Banned Books

One of Time Out's "LGBTQ+ books for kids to read during Pride Month," this irresistible picture book is a celebration of love in all its splendid forms from debut author J. J. Austrian and the acclaimed author-illustrator of Little Elliot, Big City, Mike Curato. You are cordially invited to celebrate the wedding of a worm...and a worm. When a worm meets a special worm and they fall in love, you know what happens next: They get married! But their friends want to know--who will wear the dress And who will wear the tux The answer is: It doesn't matter. Because worm loves worm. Perfect for fans of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, And Tango Makes Three, and The Sissy Duckling.  

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Then e created Gender Queer. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fan fiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere. This special deluxe hardcover edition of Gender Queer features a brand-new cover, exclusive art and sketches, a foreword from ND Stevenson, Lumberjanes writer and creator of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and an afterword from Maia Kobabe.

The long-awaited re-issue of the 1950 "lesbian pulp" classic.   Originally published in 1950, this account of life among female Free French soldiers in a London barracks during World War II sold four million copies in the United States alone and many more worldwide. The novel is based on the real-life experiences of the author, Tereska Torres. As the Blitz rains down over London, taboos are broken, affairs start and stop, and hearts are won and lost. Women's Barracks was banned for obscenity in several states and denounced by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of how the paperback industry was promoting moral degeneracy. In spite of such efforts--or perhaps, in part, because of them--the novel became a record-breaking bestseller and inspired a whole new genre: lesbian pulp.   "Kudos to the editors for bringing this lost classic back into print--it never should have left us in the first place." --Publishers Weekly

This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.

Exploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is "queer," as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance. Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four "shapes of fancy": the desire to be used to others' ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as "queer" because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed. This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.

Critical analysis of the dramatisation of homosexuality in British fiction about the Second World War is noticeable only by its relative absence from the field. Whereas feminist literary criticism has broadened the canon of war fiction to include narratives by and about women, queer scholars have seldom focused on literary representations of homosexuality during the war. Natalie Marena Nobitz closes a glaring gap in the critical attention of four novels dealing with the disruption of gender roles and institutionalised heteronormativity: Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951), Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1952), Sarah Waters' The Night Watch (2006) and Adam Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012).

Young adult literature featuring teenage lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning characters is fast growing in popularity. Unlike the "problem novels" of the past, which focused on the guilt, bullying and isolation of LGBTQ characters, today's narratives present more sympathetic and celebratory portrayals. The author explores a selection of recent novels--many of which may be new to readers--and places them in the wider contexts of LGBTQ literature and history. Chapters discuss a range of topics, including the relationship of Queer Theory to literature, LGBTQ families, and recent trends in utopian and dystopian science fiction.