New in April: Tom Spanbauer, Emma Donoghue, Michael Nava, Bernardine Evaristo, and Ron J. Suresha

Author: Edit Team

April 3, 2014

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

Beloved author Tom Spanbauer’s new book (his first in seven years), I Loved You More, is being released this month by Hawthorne Press. The book maps the emotional minefield of love and friendship between a group of writers.

From Hawthorne Press:

[….] At the heart of the book is a love triangle: two men, one woman, all of them writers. The first chapters are set in the mid–eighties in New York City. At Columbia, Ben forms a bond with his macho friend, Hank. Their bond is deep and ostensibly formed around their love of writing. But they soon find out their love is more than literary. As C.S Lewis says, friendship is homosexual. Hank is straight, though, on the Kinsey scale a zero, which means no men. Ben is a five, which means an occasional woman. But both are artists, and this affection between them is a force. How do you measure love?

The second part of the book, almost a decade later, takes place in Portland, Oregon. A now-ill Ben falls for Ruth, his writing student. Their affection, like Hank’s and Ben’s, begins with how the heart is laid bare on the written page. Affection grows into love, but it is not an equal love. Ruth provides the care and devotion Ben needs, but Ben’s just too broken, Ruth is one of his occasional women, and as Ben has found out with Hank, loving has its limits.

Ben and Ruth are in their uneasy second year when Hank visits Ben in Portland. On a whim, Ben introduces Hank to Ruth. And the real trouble starts.

Bestselling novelist Emma Donoghue’s new book, Frog Music (Little, Brown and Company) is a genre-jumping historical/mystery novel, that use a real life murder as a launching pad for an astute character study.

From the publisher:

Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heatwave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny’s murderer to justice – if he doesn’t track her down first.

The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women and damaged children. It’s the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts.

In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue’s lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boom town like no other.

This month, writer Bernardine Evaristo explores the life of a closeted West Indian man in her comedic new novel Mr. Loverman (Akashic Books).

From the publisher:

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he’s lived in Hackney, London, for years. A flamboyant, wise-cracking character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father, grandfather—and also secretly gay, lovers with his childhood friend, Morris.

His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away? With an abundance of laugh-out-loud humor and wit, Mr. Loverman explodes cultural myths and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.

This April, award-wining author Michael Nava returns with a historical-based work of fiction, The City of Palaces (University of Wisconsin Press). The novel charts the history of a singular Mexican family as their lives are shaped by the turbulent political and cultural forces that surround them.

From publisher:

In the decades before the Revolution, Mexico was governed by a tiny elite that aped European culture, grew rich from European and American investment, and prized racial – meaning white – purity. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Mexicans, who were Indian or mestizo – of mixed Indian and Spanish blood – were politically disenfranchised and increasingly impoverished. Presiding over this authoritarian system was Don Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless and inscrutable President of the Republic. Don Porfirio’s official motto was Progreso y orden – progress and order – which he imposed with his unofficial one, pan o palo – bread or the stick. Beginning with his first presidential term in 1876, Díaz imposed an iron peace on Mexico with a mixture of seeming benevolence and actual terror.

It is against this backdrop that The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Sarmiento is an idealistic young doctor, only recently returned to Mexico from Europe and tortured by guilt for a crime he committed ten years earlier. Alicia Gavilán is the old maid daughter of an aristocratic family whose face was disfigured by a childhood bout of smallpox and who, as a result, has devoted herself to working with the city’s destitute. This unlikely pair – he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian –will marry and through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, José, we follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath.

April is National Poetry Month! What better way to celebrate the month then by picking up the new poetry collection from editor Ron J. Suresha, Hibernation, and Other Poems by Bear Bards (Bear Bones Books)?

About the collection:

[This] thoughtful, fun, and moving book features more than 100 poems by 40 esteemed authors, including David Bergman and Albert Skip Brushaber, whose homonymic, eponymous poems give this anthology its title, plus noted writers Alfred C. Corn, Jameson Currier, Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, Jack Fritscher, Daniel M. Jaffe, Raymond Luczak, Jeff Mann, Ron Mohring, Felice Picano, Jay Starre, Jim Stewart, Dan Stone, and Emanuel Xavier and many fine poems from other fine contributors from around the U.S. and Canada.

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

Fiction

The City of Palaces by Michael Nava, University of Wisconsin Press
Countrycide: Stories by L.A. Fields, Lethe Press
Frog Music by Emma Donoghue, Little, Brown and Company
I Loved You More by Tom Spanbauer, Hawthorne Press
The Medici Boy by John L’Heureux , Astor + Blue Editions
Mr. Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo, Akashic Books
Nochita by Dia Felix, City Lights/Sister Spit
Ruby by Cynthia Bond, Hogarth
The Rooms Are Filled by Jessica Vealitzek, She Writes Press
Spheres of Disturbance by Amy Schutzer, Arktoi
The Summer Wasn’t Me by Jessica Verdi, Source Books
The Thief Taker by William Holden, Bold Strokes Book
Yabo by Alexis De Veaux, RedBone Press

Nonfiction

Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion edited by Ryan Conrad, AK Press
Forcing the Spring by Jo Becker, Penguin Press
Gender Failure by Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon, Arsenal Pulp Press
Judging the Boy Scouts of America: Gay Rights, Freedom of Association, and the Dale Case by Richard J. Ellis, University Press of Kansas
Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything by Robert Reilly, Ignatius Press
Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music by Nadine Hubbs, University of California Press
Same-Sex Marriage in the United States The Road to the Supreme Court and Beyond by Jason Pierceson, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers by Anne Balay, The University of North Carolina Press

LGBT Studies

After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba by Noelle M. Stout, Duke University Press
Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence by Allan Johnson, Palgrave Macmillan
Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive by Alana Kumbier, Litwin Books
French Queer Cinema by Nick Rees-Robert, Edinburgh University Press
Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders by Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff, University of Hawaii Press
Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (Sexuality Studies) by Lynette J Chua, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Slouching Towards Gaytheism: Christianity and Queer Survival in America by W. C. Harris, State University of New York Press
Transgender Persons and the Law by Ally Windsor Howell, American Bar Association

Romance

The Complete Package by Ann Roberts, Bella Books
Hypnotizing Chickens by Julia Watt, Bella Books
It’s Complicated by LA Witt, Riptide Press
Poster Boy by Anne Tenino, Riptide Press
Second to None by L.T. Marie, Bold Strokes Books
Slam by J.L. Merow, Samhain Publishing
Straight Shooter by Heidi Belleau, Riptide Press
Seneca Falls by Jesse J. Thomas, Bold Strokes Books
Timeless by Rachel Spangler, Bold Strokes Books

Erotica

Bound to be a Groom by Megan Mulry, Riptide Press
Erotica by Brian Centrone, New Lit Salon Press
Skin by Kevin Smith, Lethe Press
Speakeasy by MJ Williamz, Bold Stroke Books
Uncommon Romance: Three Erotic Novellas by Jove Belle, Bold Strokes Books
Whipping Boys: Gay S/M Erotica by Winston Gieseke, Bruno Gmunder Verlag Gmbh

Speculative Fiction

The Balance by Neal Wooten, Bold Strokes Books
The Flesh Cartel, #15: Twenty-Five by Rachel Haimowitz and Heidi Belleau, Riptide Press
A Kingdom Lost by Barbara Ann Wright, Bold Strokes Books
Kryos by Heather Stuyvesant and Idun Mars, Bold Strokes Books
Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites by Hal Duncan, Lethe Press
Spirit Sanguine by Lou Harper, Samhain Publishing