New in February: Marlon James, Isaac Mizrahi, Nishta J. Mehra, and Christopher Castellani

Author: Edit Team

January 31, 2019

We’re back with more new LGBTQ books to help you make it through the winter!

This month, we can’t wait to dive into Marlon James’ new novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead). Described as “an African Game of Thrones,” the novel is the first installment of James’ Dark Star trilogy, in which “myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.” More from the publisher:

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: “He has a nose,” people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

We’re also eagerly awaiting Isaac Mizrahi’s memoir, I.M., out this month from Flatiron Books:

Isaac Mizrahi is sui generis: designer, cabaret performer, talk-show host, a TV celebrity. Yet ever since he shot to fame in the late 1980s, the private Isaac Mizrahi has remained under wraps. Until now.

We’re also looking forward to Nishta J. Mehra’s Brown White Black (Picador). The book of essays is “a portrait of [Mehra’s] family: her wife, who is white; her adopted child, Shiv, who is black; and their experiences dealing with America’s rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality.” In these essays, she explores “her family’s daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America’s most fraught issues.”

In his novel Leading Men (Viking), Christopher Castellani combines fact and fiction to tell the story of Tennessee Williams and his lover Frank Merlo at one of Truman Capote’s parties in Italy in 1953. There, they meet Anja Blomgren, “a mysteriously taciturn young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress,” in a moment that “will go on to alter all of their lives”:

Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in the present-day U.S., until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only surviving copy of Williams’s final play.

Amy Feltman’s debut, Willa & Hesper (Grand Central Publishing), is also out this month. “Told from alternating perspectives, and ending in the shadow of Trump’s presidency,” Feltman’s novel “explores the intertwining of past and present, queerness, and coming of age in uncertain times.”

In the mood for a mystery? This month also brings Shadow Puppet (Dundurn), the latest in Jeffrey Round’s Lambda Literary Award-winning Dan Sharp series.

Or if you need a little romance to keep you warm on these cold winter nights, be sure to take a look at the titles below, including new releases from Radclyffe and Ann Roberts, among others.

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

Fiction

The Body Myth by Rheea Mukherjee, The Unnamed Press
Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella by Frieda Ekotto, Bucknell University Press
The Hundred Wells of Salaga by Ayesha Harruna Attah, Other Press
Ironbark by Jay Carmichael, Scribe US
Leading Men by Christopher Castellani, Viking
Northern Lights by Raymond Strom, Simon & Schuster
The Stranger from the Sea by Paul Binding, The Overlook Press
Willa & Hesper by Amy Feltman, Grand Central Publishing

Nonfiction

Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion by Nishta J. Mehra, Picador
Headcase: LGBTQ Writers & Artists on Mental Health and Wellness by Stephanie Schroeder & Teresa Theophano, Oxford University Press
Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future by Pete Buttigieg, Liveright
The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose by Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press
Yes Yes Yes: Australia’s Journey to Marriage Equality by Alex Greenwich & Shirleene Robinson, University of New South Wales Press

LGBT Studies

After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory and Sexuality in the 21st Century by Tyler Bradway & E. L. McCallum, Cambridge University Press
Dragging; Or the Political Aesthetics of Drag by Shaka McGlotten, Routledge
Inside the World of the Eunuch: A Social History of the Emperor’s Servants in Qing China by Melissa Dale, Hong Kong University Press
Queer Youth Histories by Daniel Marshall, Palgrave Macmillan
Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy by Jacqueline Murray & Nicholas Terpstra, Routledge
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism by Elizabeth Pender & Cathryn Setz, Penn State University Press
The Sour Fruit: Lord Byron, Love & Sex by Vincenzo Patanè, John Cabot University Press
STEM of Desire: Queer Theories and Science Education by Will Letts & Steve Fifield, Sense Publishing
Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism by Marquis Bey, University of Arizona Press
Trans People in Higher Education by Genny Beemyn, SUNY Press

Young Adult and Children’s Literature

The Afterward by E.K. Johnston, Dutton Books for Young Readers
Darkfeather by Andrew Demcak, Harmony Ink Press
I am Billie Jean King by Brad Meltzer & Christopher Eliopoulos, Dial Books
Immoral Code by Lillian Clark, Knopf Books for Young Readers
Jordan vs. All the Boys by John Goode, Harmony Ink Press
The Music of What Happens by Bill Konigsberg, Arthur A. Levine Books
The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried by Shaun David Hutchinson, Simon Pulse
Sapphire the Great and the Meaning of Life by Beverley Brenna & Tara Anderson, Pajama Press
To Night Owl From Dogfish by Holly Goldberg Sloan & Meg Wolitzer, Dial Books
We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia, Katherine Tegen Books