New in December: Ryan La Sala, Steve Abbott, and Rachel Rabbit White

Author: Lilia Shrayfer

December 8, 2019

December is here, and we’re back with more LGBTQ releases for your reading list!

Selected for the Barnes & Noble Young Adult Book Club, Reverie by Ryan La Sala is getting a lot of attention. The School Library Journal has called it an “outstanding debut…[that] will light readers’ imaginations on fire.” Our favorite part? The antagonist is a drag queen sorceress.

From the publisher :

REVERIE is a YA contemporary fantasy novel about what happens when the worlds we hide within ourselves become reality, and how far we’re willing to go to confront our darkest dreams. It features a diverse cast of queer teens doing their best to master powers that spawn from their greatest fears, to defeat a sorceress determined to tear apart reality and start over on her own terms.

If you don’t know poet, essayist, sex columnist, and the sex worker with tons of ideas, Rachel Rabbit White, first check out this interview she did with Brooklyn Rail. Then add her work to your reading list! Her chapbook Poetry is So Lesbian was published earlier this year to rave reviews, and now it’s time for her debut full length book of poetry, Porn Carnival.

From the publisher:

In PORN CARNIVAL, the debut full-length collection by Rachel Rabbit White, hedonism and materialist critique join in an abject orgy of labor confessionals, group texts, and criminality. White’s deliberate, dominating voice evokes a Plath-like dynamism turned on to queer pleasure and displeasure, indulgence and raison d’être, the bedevilments of a gay bitch on the pole.

In LGBT Studies, we are very excited for Mark McBeth’s Queer Literacies. Mark serves as Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. If you are interested in queer theory and queer rhetoric, this one’s for your reading list!

From the publisher:

In a documentarian investigation of the major LGBTQ archives in the United States, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents identifies the homophobic discourses that prevailed in the twentieth-century by those discursive forces that also sponsored the literacy acquisition of the nation. Mark McBeth tracks down the evidence of how these sponsors of literacy—families, teachers, librarians, doctors, scientists, and government agents—instituted heteronormative platforms upon which public discourses were constructed. After pinpointing and analyzing how this disparaging rhetoric emerged, McBeth examines how certain LGBTQ advocates took counter-literacy measures to upend and replace those discourses with more Queer-affirming articulations. Having lived contemporaneously while these events occurred, McBeth incorporate narratives of his own lived experience of how these discourses impacted his own reading, writing, and researching capabilities. In this auto-archival research investigation, McBeth argues that throughout the twentieth century, Queer literates revised dominant and oppressive discourses as a means of survival and world-making in their own words. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, literary studies, and communication studies will find this book particularly useful.

In the genre of graphic novels, you won’t want to miss Volume 14 of Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday? Serialized since 2007, this series captures a casual romance between two 40-year-old men and the many meals they share together. Earlier in 2019, a TV adaptation of the series was aired on TV Tokyo. Over the past decade few female comic artists have been as beloved as Fumi Yoshinaga.

In nonfiction comes a celebration of San Francisco’s queer literary giant, Steve Abbott, Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader. His writing spans a variety of political subjects from the Watts riots in Los Angeles to the future of gay culture in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic. From the publisher:

Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader is a landmark collection representing the visionary life’s work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott’s multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts.

And as always, if our reading list of LGBTQ releases missed an author or book, or if you have a book coming out next month, please email us.

Fiction

Deluge by Vincent Meis, Fallen Bros Press
Eight Kinky Nights by Xan West, Xan West
Gay & Amish in America by James Schwartz, James Schwartz
Great Escapes from Detroit by Joseph O’Malley, Cornerstone Press

NonFiction

Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbot Reader by Steve Abbot, Edited by Jamie Townsend, Nightboat Books
Great Relationships & Sex Education: 200+ Activities For Educators Working With Young People by Alice Hoyle & Ester McGeeney, Routledge

LGBTQ Studies

A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance & Imagination in the New South by L.H. Stallings, University of California Press
Queerbaiting & Fandom: Teasing Fans through Homoerotic Possibilities by Joseph Brennan, University of Iowa Press
Queer Literacies: Discourses & Discontents by Mark McBeth, Lexington Books
Queer Objects Edited by Chris Brickell & Judith Collard, Rutgers University Press
Sissy!: The Effeminate Paradox in Postwar US Literature and Culture by Harry Thomas Jr, The University of Alabama Press
Theology & Prince Edited by Jonathan H. Harwell & Rev. Katrina E. Jenkins, Fortress Academic

Young Adult and Children’s Literature

The Guardian by MC Lee, Dreamspinner Press
Owl by M. Raiya, Dreamspinner Press
Reverie by Ryan La Sala, Sourcebooks Fire
Runemaker(The Runebinder Chronicles) by Alex R. Kahler, Inkyard Press
Science! The Elements of Dark Energy by Ashley Victoria Robinson & Jason Inman, Bedside Press

Romance

Big Girl Pill by KD Williamson, Dirt Road Books
Date Night by Raven Sky, Bold Strokes Books
Face Off by PJ Treblehorn, Bold Strokes Books
Fall Through Spring by Amy Lane, Dreamspinner Press
Game Changers by Jane Cuthbertson, Bella Books
Hot Ice: Three Romance Novellas by Aurora Rey, Erin Zak, & Elle Spencer, Bold Strokes Books
Last Place in the Chalet by Sue Brown, Dreamspinner Press
Line of Duty by VK Powell, Bold Strokes Books
London Undone by Nan Higgins, Bold Strokes Books
On the Same Page: Secrets Book IV by K.C. Wells & Parker Williams, Dreamspinner Press
One Small Step by MA Binfield, Bold Strokes Books
Other Girls by Avery Brooks, Bywater Books
Someone to Love by Jenny Frame, Bold Strokes Books
Uncovered by Mildred Gail Digby, Bella Books