New in October: Chloe Caldwell, Sarah Schulman, Anna-Marie McLemore, Rita Mae Brown, and Rabih Alameddine

Author: Edit Team

October 6, 2016

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

Award winning author Rabih Alameddine’s new novel Angel of History (Atlantic Monthly Press) provides a provocative, profound, and humorous examination of a gay poet’s troubled personal history.

From the publisher:

Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by 14 saints. Set in Cairo and Beirut; Sana’a, Stockholm, and San Francisco; Alameddine gives us a charged philosophical portrait of a brilliant mind in crisis. This is a profound, philosophical and hilariously winning story of the war between memory and oblivion we wrestle with every day of our lives.

This month, Thomas Dunne Books is releasing Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow Anna-Marie McLemore’s new book When the Moon was Ours. The young adult novel is a fantastical portrait of a fantastical friendship:

Anna-Marie McLemore’s debut novel The Weight of Feathers was greeted with rave reviews, a YALSA Morris Award nomination, and spots on multiple “Best YA Novels” lists. Now, McLemore delivers a second stunning and utterly romantic novel, again tinged with magic.

To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. Roses grow out of Miel’s wrist, and rumors say that she spilled out of a water tower when she was five. Sam is known for the moons he paints and hangs in the trees and for how little anyone knows about his life before he and his mother moved to town. But as odd as everyone considers Miel and Sam, even they stay away from the Bonner girls, four beautiful sisters rumored to be witches. Now they want the roses that grow from Miel’s skin, convinced that their scent can make anyone fall in love. And they’re willing to use every secret Miel has fought to protect to make sure she gives them up.

In I’ll Tell You in Person (Emily Books), writer Chloe Caldwell, with a wry sense of self-awareness, candidly maps her own personal and romantic failings.:

Flailing in jobs, failing at love, getting addicted and un-addicted to people, food, and drugs—I’ll Tell You in Person is a disarmingly frank account of attempts at adulthood and all the less than perfect ways we get there. Caldwell has an unsparing knack for looking within and reporting back what’s really there, rather than what she’d like you to see.

This month sees the release of Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (Arsenal Pulp Press), a provocative new book from author Sarah Schulman:

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways in which cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behaviour and Traumatized behaviour resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

Bantam is releasing Cakewalk, a new novel from author Rita Mae Brown that continues her popular Runnymede series.

Continuing in the exuberant tradition of Six of One, Bingo, and Loose Lips, New York Times bestselling author Rita Mae Brown returns to her much-loved fictional hamlet of Runnymede, whose memorable citizens are welcoming both the end of the Great War and the beginning of a new era.

The night a riot breaks out at the Capitol Theater movie house—during a Mary Pickford picture, no less—you can bet that the Hunsenmeir sisters, Louise and Julia, are nearby. Known locally as Wheezie and Juts, the inimitable, irrepressible, distinctly freethinking sisters and their delightful circle of friends are coming of age in a shifting world—and are determined to understand their place in it. Across town, the well-to-do Chalfonte siblings are preparing for the upcoming wedding of brother Curtis. But for youngest sister Celeste, the celebration brings about a change she never expected and a lesson about love she’ll not soon forget.

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

Fiction

Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine, Atlantic Monthly Press
Beautiful Gravity by Martin Hyatt, Antibookclub
Candyass by Nick Comilla, Arsenal Pulp Press
Cakewalk by Rita Mae Brown, Bantam
Eros and Dust by Trebor Healy, Lethe Press
Life in Death by M. Ullrich, Bold Strokes Victory Editions
The Sacred Best by Bev Lessik, Bedazzled Ink Publishing
Tallulah Bankhead Slept Here by Sam Lollar, Bold Strokes Liberty Editions
A Thin Bright Line by Lucy Jane Bledsoe, University of Wisconsin Press
Whilst I Was Out by Sara Stewart, Pegasus Books

Nonfiction

A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain by Simon Goldhill, University of Chicago Press
Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out by Martin Aston, Constable
Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman, Aresenal Pulp Press
Dead Feminists: Historic Heroines in Living Color by Chandler O’Leary and Jessica Spring, Sasquach Books
Fashionably Late: Gay, Bi, and Trans Men Who Came Out Later in Life edited by Vinnie Kinsella, Eldredge Books
Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York by Donald Albrecht, Skira Rizzoli
No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies by E. Patrick Johnson, Duke University Press
Speak its Name! Quotations by and about Gay Men and Women edited by Christopher Tinker, National Portrait Gallery
The Queer Film Festival: Popcorn and Politics by Stuart Richards, Palgrave Macmillan

LGBT Studies

Before I Do: A Legal Guide to Marriage, Gay and Otherwise by Elizabeth F. Schwartz, The New Press
Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice by Patrick Ryan Murphy, Temple University Press
Discourses on LGBT Asylum in the UK by Thibaut Raboin, Manchester University Press
Edward II and a Literature of Same-Sex Love: The Gay King in Fiction, 1590-1640 by Michael G. Cornelius, Lexington Books
Pink 2.0 Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet by Noah A. Tsika, Indiana University Press
Pride Parades: How a Parade Changed the World by Katherine McFarland Bruce, NYU Press
Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy by Shane Brown, I.B. Tauris
Troubling the Teaching and Learning of Gender and Sexuality Diversity in South African Education by Dennis A. Francis, Palgrave Macmillan

Young Adult

Beast by Brie Spangler, Random House Children’s Books
The ABC’s of LGBT+: Understanding and Embacing Your Identity by Ashley Mardell, Mango
When the Moon was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore, Thomas Dunne Books

Romance

Camp Rewind by Meghan O’Brien, Bold Strokes Books
Cross Purposes by Gina L. Dartt, Bold Strokes Books
Delayed Gratification: The Honeymoon by Meghan O’Brien, Bold Strokes Impressions
Imperfect Truth by CA Popovich, Bold Strokes Books
Piece of Cake: The Wedding by Gun Brooke, Bold Strokes Books
Lands End by Jackie D, Bold Strokes Liberty Editions
Life in Death by By M. Ullrich, Bold Stokes Books
Lysistrata Cove by Dena Hankins, Bold Strokes Liberty Editions
Return to Paradise by Laina Villeneuve, Bella Books
The Second Wave by Jean Copeland, Bold Strokes Books
Serious Potential by Maggie Cummings, Bold Strokes Books
Smoldering Desires by C. E. Knipes, Bold Strokes Liberty Editions
Taste by Kris Bryant, Bold Strokes Books
Valley of Fire by Missouri Vaun, Bold Strokes Books
Virgin Territory by Kenna White, Bella Books
A Woman of Strong Purpose by S. M. Harding, Bella Books