I’ve been a Black woman for almost 40 years, and I’ve been writing about Black women almost as long. I grew up reading children’s books with brown faces and great stories, but the authors never interested me. Until I read Peaches, I had no idea that wholly relatable authors and stories existed. I began seeking them out. From authors like Virginia Hamilton and James Baldwin to Langston Hughes and even Donald Goines, I found stories of people with lives I recognized. I am far from an expert on Black literature. I am just grateful that during my formative years, I was exposed to some great Black authors.
An eclectic group of people regularly visit Bailey’s Cafe.
The owner believes the cafe is magical and he tells the stories of each of its patrons finding their way to a local boarding house and ultimately finding themselves. From the opening tale of the cafe owner to Sadie, and Eve, and Jessie Bell, and others, the stories are excellently told, each in a distinct voice.
Author Gloria Naylor has explained that the themes are relating to female sexuality and femaleness. I will note there are some pretty rough scenes, but the characters and their stories are unforgettable.
A “moving and memorable” novel about a cafe where everyone has a story to tell from the award-winning author of The Women of Brewster Place (The Boston Globe).
In post–World War II Brooklyn, on a quiet backstreet, there’s a little place that draws people from all over—not for the food, and definitely not for the coffee. An in-between place that’s only there when you need it, Bailey’s Cafe is a crossroads where patrons stay for a while before making a choice: Move on or check out?
In this novel, National Book Award–winning author Gloria Naylor’s expertly crafted characters experience a…
I can’t resist a queer femme YA story, and this one hit me so hard that I cried in joy and heartbreak.
Young lovers separated by culture and family made a Shakespearean drama that gripped me to the last word.
The world of arranged marriages, family honor, and homophobia reminded me of personal stories from friends in Vancouver. It echoed the fights that many queer people face coming out to family and being their true selves.
A timely and honest coming-of-age story that explores the complicated relationship between identity, culture, family, and love.
Seventeen-year-old Rukhsana Ali tries her hardest to live up to her conservative Muslim parents' expectations, but lately she's finding that impossible to do. She rolls her eyes when they blatantly favour her brother and saves her crop tops and makeup for parties her parents don't know about.
If she can just hold out another few months, Rukhsana will be out of her familial home and away from her parents' ever-watchful eyes at Caltech, a place where she thinks she can finally be herself.…
A century of prejudice is laid bare in these books, but within their pages are countless subtle and overt ways that gay Australian men have given homophobes the big middle finger. We may not always have thrived, but through resistance, migration, verbal agility, notoriety, and sheer resilience, collectively we have conquered. I stand on enormous shoulders at a time when queer writing is proliferating on an inevitable tide of equality that has risen across my lifetime in this country. My selections encompass first nations and migrant stories, some of the pioneers of our gay literature, and ‘outside’ voices bravely looking in to discern us with dignity.
Danny Kelly is a living, breathing gay Greek protagonist, and the choices this driven young competitive swimmer faces about loving relationships—while he’s in the pursuit of athletic prowess—are written with a resounding ring of truth. Tsiolkas’ visceral sex scenes, underpinned by gripping descriptions of the desires behind the mechanics, speak to much more than the act itself. They go to the heart of identity in a novel with so many layers of self-definition: the migrant, the working class hero, the quintessential male, the stereotypical gay, the success story, and the abject failure. That Danny escapes his ambition alive is a miracle, and it has everything to do with digging deep and staring down expectations.
From the international bestselling and Booker Prize nominated author of The Slap comes a blazingly brilliant new novel.
Longlisted for the 2014 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
You lose everything. In front of everyone. Where do you go from here?
Daniel Kelly, a talented young swimmer, has one chance to escape his working-class upbringing. His astonishing ability in the pool should drive him to fame and fortune, as well as his revenge on the rich boys at the private school to which he has won a sports scholarship. Everything Danny has ever done, every sacrifice his family has ever made, has…
As both an author and a teacher, I’ve been using Howard Zinn’s iconic book for over 20 years. I have found it to be an effective counterweight to more orthodox texts, as well as a credible platform for stimulating discussion. In writing my own “guide” to U.S. history, I always kept Zinn in mind. While we may not always agree, the dissonance is something I’m certain Howard Zinn would appreciate. He was unafraid to "engage" with his subject matter and his readers. This is an inspiration.
What Zinn achieved in highlighting leftist history and labor history, Kirchick achieves in highlighting gay history and its proximity to the corridors of political power in Washington.
The struggles of gay Americans to gain recognition by the U.S. government as equal to their fellow citizens and commensurate with their talents is a fascinating story, and Kirchick more than does it justice.
Like Zinn’s People’s History, this book carefully reexamines the conventional understanding of our nation’s history as a whole. It is both ambitious and particular.
For decades, the spectre of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret "too loathsome to mention" held enormous, terrifying power.
Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is…
Historical fantasy is my favorite genre, combining my twin passions of history and mythology/folklore. I especially like to read about unfamiliar times, places, identities, and cultures. What I love best about the fantastical is that it allows me to think and write about deep matters symbolically. As someone still discovering my asexuality in middle age, I’ve always identified best with coming-of-age stories, which is why there are so many young protagonists in both my reading and my writing.
I studied Dracula as a university student, so I love the way this book turns the latent homophobia, misogyny, and racism on its head by putting the “Brides of Dracula” and persecuted East European Traveller community center stage and giving us a tender, sapphic love story.
It’s set in the fifteenth-century Romania of Vlad The Impaler—here called the Dragon—when people believed in lele (forest spirits) and strigoi (undead). For me, the most memorable setting is Boyar Valcar’s castle, where twin sisters Lil and Kizzy are taken as slaves. The black-and-red uniforms, the cliff-edge pool, and the unforgettable incident with the bite wine put even the Dragon’s strigoi court in the shade.
Gothic, intoxicating, feminist, darkly provoking and deeply romantic - this is the breathtakingly imagined untold story of the brides of Dracula, by bestselling author Kiran Millwood Hargrave in her much-anticipated YA debut.
'A Chilling and breathlessly paced thriller... Feminism, spirituality, legend and desire are beautifully interwoven in this mesmerising tale of independence and resistance' - The Daily Mail
They say the thirst of blood is like a madness - they must sate it. Even with their own kin.
On the eve of her divining, the day she'll discover her fate, seventeen-year-old Lil and her twin sister Kizzy are captured and…
I came to writing later in life – at age forty-two. Writing was something I had always wanted to do. Still, it wasn’t until I experienced something that was in some ways extraordinary and in some ways prevalent–the inadequate treatment of maternal mental health and maternal health in general–that I felt my story had to be told. While maternal mental illnesses are expected, there is a shortage of books on the topic. When I was deep inside my illness, I searched for any story that might mirror my own and had difficulty finding one. With this list, I hope to help anyone who needs a hand to reach out to.
This book will be among the best books about motherhood and madness and the best books I have ever read. A beautiful and heartbreaking memoir of a young mom who suffered from post-partum psychosis, it’s the one book that most closely mirrors my own struggles.
Cho delicately explores not only her devastating experience but also the guilt and shame surrounding a pregnancy that doesn’t look like how it does in the movies and doesn’t turn out the way we had anticipated. I rarely reread books, but I’ve reached for this book many times; the pages are well-worn with love and admiration.
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'A beautifully written account of postpartum psychosis, and the ties, blessings and burdens of family' - NIGELLA LAWSON
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE
*Observer Book of the Week*
*A Guardian Memoir of the Year 2020*
*Harper's Bazaar 10 Women Who Will Shape What You Watch, See and Read in 2020*
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'Striking and original' - Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Times
'Completely devastating. Completely heartbreaking' - Daisy Johnson
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Catherine Cho's son was three months old when she and her husband left home to introduce him to their families.
Catherine…
A century of prejudice is laid bare in these books, but within their pages are countless subtle and overt ways that gay Australian men have given homophobes the big middle finger. We may not always have thrived, but through resistance, migration, verbal agility, notoriety, and sheer resilience, collectively we have conquered. I stand on enormous shoulders at a time when queer writing is proliferating on an inevitable tide of equality that has risen across my lifetime in this country. My selections encompass first nations and migrant stories, some of the pioneers of our gay literature, and ‘outside’ voices bravely looking in to discern us with dignity.
This is a searing memoir about siblings—Annabet and Anders—who grew up in an abusive household in a privileged Sydney suburb; but it is also the author’s search for the reasons behind her gay brother’s suicide. Anders Ousback became an accomplished restaurateur and potter, yet Annabet explores how despite this success, he never really outran his demons. She courageously searches for their source, using his surviving journal as clues, and what she finds throws up an incomplete and terrifying picture of a young gay Australian boy faced with the ‘rules’ of gender and sexual politics in postwar Sydney, where gay men were expected to pretend to survive. The real red herring in this story is unforgettable.
Annabet and her younger brother Anders grew up in idyllic surrounds on the lower north shore of Sydney in the 1950s. They lived in the original boatshed on Balmoral Beach and had an Australian mother and an imposing Swedish Naval captain for a father. However, nothing was as it seemed and Annabet and Anders were exposed to harsh, often irrational and frequently violent discipline from both parents, which left them emotionally unbalanced and starved of affection. In a time where domestic violence was never discussed within the family let alone outside it, Annabet and Anders struggled to keep their spirits…
I’ve struggled with mental health for most of my life, as have family members and friends I love. It’s extremely important to me that we normalize discussions of mental health so that we can find the best solutions. Anxiety and depression have been major themes in all of the young adult novels I’ve written; it’s my little way of furthering these conversations with the people who need them. I hope you’ll find these suggestions relatable, enjoyable, and question-inducing!
Author Bill Konigsberg has always pulled me in with his entertaining, well-written, and deep stories. In The Music of What Happens, Max and Jordan bond over their effort to save a 1980s-era food truck to help Jordan’s family stay afloat. Jordan’s secret, though, is that his mom’s mental health is spiraling out of control, and he carries the burden of being the only person able to hold everything together—financially and emotionally. I fell hard for Max and Jordan’s chemistry as well as for Jordan’s struggle of helping his mother through her mental health struggles.
From the award-winning author of Openly Straight, a story about two teens falling in love over a summer that throws everything possible to keep them apart.
* "Konigsberg demonstrates once again why he is one of the major voices in LGBTQ literature." -- Booklist, starred reviewMax: Chill. Sports. Video games. Gay and not a big deal, not to him, not to his mom, not to his buddies. And a secret: An encounter with an older kid that makes it hard to breathe, one that he doesn't want to think about, ever.Jordan: The opposite of chill. Poetry. His "wives" and the…
I’ve been a football fan since childhood. I grew up in rural Norfolk, supporting my local club, Norwich City. Even from an early age, though, I realized that it wasn’t just the game itself that fascinated me but also the behavior and passion of the fans. However, as I grew older and became more socially and politically aware, I came to realize that many of society’s deep-rooted problems, such as racism, homophobia, and misogyny, manifested themselves in football and often went unchallenged. Researching them seemed the best way to learn more about them and then challenge them.
I found this an enlightening read about an issue that I thought I knew well. Football has made significant progress in highlighting and tackling bigotry and discrimination in the game over the last 30 years or so.
However, this edited volume reminds us that there is still a long way to go. It’s an academic work that contains chapters covering many aspects of hate crime and how they manifest themselves on matchdays, in the boardroom, and online.
I learned a lot from this volume, and I feel it should be compulsory reading for anyone responsible for running the contemporary game.
Rates of hate crime within football have been increasing, despite the visibility of anti-racist actions such as 'taking the knee'. With a unique collection of testimonies, this book shows that hostility is a daily occurrence for some professional football players, ranging from online threats to physical intimidation and violence at football matches. Bringing a range of perspectives to this widespread problem, leading academics, practitioners and policy makers shed light on the best strategies to tackle racism, homophobia, transphobia and misogyny in football.
I chose the ‘Best’ title with trepidation: there are many sorts of aces and reading tastes will differ. I’m a cis-gender female, sex averse, verging on sex-repulsed. So, why M/M? Firstly, because reading about other females is too much like being involved myself. Secondly, because I’m het-romantic so I like my MCs to be male. And sex? I can take sex on the page as long as it isn’t gratuitous; it must be meaningful. I’ve chosen five very different books, but they all have gay protagonists and they meet my ace-based needs. In case it’s an issue, I’ve commented on the flame count.
A tale of three American athletes and their coach, all gay, and told from the POV of the coach. Included because, to me, it is a piece of queer fiction history. It was published in the seventies pre the nationwide legalisation of gay sex in the United States. Gay friends have told me how important it was for them to read The Front Runner back then. It’s all about the validation that arises from seeing people like oneself in print, as aces know. There’s nothing on the page to worry aces. The only worrying thing is that sportspeople still have homophobia to contend with.