through the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart and modern take on the age-old theme of love—whether between a man and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a child—drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and heartbreak. A disheartened English professor’s life changes when she goes rock climbing and falls for an outdoors-man. A gay oncologist attending his sister’s second wedding ponders dark matter in the universe and the ties that bind us. Three psychiatric patients, each convinced that he is Christ, give rise to a love affair in a small Minnesota town. A Brooklyn woman is thrown out of an ashram for choosing earthly love over enlightenment. A lesbian student of film learns theories of dramatic action the hard way—by falling for a married male professor.

[….]Incorporating theories from physics to film to philosophy, from Rational Choice to Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, these stories movingly explore the heart and mind—shooting cupid’s arrow toward a target that may never be reached.

Portobello Books is releasing Lovetown, the debut novel from Poland-based author Michal Witkowski. Lovetown is a novel that explores gay generational conflict in a post-communist state:

Growing up queer in a Communist state, queens Patricia and Lucretia spent the ’70s and ’80s underground, finding glamour in the squalor, strutting their stuff in parks and public toilets, seducing hard Soviet soldiers, preying on drunks and seeing their friends die of [AIDS]. Today they’re about to hit Lovetown, a homo-haven, populated by a younger generation of emancipated gays, who are out and proud in their post-Communist paradise: suntanned, sculpted and vigorously spending the pink euro.This is the story of the clash between old and new gays – the clapped out queens and the flashy fags – as they meet in a place where anything goes, but some things have also been lost.

Also this month expect new releases from novelist Michael Lowenthal, Jesse Blackadder, Lesléa Newman, Jaime Manrique, and a new edited collection from Michelle Tea.

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