interior banner image

New in November: Nicola Griffith, Richard Blanco, Hilton Als, and Christopher Hennessy

New in November: Nicola Griffith, Richard Blanco, Hilton Als, and Christopher Hennessy

Author: Edit Team

November 4, 2013

November is upon us and so are a slew of new and noteworthy LGBT books.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing Hild, a new book by the Lambda Literary 2013 James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize honoree Nicola Griffith. Hild is a riveting historical novel that details the ascension of one of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages.

From the publisher:

In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king’s youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby.

But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world—of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing her surroundings closely and predicting what will happen next—that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.

Her uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the king’s seer. And she is indispensable—unless she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, for her family, for her loved ones, and for the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future.

Beacon Press is publishing For All of One Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey by Richard Blanco, an intimate memoir from the United States’s first openly gay Latino inaugural poet.

From Beacon Press:

For All of Us, One Today is a fluid, poetic memoir anchored by Richard Blanco’s experiences as the inaugural poet in 2013, and beyond. In this brief and evocative narrative, he shares for the first time his journey as a Latino immigrant and openly gay man discovering a new, emotional understanding of what it means to be an American. He tells the story of the call from the White House committee and all the exhilaration and upheaval of the days that followed. He reveals the inspiration and challenges behind the creation of the inaugural poem, “One Today,” as well as two other poems commissioned for the occasion (“Mother Country” and “What We Know of Country”), published here for the first time ever alongside translations of all three of those poems into his native Spanish. Finally, Blanco reflects on his life-changing role as a public voice since the inauguration, his spiritual embrace of Americans everywhere, and his vision for poetry’s new role in our nation’s consciousness. Like the inaugural poem itself, For All of Us, One Today speaks to what makes this country and its people great, marking a historic moment of hope and promise in our evolving American landscape.

Renowned author and cultural critic Hilton Als’s long delayed book, White Girls (McSweeney’s), is being released this month. Already hailed as one of the best books of the year, the collection is a panoramic, yet personal, reflection on race, gender, and American cultural history.

From the publisher:

White Girls, Hilton Als’s first book since “The Women” fourteen years ago, finds one ofThe New Yorker’s boldest cultural critics deftly weaving together his brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history. The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of “white girls,” as Als dubs them—an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks, Malcolm X and Flannery O’Connor. In pieces that hairpin between critique and meditation, fiction and non-fiction, high culture and low, the theoretical and the deeply personal, Als presents a stunning portrait of a writer by way of his subjects, and an invaluable guide to the culture of our time.

What do we talk about when we talk about poetry? In Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire (University of Wisconsin Press) poet Christopher Hennessy interviews some of the country’s most beloved gay poets and astutely examines the ways in which queerness can shape aesthetics:

From Walt Whitman forward, a century and a half of radical experimentation and bold speech by gay and lesbian poets has deeply influenced the American poetic voice. In Our Deep Gossip, Christopher Hennessy interviews eight gay men who are celebrated American poets and writers: Edward Field, John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Aaron Shurin, Dennis Cooper, Cyrus Cassells, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Kazim Ali. The interviews showcase the complex ways art and life intertwine, as the poets speak about their early lives, the friends and communities that shaped their work, the histories of gay writers before them, how sex and desire connect with artistic production, what coming out means to a writer, and much more.

While the conversations here cover almost every conceivable topic of interest to readers of poetry and poets themselves, the book is an especially important, poignant, far-reaching, and enduring document of what it means to be a gay artist in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America.

Tens across the board! Photographer Gerard H. Gaskin new book Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene (Duke University Press) provides a vivid pictorial examination of contemporary ball culture:

Gerard H. Gaskin’s radiant color and black-and-white photographs take us inside the culture of house balls, underground events where gay and transgender men and women, mostly African American and Latino, come together to see and be seen. At balls, high-spirited late-night pageants, members of particular “houses”—the House of Blahnik, the House of Xtravaganza—”walk,” competing for trophies in categories based on costume, attitude, dance moves, and “realness.” In this exuberant world of artistry and self-fashioning, people often marginalized for being who they are can flaunt and celebrate their most vibrant, spectacular selves.

From the quiet backstage, to the shimmering energies of the runway. to the electricity of the crowd, Gaskin’s photographs take us to the ball. Legendary, comprised of photos taken at events in the New York city area, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Washington, D.C., is a collaboration between Gaskin, a camera-laden outsider who has been attending balls for twenty years, and the house members who let him enter the intimate world of ball culture. In addition to an introduction by Deborah Willis, Legendary includes an essay, “The Queer Undercommons,” by Frank Roberts.

Also this month, expect new books from Radclyffe, Stacia Seaman, Perry N. Halkitis, and Mary Meriam.

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

 

 9781927428146

Fiction

 

 9780374230890

Nonfiction

LGBT Studies 

 

 

Romance

 

Erotica

 

Speculative Fiction

Mystery/Thiller

 

Bio/Memoir 


 978-1599540528

Poetry

 

 

Art/Graphic Novel

Related posts:

E. Lynn Harris: Life Visible
Dennis Cooper: Florid Mysteries
A Major Studio Teen Romance, Jacqueline Woodson's Book Deal, and More LGBTQ News
Edit Team photo

About: Edit Team

Subscribe to our newsletter