New in November: Arch Brown, Andrea Lawlor, Myriam Gurba, and Alan Bennett

Author: Edit Team

November 15, 2017

Looking to curl up with a new fall book? We have you covered.

This month sees the posthumous release of playwright and filmmaker Arch Brown’s final manuscript, A Pornographer, from Chelsea Station Editions.

From the publisher:

In 2012, in the months following the death of playwright and filmmaker Arch Brown at the age of 76, an unpublished manuscript was discovered while archiving his possessions, a memoir titled A Pornographer. In it, Brown, whose career as a director of sex films stretched from 1967 to 1985, recounts his interviews in the late 1960s and early 1970s with many of the men and women who wanted to star in his sex films—some who did, others who did not. Here, he is all at once receptionist, gopher, casting agent, writer, director, stagehand, cameraman, talent scout, friend, and on-the-spot psychiatrist. You don’t need to have viewed any of Arch Brown’s sex films from this era to appreciate this memoir. In fact, Brown goes out of his way to not mention the titles of any of his films and he only identifies his cast of characters by fictional first names. The result is that A Pornographer is an historical gem, an unexpectedly insightful psychological view of the performers who were drawn to having sex in front of a camera and how and why audiences responded to them.

David Bowie Made Me Gay (Overlook Press), by Darryl W. Bullock, is a comprehensive accounting of LGBT music, encompassing a century of music by and for the LGBT community.

From the publisher:

LGBT musicians have shaped the development of music over the last century, with a sexually progressive soundtrack in the background of the gay community’s struggle for acceptance. With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music.

David Bowie Made Me Gay uncovers the lives of the people who made these records, and offers a lively canter through the scarcely documented history of LGBT music-makers. Darryl W. Bullock discusses how gay, lesbian, and bisexual performers influenced Jazz and Blues; examines the almost forgotten Pansy Craze in the years between the two World Wars (when many LGBT performers were feted by royalty and Hollywood alike); chronicles the dark years after the depression when gay life was driven deep underground; celebrates the re-emergence of LGBT performers in the post-Stonewall years; and highlights today’s most legendary out-gay pop stars: Elton John, Boy George, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael.

Andrea Lawlor‘s long awaited debut novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, is a pop culture laced look at 90s queer culture.

From the publisher:

It’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women’s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco—a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.

Andrea Lawlor’s debut novel offers a speculative history of early ’90s identity politics during the heyday of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

Author Myriam Gurba’s Mean (Coffee House Press) is a multifaceted take on the coming of age memoir:

True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly serious

Keeping On Keeping On (FSG), writer Alan Bennett’s latest collection, offers insight into the beloved playwright’s personal life and private musing:

Alan Bennett’s third collection of prose, Keeping On Keeping On, follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful Writing Home and Untold Stories. Bringing together the hilarious, revealing, and lucidly intelligent writing of one of England’s best-known literary figures, Keeping On Keeping On contains Bennett’s diaries from 2005 to 2015—with everything from his much celebrated essays to his irreverent comic pieces and reviews—reflecting on a decade that saw four major theater premieres and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. A chronicle of one of the most important literary careers of the twentieth century, Keeping On Keeping On is a classic history of a life in letters.

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