|
|
LGBTQIA+ Book Club in July
|
|
|
Speak no evil
by Uzodinma Iweala
An Ivy League-bound star athlete from a prestigious private school in Washington, D.C., and his best friend, the daughter of prominent government insiders, struggle with brutal responses to the young man's sexual orientation before finding themselves speeding toward a violent and senseless future.
|
|
|
Thelma /
A shy young student leaves her small town and religious family to study at a university in Oslo, but once on campus she experiences what appears to be a violent, unexpected seizure. Overwhelmed by the increasing intensity of the mystifying episodes and her powerful feelings for a beautiful classmate, Thelma struggles to control her supernatural abilities.
|
|
|
Annihilation
A biologist signs up for a dangerous, secret expedition where the laws of nature don't apply.
|
|
|
Love, Simon
Everyone deserves a great love story. But for Simon it's complicated: no-one knows he's gay and he doesn't know who the anonymous classmate is that he's fallen for online. Resolving both issues proves hilarious, scary and life-changing.
|
|
|
Blockers
When three parents discover their daughters pact to lose their virginity at prom, they launch a covert one-night operation to stop the teens from sealing the deal.
|
|
|
So lucky
by Nicola Griffith
From the author of Hild, a fierce and urgent autobiographical novel about a woman facing down a formidable foe.
So Lucky is the sharp, surprising new novel by Nicola Griffith—the profoundly personal and emphatically political story of a confident woman forced to confront an unnerving new reality when in the space of a single week her wife leaves her and she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Mara Tagarelli is, professionally, the head of a multi-million-dollar AIDS foundation; personally, a committed martial artist. But her life has turned inside out like a sock. She can't rely on family, her body is letting her down, and friends and colleagues are turning away—they treat her like a victim. She needs to break that narrative: build her own community, learn new strengths, and fight. But what do you do when you find out that the story you’ve been told, the story you’ve told yourself, is not true? How can you fight if you can’t trust your body? Who can you rely on if those around you don’t have your best interests at heart, and the systems designed to help do more harm than good? Mara makes a decision, and acts, but her actions unleash monsters aimed squarely at the heart of her new community.
This is fiction from the front lines, incandescent and urgent, a narrative juggernaut that rips through sentiment to expose the savagery of America’s treatment of the disabled and chronically ill. But So Lucky also blazes with hope and a ferocious love of self, of the life that becomes possible when we stop believing lies.
|
|
|
My Ex-life
by Stephen McCauley
David Hedges is having an unusual midlife crisis. His boyfriend, Soren, has left him for an older man. His job is exasperating. As his life reaches new lows, his weight reaches new highs. Across the country, Julie Fiske isn't having a much better time herself. Carol, the woman (younger, of course) that Henry, her second husband, left her for, is downright likable--more likeable than Henry was. Her sullen teen daughter adamantly refuses to apply to college. Henry lays down an ultimatum--if Mandy doesn't start applying to college, she's going to come live with him and Carol. And then Mandy surprises Henry, and stuns Julie, by saying she's been working with David Hedges, Mom's first husband from long ago. It's a lie, but a good one, and, Julie thinks, not a bad idea. So when Julie calls David up out of the blue and asks if he'll help Mandy, he says of course. And when Mandy tells David he should come visit them and stay in one of their B&B rooms, he surprises everyone, including himself, by accepting. Soon David and Julie are living together and in many ways pick up exactly where they left off. But while the chemistry between them is still there, and they can finish each other's sentences, there's one conversation they never finished that is unavoidable.
|
|
|
Night Beast
by Ruth Joffre
A masterful collection from an important new voice in American fiction, Night Beast is a gorgeously written work of profound originality and vision. These doomed love stories and twisted fairytales explore the lives of women--particularly queer women and mothers--and reveal the monsters lurking in our daily lives: the madness, isolation, betrayals, and regrets that arise as we seek human connection.
Through this collection, readers are taken to places where the sun never sets, where cornfields rustle ominously and sleepwalkers prowl the night. In "Weekend," the lead actors of an avant-garde television show begin to confuse their characters' identities with their own; in "Go West, and Grow Up," a young girl living in a car with her mother is forced to shed her innocence too soon; and in "Safekeeping," a woman trapped inside a futuristic safehouse gradually unravels as she waits for her lover, who may never return.
With exquisite prose and transfixing imagery, Joffre explores worlds both strange and familiar, homing in on the darker side of humanity. Powerful, unsettling, and wildly imaginative, Night Beast is a mind-bending, genre-hopping debut, a provocative and uncommonly raw examination of relationships and sexuality, trauma and redemption, the meaning of family, and coming-of-age--and growing old--as an outsider.
|
|
|
The Princess Deception
by Nell Stark
When Sebastian, the Crown Prince of Belgium, overdoses on heroin shortly before he is set to launch Belgium’s campaign to host the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, his family manages to hush up the scandal. While the royals are debating how to proceed, Sebastian’s twin sister Viola decides to impersonate him to keep Belgium’s bid hopes alive.
Missy Duke is a freelance reporter covering Belgium’s World Cup bid. A former women’s soccer player whose career was sidelined by injury, she is now trying to break into the male-dominated sportscasting world. While in Belgium, she meets the imposter Sebastian and soon realizes that he is actually Viola. Sensing a big story in the making, Duke feigns ignorance and plays along with the charade.
Real sparks develop between the two women, but will the double deception doom this fairy-tale romance?
|
|
|
Queer City : Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day
by Peter Ackroyd
In Queer City, the acclaimed Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way–through the complete history and experiences of its gay and lesbian population. In Roman Londinium, the city was dotted with lupanaria (“wolf dens” or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels), and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks, and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music, and the horror of AIDS. Ackroyd reveals the hidden story of London, with its diversity, thrills, and energy, as well as its terrors, dangers, and risks, and in doing so, explains the origins of all English-speaking gay culture.
|
|
|
Super Late Bloomer : My Early Days in Transition
by Julia Kaye
A highly personal collection documenting the early months of artist Julia Kaye's gender transition. Instead of a traditional written diary, Julia Kaye has always turned to art as a means of self-reflection. So when she began her gender transition in 2016, she decided to use her popular webcomic, Up and Out, to process her journey and help others with similar struggles realize they weren't alone. Julia's poignant, relatable comics honestly depict her personal ups and downs while dealing with the various issues involved in transitioning--from struggling with self-acceptance and challenging societal expectations, to moments of self-love and joy. Super Late Bloomer both educates and inspires, as Julia faces her difficulties head-on and commits to being wholly, authentically who she was always meant to be.
|
|
|
Excuse Me While I Slip into Someone More Comfortable
by Eric Poole
In the great tradition of David Sedaris, David Rakoff, and Augusten Burroughs, memoirist Eric Poole recounts his quirky childhood years in utterly hilarious and painful detail.
In 1977, Eric Poole is a talented high school trumpet player with one working ear, the height-to-weight ratio of a hat rack, a series of annoyingly handsome bullies, and a mother irrationally devoted to Lemon Pledge. But who he wants to be is a star…ANY star. With equal parts imagination, flair, and delusion, Eric proceeds to emulate a series of his favorite celebrities, like Barry Manilow, Halston, Tommy Tune, and Shirley MacLaine, in an effort to become the man he’s meant to be—that is, anyone but himself.
As he moves through his late teens and early twenties in suburban St. Louis, he casts about for an appropriate outlet for his talents. Will he be a trumpet soloist? A triple-threat actor/singer/dancer? A fashion designer in gritty New York City?
Striving to become the son who can finally make his parents proud, Eric begins to suspect that discovering his personal and creative identities can only be accomplished by admitting who he really is. Picking up at the end of his first acclaimed memoir, Where’s My Wand?, Poole’s journey from self-delusion to acceptance is simultaneously hysterical, heartfelt, and inspiring.
|
|
|
Against memoir : complaints confessions + criticism
by Michelle Tea
Valerie Solanas, a lesbian gang, recovering alcoholics, and teenagers surviving at a shop: these are some of the figures populating America's borders. These essays include fights and failures and the uncovering of and documentation of these lives. Michelle Tea reveals herself through these stories.
|
|
|
Transforming : the Bible and the lives of transgender Christians
by Austen Hartke
In 2014, Time magazine announced that America had reached "the transgender tipping point," suggesting that transgender issues would become the next civil rights frontier. Years later, many people--even many LGBTQ allies--still lack understanding of gender identity and the transgender experience. Into this void, Austen Hartke offers a biblically based, educational, and affirming resource to shed light and wisdom on this modern gender landscape. Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians provides access into an underrepresented and misunderstood community and will change the way readers think about transgender people, faith, and the future of Christianity. By introducing transgender issues and language and providing stories of both biblical characters and real-life narratives from transgender Christians living today, Hartke helps readers visualize a more inclusive Christianity, equipping them with the confidence and tools to change both the church and the world.
|
|
|
Girl made of stars
by Ashley Herring Blake
When Mara's twin brother Owen is accused of rape by her friend Hannah, Mara is forced to confront her feelings about her family, her sense of right and wrong, a trauma from her past, and the future with her girlfriend, Charlie
|
|
|
White rabbit
by Caleb Roehrig
Rufus Holt has one night to prove his half-sister, April, innocent of murdering her boyfriend at a wild party--the very night his ex-boyfriend, Sebastian, shows up wanting to talk.
|
|
|
Out of the Blue
by Sophie Cameron
Ten days after Jaya Mackenzie's mum dies, angels start falling from the sky. Smashing down to earth at extraordinary speeds, wings bent, faces contorted, not a single one has survived. Hysteria mounting with every Being that drops, Jaya's father uproots the family to Edinburgh intent on catching one alive. But Jaya can't stand this obsession and, struggling to make sense of her mother's sudden death and her own role on that fateful day, she's determined to stay out of it. When her best friend disappears and her father's mania spirals, things hit rock bottom and it's at that moment something extraordinary happens: an angel lands right at Jaya's feet, and it's alive. Finally she is forced to acknowledge just how significant these celestial beings are. Set against the backdrop of the Edinburgh festival, Out of the Blue tackles questions of grief and guilt and fear over who we really are. But it's also about love and acceptance and finding your place in this world as angels drop out of another.
|
|
|
Love and other carnivorous plants
by Florence Gonsalves
Nineteen-year-old Danny returns home after a disastrous first semester of college as a pre-med student and struggles with first love, grief, identity, and self-destructive behavior.
|
|
|
Prince & Knight
by Daniel Haack
A prince and a knight in shining armor find true love in each other's embrace after fighting a dragon together.
|
|
|
If you are having trouble unsubscribing to this newsletter, please contact the Dayton Metro Library at
937.463.BOOK - 215 E. Third Street Dayton, OH 45402
|
|
|