Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang (she/her) won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and was hailed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Described as “[v]isceral stories that center the bodies, memories, myth, and relationships of Asian American women” (back cover) and “unapologetically queer” (The Guardian), I wasRead More
A Queer Diasporic Matrilineal Epic: Amma by Saraid de Silva Review
Some silences are so profound that they become part of the landscape, not just heard but inhabited. Amma knows that terrain—how silence gets passed down not just through forgetting but through a caring that has been cornered. In this debut novel from Saraid de Silva, the unspoken doesn’t just haunt the margins of the characters’Read More
Love in the Times of Seaside Horror: Providence Girls by Morgan Dante Review
In the past couple of years, I have discovered some real gems of independent and self-published sapphic literature. Last May, I read Morgan Dante’s stunning Providence Girls, which won Best Historical Fiction at the 2023 Indie Ink awards. The author pitches it as “a seaside sapphic cosmic horror romance” in the vein of The Handmaiden and The Shape ofRead More
Memory as Storytelling: Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch Review
Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch has been on my to-read list for years; I’ve heard nothing but excellent things about that memoir. So, when I saw that she had new one out (that I could talk about on the All the Books podcast), I had to pick it up! Reading the Waves ended upRead More
Court Intrigue at the Heart of an Interstellar Empire: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Bookshop.org Affiliate Link A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine is an elegant space opera that artfully ties together themes of empire, identity, and cultural dominance. It makes you consider all of these while drawing you into the characters and the complex political intrigues. The book follows Mahit Dzmare, a newly appointed ambassador to theRead More
The Half-Light Makes for a Clearer View: Genevra Littlejohn reviews On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
I’m writing this from inside of a curious space. About a week ago I stood up into a cabinet and gave myself a concussion, which I then immediately exacerbated by doing Chinese lion dance in four shows for a local production of The Nutcracker. So my life for a few days was cut harshly betweenRead More