June 1, 2024
LGBTQ+ Pride Month begins today and we’re kicking off the celebration with two recommendations below, as well as a list of new and recent queer must-reads from our Bookstore. Two from our selection this week are by Indigenous writers. There is also a coming-of-age story about a biracial teen dreaming of a brighter future, and a fascinating look behind the politics of soccer which takes us to Benin.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Coexistence
By Billy-Ray Belcourt
Published by W. W. Norton
These fine stories from a gay Native writer follow Belcourt’s award-winning debut novel. Hailing from the Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta, Canada, Belcourt introduces us to a host of characters. In “Poetry Class” a teacher declares: “To be a poet one had to believe in the coexistence of…contradictory truths.” In the eerie “My Summer Research” our protagonist dog-sits for his parents who live in a former nunnery with a haunted past. In “Various People” a man visits his dying mother who hopes “heaven looks like the rez.” Each story addresses the way Indigenous people live, and the philosophical underpinnings that guide their choices.
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Godwin
By Joseph O'Neill
Published by Knopf
O’Neill’s first novel displayed his obsession with cricket. Now he turns his eye toward the business and politics of soccer in the quest to discover talented players from Africa to be the new Messi. Two brothers, very different from one another, join forces in the search for a rumored candidate, the eponymous character from Benin. In this unpredictable novel, we follow the search for gifted athletes who will be wrested from home and poverty to a potential life of opportunity, fame, and wealth. The sports agents’ dubious motives and O’Neill’s trenchant exploration of colonialism and capitalism contribute to the propellant pace of this high-wire act. And, it’s funny.
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Fire Exit
By Morgan Talty
Published by Tom House Books
Talty’s (Night of the Living Rez) debut novel is set in the Maine Penobscot Indian Nation where he is from. Charles has a secret daughter, but now in middle age and sober, he no longer wants to keep this secret. He lives across the river from the rez where he’s watched her grow up as he struggled with alcoholism. His mother has dementia, his stepfather is gone, and he wants desperately to connect with his twentysomething daughter. Talty says this book is ‘for humanity.’ Powerful and poetic, it is about family, bloodlines, and the ways in which we must help each other to live well in the world.
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Swift River
By Essie Chambers
Published by Simon & Schuster
Swift River is the New England setting for Chambers’s affecting first novel—it was once a ‘sundown town’ that excluded Black people from remaining there after sunset (racist laws which existed until the late ’60s). Diamond’s Pop goes missing when she is entering fourth grade (“He is leaving us in slow drips.”). By the age of 16 in 1987 she is “so fat I can’t ride my bike anymore” and isolated as the only Black girl (her mother is white; her father is Black) in her class. Bright but lonely, Diamond uncovers family secrets as her desire for a more comfortable place in the world in the future grows. Chambers, also biracial, traces “the tragic imprint of America’s sins” in this extraordinary novel.
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A Last Supper of Queer Apostles
By Pedro Lemebel
Published by Penguin Classics
Translated by Gwendolyn Harper
A terrific addition to Queer Latin American literature, this essay collection should expand Lemebel’s (activist, essayist, novelist) audience. In these ‘cronicas,’ Lemebel, whom Roberto Bolaño called “courageous,” documents the Chilean underground, the Pinochet dictatorship, the AIDS era, and an ode to Che Guevara. His pieces have titles like “Hot Pants at the Sodomy Disco” and “Letter to Liz Taylor (or Egyptian Emeralds for AZT).” Lemebel died of cancer in 2015. Discovering him in this new edition is an exciting experience. As Idra Novey says in her foreword: “If you have yet to read the work of Pedro Lemebel, prepare to be wrecked and resurrected…”
