June is Pride Month, and there’s no better way to celebrate it than picking up one of our many books delving into LGBTQIA+ topics or written by LGBTQIA+ authors. Throughout this month, you can also enjoy these books and thousands more for 50% off during our Summer Reading Sale until July 15.
Soldier of Change by Stephen Snyder-Hill
[Soldier of Change] is an important story to read if you need to know where LGBT rights have been and whose brought them forward. It’s also one to enjoy if you want an informal, easy-to-like memoir. Even in this post-DADT time, Soldier of Change is a book to call for.
Terri Schlichenmeyer, Washington Blade
Transmovimientos edited by Ellie D. Hernández, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Magda García
A critical and timely set of subjects, especially given the rampant and castigating racism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia against the Latinx LGBTQI communities in the United States and throughout other countries at this time. The coeditors have brought together important, established, and emerging voices in an exciting manner.
Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz, author of Wild Tongues: Transnational Mexican Popular Culture
Hybrid Anxieties by C. L. Quinan
In this fascinating study Quinan analyzes fictions that plumb anxieties about hybridity—racial, sexual, gendered, and national—in the wake of the French-Algerian war. Hybrid Anxieties offers a brilliant and much-needed synthesis of queer theory, postcolonial studies, and deconstruction in a French and Algerian context.
Kadji Amin, author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History
Nepantla Squared by Linda Heidenreich
This queer Chicanx history project is everything such a project should be: a brilliant analysis with fresh and illuminating ideas and approaches, an unearthing of hidden trans stories, and an intellectual exploration of trans mestiz@ identity.
Norma E. Cantú, Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University
Sacrament of Bodies by Romeo Oriogun
It is inevitable that Sacrament of Bodies will become an influential work in contemporary poetry from Africa, especially with its centering of queer people. In Oriogun’s journey, it feels like a book he needed to write. Where a weaker hand might falter under the sensitivity of such a subject, his is assured—skills he has been traversing beautifully into prose nonfiction.
Emmanuel Esomnofu, Open Country
Salvific Manhood by Ernest L. Gibson III
The author finds an edifying connection between the sanctuary the black church offered and the potential space of intimacy the body offered. Gibson engages in close readings of five seismic novels in the Baldwin canon, masterfully walking readers through the journey of John’s forgotten birthday in Go Tell It on the Mountain and the streets of David’s Paris in Giovanni’s Room. This excellent study may interest those studying religion as well those in the disciplines of literature and cultural studies.
A. P. Pennino, Choice
Gothic Queer Culture by Laura Westengard
The real reason why Gothic Queer Culture is impossible to put down is that in addition to being meticulously argued, it is celebratory. In the spirit of Lady Gaga’s gleefully bloody and irreverent meat dress, with which Westengard opens the book, Gothic Queer Culture gracefully sidesteps moralizing judgements of the artists and writers whose challenging work it examines, choosing instead to emphasize the affirmative power of reveling in the lurid grey areas that queer artists and their work so often occupy.
Elizabeth Simins, Art Discourse
Terrorizing Gender by Mia Fischer
Terrorizing Gender ultimately asks media scholars to move beyond reductive debates over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ representation, instead pointing to the more insidious ways in which visibility as a directive both obscures more entrenched struggles in marginalized communities as well as contributes directly to increased political violence toward those who are most at risk.
Erique Zhang, International Journal of Communication
Queer Embodiment by Hil Malatino
Queer Embodiment joins a small shelf of important work in critical intersex studies. In beautifully written, lucidly argued, theoretically sharp, and emotionally evocative prose, Malatino articulates queer and trans theory with continental philosophy and a racially conscious decolonial perspective to produce a teratologically sublime work of scholarship on bodies that challenge our culture’s belief in biologically based binary genders.
Susan Stryker, founding coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
Queering Kansas City Jazz by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone
This narrative rights the historical record and adds nuance to our understanding of the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and space in Jazz Age Kansas City.
Kathleen A. Kelly, Kansas History
What Becomes You by Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz
Aaron Raz Link’s story is a vital contribution to the oeuvre of transgender literature. . . . It is careful and tender while simultaneously confrontational and challenging.
Julie R. Enszer, Lambda Book Report
Making My Pitch by Ila Jane Borders with Jean Hastings Ardell
An inspiring and important account, told with grace and self-awareness that will appeal to baseball and sports fans along with readers interested in LGBTQ memoirs.
Janet Davis, Library Journal
Double-Edged Sword by Bart Paul
Interjecting his opinions clearly while letting readers judge Franklin’s motives for themselves, Paul presents an absorbing biography of a twentieth century original, a confidante, lover, narcissist, and bravura performer whose capacity for suffering captured one of America’s greatest literary minds.
Publishers Weekly
Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich
[Body Geographic is] a stunningly original memoir that explores a woman’s connection to the real and imagined Midwestern landscapes that have defined her life.
Kirkus starred review
Cora Du Bois by Susan C. Seymour
Seymour’s meticulously researched biography on Cora Du Bois skillfully weaves together threads from a myriad of often obscure, intensely personal documents, to produce a magnificent reconstruction of the life and personality of this major anthropological figure.”
Carol Mukhopadhyay, Association for Feminist Anthropology
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