New in January: Armistead Maupin, Melissa Pritchard, Sean Strub, Charles Stephens, Steven G. Fullwood, and Amy Villarejo

Author: Edit Team

January 1, 2014

New year! New books! January is upon us and so are a slew of new and noteworthy LGBT books.

Beloved writer Armistead Maupin is releasing The Days of Anna Madrigal (HarperCollins), the ninth novel in his bestselling “Tales of the City” series.

From the publisher:

The Days of Anna Madrigal, the suspenseful, comic, and touching ninth novel in Armistead Maupin’s bestselling “Tales of the City” series, follows one of modern literature’s most unforgettable and enduring characters—Anna Madrigal, the legendary transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane—as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her past.

Now ninety-two, and committed to the notion of “leaving like a lady,” Mrs. Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her “logical family” in San Francisco: her devoted young caretaker Jake Greenleaf; her former tenant Brian Hawkins and his daughter Shawna; and Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, who have known and loved Anna for nearly four decades.

Some members of Anna’s family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where 60,000 revelers gather to construct a city designed to last only one week. Anna herself has another destination in mind: a lonely stretch of road outside of Winnemucca where the 16-year-old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse he called home. With Brian and his beat-up RV, she journeys into the dusty troubled heart of her Depression childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams and attend to unfinished business she has long avoided.

In her new book Palmerino (Bellevue Literary Press), Melissa Pritchard offers a fictional snapshot of the 19th century writer and Aesthetic Movement proponent Violet Paget a.k.a. Vernon Lee.

From the publisher:

Welcome to Palmerino, the British enclave in rural Italy where Violet Paget, known to the world by her pen name and male persona, Vernon Lee, held court. In imagining the real life of this brilliant, lesbian polymath known for her chilling supernatural stories, Pritchard creates a multilayered tale in which the dead writer inhabits the heart and mind of her lonely, modern-day biographer.

Positing the art of biography as an act of resurrection and possession, this novel brings to life a vividly detailed, subtly erotic tale about secret loves and the fascinating artists and intellectuals—Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Robert Browning, Bernard Berenson—who challenged and inspired each other during an age of repression

This month, the work of activist and author Joseph Beam is thoughtfully revisited in the new anthology Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call (Vintage Entity Press), edited by Charles Stephens & Steven G. Fullwood.

From Vintage Entity Press:

Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call was born out of a series of conversations, panel discussions, debates, and dinners with friends, colleagues and comrades over the years, assessing the impact and legacy of Joseph Beam and the writers of the In the Life generation. This anthology aims to bring that dazzling history of the black gay arts movement of the 1980s front and center to contemporary Black gay life. Black Gay Genius consists of writers, scholars, and activists responding to In the Life and the influence of Joseph Beam. This text celebrates with those that remember and know, and introduces to the ones that don’t, to this important, unstudied literary legacy.

Scribner is a releasing a new memoir from activist Sean Strub, Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival. The memoir is a detailed accounting of Strub’s personal struggles and triumphs during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

From Scribner:

As a politics-obsessed Georgetown freshman, Sean Strub arrived in Washington, D.C., from Iowa in 1976, with a plum part-time job running a Senate elevator in the U.S. Capitol. He also harbored a terrifying secret: his attraction to men. As Strub explored the capital’s political and social circles, he discovered a parallel world where powerful men lived double lives shrouded in shame.

When the AIDS epidemic hit in the early 1980s, Strub was living in New York and soon found himself attending “more funerals than birthday parties.” Scared and angry, he turned to radical activism to combat discrimination and demand research. Strub takes readers through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP, the activist organization that transformed a stigmatized cause into one of the defining political movements of our time.

From the New York of Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s Factory to the intersection of politics and burgeoning LGBT and AIDS movements, Strub’s story crackles with history. He recounts his role in shocking AIDS demonstrations at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the home of U.S. Sen­ator Jesse Helms. Body Counts is a vivid portrait of a tumultuous era, with an astonishing cast of characters, including Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Keith Haring, Bill Clinton, and Yoko Ono.

By the time a new class of drugs transformed the epidemic in 1996, Strub was emaciated and covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, the scarlet letter of AIDS. He was among the fortunate who returned, Lazarus-like, from the brink of death.

How has LGBT representation on TV changed over time? In Ethereal Queer (Duke University Press), Amy Villarejo examines the history of TV representation through a specifically queer lens.

In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s. Challenging the widespread view that LGBT characters did not make a sustained appearance on television until the 1980s, she draws on innovative readings of TV shows and network archives to reveal queer television’s lengthy, rich, and varied history. Villarejo goes beyond concerns about representational accuracy. She tracks how changing depictions of queer life, in programs from Our Miss Brooks to The L Word, relate to transformations in business models and technologies, including modes of delivery and reception such as cable, digital video recording, and online streaming. In so doing, she provides a bold new way to understand the history of television.

Why not start the New Year with a new romance? This month sees the release of  new romance titles from Robbi McCoy, Julie Cannon, and Georgia Beers.

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

 

Fiction

• The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin, HarperCollins
  
• Fingerless by Ian D. Arbuckle, Pelekinesis
• Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction edited by Timothy J. Lambert and R. D. Cochrane, Cleis Press
• Palmerino by Melissa Pritchard, Bellevue Literary Press
• Revolutionary by Alex Myers, Simon & Schuster
• A Room in Chelsea Square (reprint) by Michael Nelson, Valancourt Books
• The Story Thief  by Shari McNally, Bella Books 
• Water Music by Georgette Gouveia, River Grove Books

 

Nonfiction

• 7th Time Lucky: A Gay Man’s Determination to Become a Parent by Dave Rigby, Book Guild Ltd
• Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call edited by Charles Stephens & Steven G. Fullwood, Vintage Entity Press
• The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History by Karel Plessini, University of Wisconsin Press
• Misogyny Re-loaded by Abigail Bray, Spinifex Press
• Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk  by Melinda Chateauvert, Beacon Press
• The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic by Richard Godbeer, Johns Hopkins University Press
• Why Europe Is Lesbian and Gay Friendly (and Why America Never Will Be) by Angelia R. Wilson, State University of New York Press

 LGBT Studies

• Ethereal Queer  by Amy Villarejo, Duke University Press
  
• Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families by Shelley M. Park, State University of New York Press
• Queer Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Narrative Representations (Tauris World Cinema) by Gustavo Subero, I. B. Tauris
• Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture by Gilad Padva, Palgrave Macmillan
• Sex, or the Unbearable (Theory Q) by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Duke University Press

 

Romance

• The Beginning of Us by Sarah Brooks, Riptide Press
• Color of Grace by A.M Arthur, Samhain Publishing
• The Farmer’s Daughter by Robbi McCoy, Bella Books
• A Minor Inconvenience by Susan Granger, Samhain Publishing
• Smoke and Fire by Julie Cannon, Bold Strokes Books
• Snow Globe by Georgia Beers, Brisk Press

 

Erotica

• Best Gay Erotica 2014 edited by by Larry Duplechan, Cleis Press
• The Flesh Cartel #13: The House Always Wins by Heidi Belleau and Rachel Haimowitz, Riptide Press

 

Speculative Fiction

• Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones, Bella Books
• Static by L.A. Witt, Riptide Publishing
• A Matter of Degrees by Alex Marcoux, Bella Books
• Lying with Scorpions by Aleksandr Voinov, Riptide Press
• The Quickening: Book Two of the Sisters of Spirits Trilogy by Yvonne Heidt, Bold Strokes Books
• Windigo Thrall by Cate Culpepper, Bold Strokes Books

 

Mystery/Thiller

• Agnes by Jaime Maddox, Bold Strokes Books
• Death Came Calling by Donald Webb, Bold Strokes Books
• Dirty Deeds by SE Jakes, Riptide Press
• Love in the Shadows by Dylan Madrid, Bold Strokes Books

 

Bio/Memoir

• Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub, Scribner
• Call Me Burroughs by Barry Miles, Twelve Books
• The End of the Sherry by Bruce Berger, Pleasure Boat Studio

 

Poetry

• The Poetry of Derek Walcott edited by Glyn Maxwell, Farrarr, Straus and Giroux
• Living as a Lesbian (reprint) by Cheryl Clarke, Midsummer Night Press/Sinister Wisdom