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New in April: Sarah Blake, Philippe Besson, and Celebrating Stonewall

New in April: Sarah Blake, Philippe Besson, and Celebrating Stonewall

Author: Edit Team

April 2, 2019

Spring is here, and we’re back with more new LGBTQ books for your April reading list!

As we approach the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, several new books marking its history are hitting bookstores. This month, Penguin Classics will publish The Stonewall Reader, a “collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots” from the New York Public Library archives, with a foreword by Edmund White.

April will also see the publication of the first children’s picture book about Stonewall: Rob Sanders and Jamey Christoph’s Stonewall: A Building. An Uprising. A Revolution (Random House Books for Young Readers). And Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989, edited by Jonathan Weinberg (Rizzoli Electa), is also out this month, exploring the impact of the “movement on the art world” and, according to the publisher, “stand[ing] as a visual history of twenty years in American queer life.”

This month, we’re also looking forward to Naamah, Sarah Blake’s queer retelling of the Great Flood, from the point of view of Noah’s wife.

More from the publisher:

With the coming of the Great Flood–the mother of all disasters–only one family was spared, drifting on an endless sea, waiting for the waters to subside. We know the story of Noah, moved by divine vision to launch their escape. Now, in a work of astounding invention, acclaimed writer Sarah Blake reclaims the story of his wife, Naamah, the matriarch who kept them alive. Here is the woman torn between faith and fury, lending her strength to her sons and their wives, caring for an unruly menagerie of restless creatures, silently mourning the lover she left behind. Here is the woman escaping into the unreceded waters, where a seductive angel tempts her to join a strange and haunted world. Here is the woman tormented by dreams and questions of her own–questions of service and self-determination, of history and memory, of the kindness or cruelty of fate.

Philippe Besson’s novel, Lie With Me (Scribner), which has been translated from the French by Molly Ringwald (yes, that Molly Ringwald!), will be out in the US this month. The novel was awarded the Prix Maison de la Presse after its 2017 publication in France and tells the story of “an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France”:

Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.

In graphic novel news, Is This How You See Me? (Fantagraphics Books) is the latest in Jaime Hernandez’s Love & Rockets series, which “has followed the lives of [Hernandez’s] queer, Chicano cast of characters for over 30 years of romance, heartbreak, and the self-awareness that comes with age.” This installment “hones in on Jaime’s two most beloved characters, Maggie and Hopey, flashing backward and forward in time to reveal how the passage of time has molded these young LA punks into complex, middle-aged women.”

April also brings the release of Kelsey Wroten’s graphic novel, Cannonball (Uncivilized Books), the story of “the messy life of Caroline Bertram: aspiring writer, queer, art school graduate, near alcoholic, and self proclaimed tortured genius […] struggling with the arrival of adulthood and the Sisyphean task of artistic fulfillment” in what the publisher describes as an “Art School Confidential for the Tumblr generation.”

Fans of Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough Dossier trilogy won’t want to miss the conclusion, Amnesty, which arrives this month from Tor Books:

In Amberlough City, out of the ASHES of revolution, a TRAITOR returns, a political CAMPAIGN comes to a roaring head, and the people demand JUSTICE for crimes past.

And be sure to check out the new poetry titles below, with collections coming this month from Franny Choi and Jericho Brown, among others.

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

 

Lie With Me

Fiction

 

Sister Stories

Nonfiction

 

Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory

LGBT Studies

 

Love and Other Curses

Young Adult and Children’s Literature

 

Knight & Dai

Romance

 

Cannonball

Graphic Novels/Illustrated Books

 

Book of Flora

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror

 

The Fourth Courier

Mystery/Thriller

 

He Said, She Said

Bio/Memoir

 

The Tradition

Poetry

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