New in March: Kaitlyn Greenidge, Saleem Haddad, Jim Downs, Sarah Schulman, and Augusten Burroughs

Author: Edit Team

March 10, 2016

March is here, bringing with it a slew of new books to enjoy.

This month, Algonquin Books is releasing We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge, a provocative examination of familial relationships and race.

From the publisher:

The Freeman family–Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie–have been invited to the Toneybee Institute in rural Massachusetts to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected for the experiment because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family.

Isolated in their new, nearly all-white community not just by their race but by their strange living situation, the Freemans come undone. And when Charlotte discovers the truth about the Institute’s history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past begin to invade the present.

The power of this novel resides in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s undeniable storytelling talents. What appears to be a story of mothers and daughters, of sisterhood put to the test, of adolescent love and grown-up misconduct, and of history’s long reach, becomes a provocative and compelling exploration of America’s failure to find a language to talk about race.

The personal and the political collide in the Saleem Haddad’s new novel Gaupa (Other Press):

Set over the course of twenty-four hours, [Guapa] follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, and trying to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and religious upheaval. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists, and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. Then one morning Rasa’s grandmother, the woman who raised him, catches them in bed together. The following day—the day leading up to Taymour’s wedding—Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar, Guapa, who has been arrested by the police. Ashamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, he roams the city’s slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country’s elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution.

Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity, as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family. As Rasa confronts the simultaneous collapse of political hope and his closest personal relationships, he is forced to discover the roots of his alienation and try to re-emerge into a society that may never accept him.

LGBT history gets a thorough reinvestigation in Jim Down’s Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books):

Despite the tremendous gains of the LGBT movement in recent years, the history of gay life in this country remains poorly understood. According to conventional wisdom, gay liberation started with the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969. The 1970s represented a moment of triumph—both political and sexual—before the AIDS crisis in the subsequent decade, which, in the view of many, exposed the problems inherent in the so-called “gay lifestyle.”

In Stand by Me, the acclaimed historian Jim Downs rewrites the history of gay life in the 1970s, arguing that the decade was about much more than sex and marching in the streets. Drawing on a vast trove of untapped records at LGBT community centers in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, Downs tells moving, revelatory stories of gay people who stood together—as friends, fellow believers, and colleagues—to create a sense of community among people who felt alienated from mainstream American life.

As Downs shows, gay people found one another in the Metropolitan Community Church, a nationwide gay religious group; in the pages of the Body Politic, a newspaper that encouraged its readers to think of their sexuality as a political identity; at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, the hub of gay literary life in New York City; and at theaters putting on “Gay American History,” a play that brought to the surface the enduring problem of gay oppression.

These and many other achievements would be largely forgotten after the arrival in the early 1980s of HIV/AIDS, which allowed critics to claim that sex was the defining feature of gay liberation. This reductive narrative set back the cause of gay rights and has shaped the identities of gay people for decades.

An essential act of historical recovery, Stand by Me shines a bright light on a triumphant moment, and will transform how we think about gay life in America from the 1970s into the present day.

This month sees the release of The Cosmopolitans (Feminist Press), a new novel from writer Sarah Schulman. The book provides an intimate snapshot of the troubled friendships among a group of 1950s New York City denizens:

Greenwich Village, 1958. Earl, a black, gay, actor, and Bette, a white secretary, have been neighbors for thirty years, forming a deep bond as refugees from small-minded hometowns. But when Hortense, a wealthy young actress with links to Bette’s painful past, shows up, Earl and Bette’s hard-won assumptions are shaken to the core. The Cosmopolitans is a beautifully written, page-turning novel about friendship, love, and revenge set in the disappeared world of 1950s New York.

Love is a strange complicated thing. Celebrated writer Augusten Burroughs recounts his own complicated romantic upheavals in Lust & Wonder: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press):

In chronicling the development and demise of the different relationships he’s had while living in New York, Augusten Burroughs examines what it means to be in love, what it means to be in lust, and what it means to be figuring it all out. With Augusten’s unique and singular observations and his own unabashed way of detailing both the horrific and the humorous, Lust & Wonder is an intimate and honest memoir that his legions of fans have been waiting for.

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

Fiction

Beijing Comrades by Bei Tong, Feminist Press
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman, Feminist Press
Dian’s Ghost by Justine Saracen, Bold Stokes Books
Gaupa by Saleem Haddad, Other Press
The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson

,University Press of Kentucky

I Met Someone by Bruce Wagner, Blue Rider Press
A Return to Arms by Sheree L. Greer, Bold Strokes Books
We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Saleem Haddad, Algonquin Books

Nonfiction

A Murder Over a Girl: Justice, Gender, Junior High by Ken Corbett, Henry Holt and Co.
Five Bells: Being LGBT in Australia by Jenny Papalexandris, The New Press
Gay Awareness: Discovering the Heart of the Father and the Mind of Christ on Sexuality by Landon Schott, Famous Publishing
LGBT Hampton Roads by Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Arcadia Publishing
The Making of the American Essay edited by John D’Agata, Graywolf Press
Making Out in the Mainstream: GLAAD and the Politics of Respectability by Vincent Doyle, McGill-Queens University Press
Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India by Jyoti Puri, Duke University Press
Spartacus International Gay Guide 2016 by Briand Bedford, Bruno Gmunder Verlag
Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation by Jim Downs, Basic Books

LGBT Studies

Constructive Feminism: Women’s Spaces and Women’s Rights in the American City by Daphne Spain, Cornell University Press
Gay American Novels: 1870-1970 by Drewey Wayne Gunn, McFarland Books
Health Care Disparities and the LGBT Population by Vickie L. Harvey and Teresa Heinz Housel, Lexington Books
Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis by Kevin J. Mumford, The University of North Carolina Press
Obstruction by Nick Salvato, Duke University Press
Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on Youtube by Dr. Tobias Raun, Ashgate Publishing Limited
Psychology and Gender Dysphoria: Feminist and Transgender Perspectives by Jemma Tosh, Routledge
Queer Youth, Suicide and Self-Harm: Troubled Subjects, Troubling Norms by E. McDermott and K. Roen, Palgrave Macmillan
Queer Wars by Dennis Altman and Jonathan Symons, Polity
Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies by Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley, NYU Press
Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus by Jonathan A. Allan, University of Regina Press
Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation, Sherry Wolf, Haymarket Books
Signs and Wonders: Theology After Modernity by Ellen T. Amour, Columbia University Press
Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain by Brian Lewis, Palgrave Macmillan

Young Adult

The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle, Simon and Shuster Books for Young Readers
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? by Yvonne Cassidy, Flux
My Year Zero by Rachel Gold, Bella Books
The Way He Lived by Emily Wing Smith, Dutton Books for Young Readers