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March’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books

March’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books

Author: Lilia Shrayfer

March 4, 2020

In honor of March as National Foreign Language Month, here is your favorite word (book) in seven languages with which you may, or may not, be familiar! Azerbaijani-Kitab; Estonian-Ramat; Farsi-Ketabi; Luxembourgish-Buch; Mongolian-Nom; Zulu-Incwadi. And here are all the LGBTQ Knigi (Russian) you can add to your shelf this month.

In the captivating Fiebre Tropical, by Lambda Literary Fellow Juliana Delgado Lopera, a young protagonist grapples with a chaotic new life and an intense, but troubled, relationship.

Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead.

But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor’s daughter. As her mother’s mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls more and more intensely in love with Carmen. To get closer to her, Francisca turns to Jesus to be saved, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.

I’ve noticed that if the book’s title has the word “Perfect” in it, something awful is going to happen. In the case of The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, author Clarissa Goenawan begins the novel with a tragic death. But Goenawan, like any skilled novelist, manages to elegantly reveal both the pain and beauty of unraveling a life after loss. This is only her second novel to date, and she’s already been compared to the wizard of world-building, Haruki Murakami.

On The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, from the publisher:

University sophomore Miwako Sumida has hanged herself, leaving those closest to her reeling. In the months before her suicide, she was hiding away in a remote mountainside village, but what, or whom, was she running from? Ryusei, a fellow student at Waseda who harbored unrequited feelings for Miwako, begs her best friend Chie to bring him to the remote village where she spent her final days. While they are away, his older sister, Fumi, who took Miwako on as an apprentice in her art studio, receives an unexpected guest at her apartment in Tokyo, distracting her from her fear that Miwako’s death may ruin what is left of her brother’s life.

Expanding on the beautifully crafted world of Rainbirds, Clarissa Goenawan gradually pierces through a young woman’s careful façade, unmasking her most painful secrets.

Repeat after me: Peter Piper the Pickled Pepper Picker Picked A Peck of Pickled Peppers. Got it? Now try this one: The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic. Better yet, order a copy from Sibling Rivalry Press. Author and Founding Editor of queer literary collective Foglifter, Miah Jeffra’s collection explosively subverts genres, moving seamlessly between critical, narrative and lyrical modes to take the reader on a seductive journey through the perceptions and aesthetics of sexuality, as depicted by art.

On The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic, from the publisher:

“A river’s edge, if approached too close, can sweep a body beyond itself.” In The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!, Miah Jeffra perfects apostrophe as canticle, a host of heroes beckoning the reader deeper into the waters of selfhood, Madonna, Mary Shelley, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Plato, and Jeffra’s mother among them. Jeffra explores the nature of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and love, taking a tiny hammer to the stability of the limits of perception, troubling the tether between perception and memory. At once memoir and cultural criticism, this collection discovers itself as a book about forgiveness, family, and the truths we find in “the lightness of a door,” “the probability of a radio,” the long line between one story and another.

Find yourself saying “no” when your work buddies invite you out for drinks? Do you treasure time in your room above all else? According to Lambda Literary Award Winner for both Gay Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, Fenton Johnson, it might not be so bad to be a recluse. At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life offers the lives of historical literary giants as evidence in the compelling case for seclusion and peace. Thank Goodness… someone gets me.

From the publisher:

Whether seeking more time for solitude or suffering what seems a surfeit of it, readers will find the best of companions here. Fenton Johnson’s lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion, common in his Roman Catholic childhood, that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling. He delves into the lives and works of nearly a dozen iconic “solitaries” he considers his kindred spirits, from Thoreau at Walden Pond and Emily Dickinson in Amherst, to Bill Cunningham photographing the streets of New York; from Cézanne (married, but solitary nonetheless) painting Mont Sainte-Victoire over and over again, to the fiercely self-protective Zora Neale Hurston. Each character portrait is full of intense detail, the bright wakes they’ve left behind illuminating Fenton Johnson’s own journey from his childhood in the backwoods of Kentucky to his travels alone throughout the world and the people he has lost and found along the way.

This month in fantasy, get ready for Lambda Literary Award Winner TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea. This is a beautifully told story about learning your true values whilst dismantling the powers that be.

From the publisher:

Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He’s tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world.

Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light.

This March is a huge month for queer poetry. One book of note is Postcolonial Love Poem, the new collection from poet Natalie Diaz. Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, Natalie Diaz is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship, a Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the winner of an American Book Award for the critically acclaimed When My Brother Was An Aztec. 

On Postcolonial Love Poem, from the publisher:

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

And as always, if our list of LGBTQ releases missed an author or book, or if you have a book coming out next month, please email us.

Fiction

Nonfiction

LGBT Studies

Young Adult and Children’s Literature

Romance

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror

Mystery/Thriller

Bio/Memoir

Poetry

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About: Lilia Shrayfer

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