New in September: Bob Smith, Ari Banias, Tim Lawrence, Michelle Tea, and Emma Donoghue

Author: Edit Team

September 8, 2016

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

Comedian and author Bob Smith’s new book Treehab (University of Wisconsin Press) provides a humorous examination of the writer’s own personal relationship with the natural world.

From the publisher:

In this bitingly funny and often surprising memoir, award-winning author and groundbreaking comedian Bob Smith offers a meditation on the vitality of the natural world—and an intimate portrait of his own darkly humorous and profoundly authentic response to a life-changing illness.

In Treehab—named after a retreat cabin in rural Ontario—Smith muses how he has “always sought the path less traveled.” He rebuffs his diagnosis of ALS as only an unflappable stand-up comic could (“Lou Gehrig’s Disease? But I don’t even like baseball!”) and explores his complex, fulfilling experience of fatherhood, both before and after the onset of the disease.

Stories of his writing and performing life—punctuated by hilariously cutting jokes that comedians tell only to each other—are interspersed with tales of Smith’s enduring relationship with nature: boyhood sojourns in the woods of upstate New York and adult explorations of the remote Alaskan wilderness; snakes and turtles, rocks and minerals; open sky and forest canopy; God and friendship—all recurring touchstones that inspire him to fight for his survival and for the future of his two children.

Aiming his potent, unflinching wit at global warming, equal rights, sex, dogs, Thoreau, and more, Smith demonstrates here the inimitable insight that has made him a beloved voice of a generation. He reminds us that life is perplexing, beautiful, strange, and entirely worth celebrating.

This month, disco and discourse converge in Tim Lawrence’s Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 (Duke University Press). The book astutely maps the vibrant interconnected “post-disco” Manhattan club scene:

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York’s party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city’s subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film.

Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.

In Anybody (W. W. Norton & Company), poet Ari Banias lyrically explores themes of gender and physicality:

In Anybody, Ari Banias takes up questions of recognition and belonging: how boundaries are drawn and managed, the ways he and she, us and them, here and elsewhere are kept separate, and at what cost identities and selves are forged. Moving through iconic and imagined landscapes, Anybody confronts the strangeness of being alive and of being a restlessly gendered, queer, emotive body. Wherever the poet turns—the cruising spaces of Fire Island, a city lake, a Greek island, a bodega-turned-coffee-shop—he finds the charge of boundedness and signification, the implications of what it means to be a this instead of at hat. Witty, tender, and original, these poems pierce the constructs that define our lives.

Feminist Press is releasing Black Wave, a new apocalyptic-tinged novel from author Michelle Tea, that provides a decidedly queer take on the end of the world:

It’s 1999—and Michelle’s world is ending.

Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it’s officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.

While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she tries to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she’ll have to compromise her artistic process if she’s going to properly ride out doomsday.

This month sees the release of The Wonder (Little, Brown and Company), a new novel from best-selling author Emma Donoghue:

In Emma Donoghue’s latest masterpiece, an English nurse brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle-a girl said to have survived without food for months-soon finds herself fighting to save the child’s life

Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale’s Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl.

Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels–a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.

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

Fiction

After Disasters by Viet Dinh, Little A
All That Sang by Lydia Perovic, Véhicule Press
Black Wave by Michelle Tea, Feminist Press
Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction edited by Martha Amore and Lucian Childs, University of Chicago Press
Country by Jeffery Mann, Lethe Press
Burning Tracks by Lilah Suzanne, Interlude Press
Inside Dumont by Michael Craft, Questover Press
A Perfect Life by Elaine Burnes, Bedazzled Ink
The Troubleseeker by Alan Lessik, Chelsea Station Editions
Two Natures by Jendi Reiter, Saddle Road Press
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue, Little, Brown and Company

Nonfiction

Appealing for Justice: One Lawyer, Four Decades and the Landmark Gay Rights Case: Romer V. Evans by Susan Berry Casey, Gilpin Park Press
Becoming Who I Am: Young Men on Being Gay by Ritch C. Savin-Williams, Harvard University Press
Purple Prose: Bisexuality in Britian by Kate Harrad, Thorntree Press
Catching Rainbows: An Account of the Lives of Ordinary Gay Men by Michael DeQueen, Amazon Singles
The Essential RuPaul by John Davis, Smith Street Books
Love Notes to Men Who Don’t Read by North Moragn, Limehouse Books
She and Her: Lesbian Sex Positions from Intimate and Sensual to Wild and Naughty by Shanna Katz, Amorata Press

LGBT Studies

Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: Perspectives on Marital Possibilities edited by Ronald C. Den Otter, Lexington Books
Exploring LGBT Spaces and Communities by Eleanor Formby, Routledge
Human Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity edited by Anne Hellum, Routledge
Life and Death of the Dance Floor, 1980-1983 by Tim Lawrence, Duke University Press
New Intimacies, Old Desires: Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times by Oishik Sircar and Dipika Jain, Zubaan Books
New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film by Vinodh Venkatesh, University of Texas Press
Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for Representing the LGBTQ Past by Thomas R. Dunn, University of South Carolina Press
The Gift of Anger: Use Passion to Build Not Destroy by Joe Solmonese, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
The Politics of Gay Marriage in Latin America: Argentina, Chile, and Mexico by Jordi Diaz, Cambridge University Press
Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by Rogers Brubaker, Princeton University Press
Venice: Serenissima Homosexual Pleasure by Michael Hone, Createspace
Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1960-1914 by Scott Spector, University of Chicago Press

Young Adult

As I Descended by Robin Talley, HarperTeen
Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard, HarperTeen
It Looks Like This by Rafi Mittlefehldt, Candlewick
Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Cordova, Sourcebooks Fire
Not Your Sidekick by C. B. Lee, Duet
The Other Boy by M.G Hennessey, HarperCollins
Princess Ever After by Katie O’Neill, Oni Press
Radical by E. M. Kokie, Candlewick
The Graces by Laure Eve, Amulet Books

Romance

Alaskan Bride by D Jordan Redhawk, Bella Books
Basic Training of the Heart by Jaycie Morrison, Bold Strokes Books
Before by KE Payne, Bold Strokes Soliloquy
Believing in Blue by Maggie Morton, Bold Strokes Books
Coils by Barbara Ann Wright, Bold Strokes Books
Courting the Countess by Jenny Frame, Bold Strokes Books
Delayed Gratification: The Honeymoon by Meghan O’Brien, Bold Strokes Impressions
Don’t Let Go by Sheryl Wright, Bella Books
Hooked by Jaime Maddox, Bold Strokes Books
For Money or Love by Heather Blackmore, Bold Strokes Books
Piece of Cake: The Wedding by Gun Brooke, Bold Strokes Books
Lands End by Jackie D, Bold Strokes Liberty Editions
Lysistrata Cove by Dena Hankins, Bold Strokes Liberty Editions
Return to Paradise by Laina Villeneuve, Bella Books
The Secret Unknown by Dillon Watson, Bella Books
Sing Me Home by Shannon O’Brien, Bella Books
Too Much Heart to Run by SL Harris, Bella Books