New in October: Armistead Maupin, Ross Raisin, Malinda Lo, and Carmen Maria Machado

Author: Edit Team

October 5, 2017

New month, new books!

This month, explore the uncanny with Carmen Maria Machado’s fantastically surreal new short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf).

From the publisher:

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls-with-bells-for-eyes.

Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction

Armistead Maupin’s much-anticipated memoir, Logical Family (HarperCollins), maps the author’s journey from rural South Carolina to San Francisco, to his life as a ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer.

From the publisher:

Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man “on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.” Realizing that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT (including a beloved portrait of a Confederate ancestor), and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Reflecting on the profound impact those closest to him have had on his life, Maupin shares his candid search for his “logical family,” the people he could call his own. “Sooner or later, we have to venture beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us,” he writes. “We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.” From his loving relationship with his palm-reading Grannie who insisted Maupin was the reincarnation of her artistic bachelor cousin, Curtis, to an awkward conversation about girls with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, Maupin tells of the extraordinary individuals and situations that shaped him into one of the most influential writers of the last century.

2017 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ faculty member Malinda Lo’s new book, A Line in the Dark (Dutton Books for Young Readers) is a young adult thriller that explores themes of love and loyalty.

From the publisher:

The line between best friend and something more is a line always crossed in the dark.

Jess Wong is Angie Redmond’s best friend. And that’s the most important thing, even if Angie can’t see how Jess truly feels. Being the girl no one quite notices is OK with Jess anyway. If nobody notices her, she’s free to watch everyone else. But when Angie begins to fall for Margot Adams, a girl from the nearby boarding school, Jess can see it coming a mile away. Suddenly her powers of observation are more a curse than a gift.

As Angie drags Jess further into Margot’s circle, Jess discovers more than her friend’s growing crush. Secrets and cruelty lie just beneath the carefree surface of this world of wealth and privilege, and when they come out, Jess knows Angie won’t be able to handle the consequences.

When the inevitable darkness finally descends, Angie will need her best friend.

This month sees the release of novelist Ross Raisin new novel A Natural (Random House), a coming of age novel set in the high-stakes world of English soccer:

After his unceremonious release from a Premier League academy at nineteen, Tom feels his bright future slipping away. The only contract offer he receives is from a lower-level club. Away from home for the first time, Tom struggles on and off the field, anxious to avoid the cruel pranks and hazing rituals of his teammates. Then a taboo encounter upends what little stability he has, forcing Tom to reconcile his suppressed desires with his drive to succeed.

Meanwhile, the team’s popular captain, Chris, is in denial about the state of his marriage. His wife, Leah, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held for her career. As her husband is transferred from club to club, and raising their first child practically on her own, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her.

A Natural delves into the heart of a professional soccer club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body, and the struggle of conforming to the person everybody else expects you to be.

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

Fiction

A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be by Quintan Ana Wikswo, Stalking Horse Press
A Natural: A Novel by Ross Raisin, Random House
The Black Emerald by Jeanne W Thornton, Instar Books
Channeling Morgan by Lewis Desimone, Beautiful Dreamer Press
Charlatan: New and Selected Stories by Cris Mazza, Curbside Splendor Publishing
The Fiddler Is a Good Woman by Geoff Berner, Dundurn
The HIV Monologues by Patrick Cash, Oberon Books
London Skin and Bones: The Finsbury Park Stories by Ian Young, Squares & Rebels
Malagash by Joey Comeau, ECW Press
The Off Season by Amy Hoffman, University of Wisconsin Press
The Red Beach Hut by Lynn Michell, Inspired Quill
This Is How It Begins: A Novel by Joan Dempsey, She Writes Press

Nonfiction

Marching Dykes, Liberated Sluts, and Concerned Mothers: Women Transforming Public Space by Elizabeth Currans, University of Illinois Press
Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America by Samhita Mukhopadhyay & Kate Harding, Picador
Tell: Love, Defiance, and the Military Trial at the Tipping Point for Gay Rights by Major Margaret Witt, ForeEdge
To My Trans Sisters edited by Charlie Craggs, Jessica Kingsley Publishers

LGBT Studies

A Practical Guide to Gender Diversity and Sexuality in Early Years by Deborah Price, Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community by Larry Yang, Wisdom Publications
Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan edited by Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, & Jing Jamie Zhao, Hong Kong University Press
Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir by Michaela Koch, Transcript-Verlag
Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical Solidarities in a Global Perspective edited by Niharika Banerjea, Debanuj Dasgupta, Rohit K. Dasgupta, & Jaime M. Grant, Seagull Books
Geographies of Sexualities ‘Down Under’: Gay and Lesbian Geographies in Australia by Andrew Gorman-Murray, Routledge
Gender Panic, Gender Policy by Vasilikie P. Demos, Emerald Publishing Limited
LGBT Psychology and Mental Health: Emerging Research and Advances edited by Richard Ruth Ph.D. & Erik Santacruz Ed.D., Praeger
Trans* Lives in the United States: Challenges of Transition and Beyond by Andrew Cutler Seeber, Routledge

Young Adult and Children’s Literature

The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
A Line in the Dark by Malinda Lo, Dutton Books for Young Readers
A Penny on the Tracks by Alicia Joseph, Bedazzled Ink Publishing
A Very, Very Bad Thing by Jeffery Self, Push
Being Roy by Julie Aitcheson, Harmony Ink Press
Echo After Echo by Amy Rose Capetta, Candlewick
Like Water by Rebecca Podos, Balzer + Bray
Mick & Michelle by Nina Rossing, Harmony Ink Press
Mirror, Mirror: A Novel by Cara Delevingne, Harper
Not Your Villain by C.B. Lee, Duet
That Doesn’t Belong Here by Dan Ackerman, Supposed Crimes
That Inevitable Victorian Thing by E.K. Johnston, Dutton Books for Young Readers
Vanilla by Billy Merrell, Push
The Wicker King by K. Ancrum, Imprint