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New in June: John Waters, Kim Stolz, Lorrie Sprecher, Ariel Schrag, Michael Carroll, and Felice Picano

New in June: John Waters, Kim Stolz, Lorrie Sprecher, Ariel Schrag, Michael Carroll, and Felice Picano

Author: Edit Team

June 9, 2014

New month, new books! June is upon us and so are a slew of new and noteworthy LGBT books.

Who wouldn’t want to take a road trip with the king-of-camp John Waters? This month, readers get to join the writer and director on a hilarious cross-country trip in his new book Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

From Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

John Waters is putting his life on the line. Armed with wit, a pencil-thin mustache, and a cardboard sign that reads “I’m Not Psycho,” he hitchhikes across America from Baltimore to San Francisco, braving lonely roads and treacherous drivers. But who should we be more worried about, the delicate film director with genteel manners or the unsuspecting travelers transporting the Pope of Trash?

Before he leaves for this bizarre adventure, Waters fantasizes about the best and worst possible scenarios: a friendly drug dealer hands over piles of cash to finance films with no questions asked, a demolition-derby driver makes a filthy sexual request in the middle of a race, a gun-toting drunk terrorizes and holds him hostage, and a Kansas vice squad entraps and throws him in jail. So what really happens when this cult legend sticks out his thumb and faces the open road? His real-life rides include a gentle eighty-one-year-old farmer who is convinced Waters is a hobo, an indie band on tour, and the perverse filmmaker’s unexpected hero: a young, sandy-haired Republican in a Corvette.

Laced with subversive humor and warm intelligence, Carsick is an unforgettable vacation with a wickedly funny companion—and a celebration of America’s weird, astonishing, and generous citizenry

Is Internet-based connectivity making it harder for us to, well, connect? In the new memoir Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I’ll Never Do (Scribner), TV personality Kim Stolz candidly explores the pitfalls of the social networking revolution.

From the publisher:

Social media and technology have fundamentally altered the way we do business, couple and break up, develop friendships, and construct our identities and our notions of aspiration and fame. We make decisions about where we’ll go based on whether it’s Instagrammable. We don’t have friends, we have followers. For an entire generation, an experience not captured on social media might as well not have happened at all.

As someone whose identity has been forged by reality TV (as a contestant on America’s Next Top Model) and social media and mobile technology, Kim Stolz is deeply obsessed with the subject. She has a hard time putting her phone down. And yet she remembers what life was like before technology-induced ADD, before life had become a string of late-night texts, Snapchats, endless selfies, that sinking feeling you get when you realize you’ve hit reply all by mistake. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was once a time before we wasted a full hour emptily clicking through a semi-stranger’s vacation pictures on Facebook, a time before every ex, every meaningless fling was a mere click away.

Unfriending My Ex (And Other Things I’ll Never Do) is the first book to document the hilarity of the social media revolution from the inside; it chronicles a life filtered through our obsessive relationship with technology. The book is as eye-opening as it is entertaining as it proceeds through the various ways in which social media and mobile technology have generated empathy deficits and left us all with the attention spans of fruit flies…and the sad fact that in spite all of this, we find it impossible to switch our devices off.

In Little Reef and Other Stories (University of Wisconsin Press), writer Michael Carroll delves into the lives of contemporary characters who are stuck in a quagmire of ennui.

From the publisher:

From Key West to Maine, Michael Carroll’s debut collection of stories depicts the lives of characters who are no longer provincial but are not yet cosmopolitan. These women and their gay male friends are “B-listers” of a new, ironic, media-soaked culture. They live in a rich but increasingly divided America, a weirdly paradoxical country increasingly accepting of gay marriage but still marked by prejudice, religious strictures, and swaths of poverty and hopelessness

In the novel Pissing in the River (Feminist Press), author Lorrie Sprecher provides a vivid cultural snapshot of the post-punk era–simultaneously exploring both the personal and the political.

From the publisher:

Amanda moves to London with nothing but her guitar and her collection of punk music as the soundtrack to her every step. With the company of a few friendly voices in her head, she looks for—and finds—a best friend and new lover. She forms a band, Lesbian Raincoat, and completely rewrites the story of her life.

In this irreverently funny yet profound novel, Amanda risks deportation, recalls the fervor of AIDS activism in the US, connects to the class struggle of punk, and finds redemption in love. But she also must confront her own mental illness, her lover’s rape, and the violence of post-9/11 politics. Pissing in a River captures the glee and turbulence of surviving the cacophony of modern life.

Sibling Rivalry Press is releasing Prime: Poetry & Conversation, a lively collection of verse and dialogue between poets Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams and L. Lamar Wilson.

About the collection:

Prime: Poetry & Conversation is a first-of-its-kind document of poetry and ongoing conversation in the black, queer literary community. Sparked into existence by a Best American Poetry blog from Jericho Brown in which he singled out some of the most exciting young, black, and gay men writing today, Prime features poems by and dialogue between poets Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams, and L. Lamar Wilson. Jericho Brown provides the introduction for this collection, which is proudly published by Sibling Rivalry Press.

This month also sees the release of a new novel from Ariel Schrag, a new short story collection edited by Steve Berman, and a new memoir from Felice Picano.

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

 

 9781927428146

Fiction

 

9780814725467  9780374230890

Nonfiction

 

 LGBT Studies

 

 

 9781594933783

Romance

 

Erotica

 

 9781619291669

Speculative Fiction

 

Mystery/Thiller

 

 9781451661958

Bio/Memoir

 

 978-1599540528

Poetry

 

ART/GRAPHIC NOVELS

 

 

Related posts:

Queer Stages: New Initiatives in LGBTQ Theatre
Remembering Writer and Teacher Christina Crosby
'Hero' author Perry Moore dies
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