Books

2015: The Year in Lesbian/Bi Books

For the second year in a row, print book sales are on the rise. But how are lesbian and bisexual women writers faring? Are they, too, riding the publishing wave? Or have they continued to be relegated to the margins, and considered “too niche” for publication? In a conversation last month, Eileen Myles told me that when publishers turn down queer women’s manuscripts as “too niche, statistically they’re telling you how many people eat pussy without saying that.”

Myles is a paramount example of the success of the queer women writer: Delayed. Untimely. Desired. On her recent mainstream success with the publication of the critically acclaimed I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, and the simultaneous reissue of Chelsea Girls, Myles said it was a matter of time. Or, rather, a matter of geology:

“I think that it’s geological-I simply have done so much that it would be impossible to not publish me in the mainstream. It makes sense there would be one smart editor who would see a book people wanted. And this is work that people already know and care about. It’s sort of like, they’re not making something be true, they’re just capitalizing or commodifying something that is true.” (emphasis added)

Eileen Myles has always been here, but the visibility of her work and correlative success is a matter of commodification. Regardless of Frank Rich‘s assessment about the “invisibility” of lesbian culture, lesbian and bisexual women writers have always been present, writing and publishing. In 2015, we have seen our culture move into the mainstream, especially when it comes to literature. Patricia Highsmith‘s Carol, first published as The Price of Salt in 1952 under a pseudonym, found itself adapted this year into one of the best movies of the decade (and, arguably, the best lesbian-not-lesbian film ever made).

Likewise, this year we saw the cinematic adaptation of David Ebershoff‘s novel, The Danish Girl (2000), as well as out lesbian Emma Donoghue‘s Room (2010), for which she wrote the screenplay. All three films have received critical and public acclaim; all three have garnered multiple awards and award nominations-Donoghue, in fact, received a Golden Globe nomination for writing the screenplay for Room.

Out lesbian Patricia Cornwell-the all-time bestselling crime fiction writer-saw the publication of Depraved Heart (HarperCollins), which marks the 25th anniversary of the Kay Scarpetta series. The literary world was abuzz with the controversial publication of alleged lesbian Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (HarperCollins), featuring a grown-up Scout who, as readers of To Kill a Mockingbird know, continues to set off #DeepLez alarm bells as she happily embraces spinsterhood.

This year, in fact, we witnessed the “mainstreaming” (otherwise known as “acclaim and general recognition”) of a number of lesbian and bisexual women writers, who produced some damn fine work. Below is a selection-in no way comprehensive-of some of the most celebrated and most beloved books of 2015 by or about lesbian, bisexual and queer women.

FICTION

Dreamy visionary Miranda July gives readers a doozy of a plot-about a sexual relationship between a young, pregnant woman and a much older woman-in The First Bad Man: A Novel (Scribner). Nell Zink’s Mislaid (Ecco) was shortlisted for the National Book Award for good reason: It’s a wild ride! The plot details the unconventional relationship between Meg, a lesbian, and her professor-a gay man. They get married and have two children. What happens next is a comedy of queer manners, including a plot twist apropos a la Rachel Dolezal.

Oprah loved out bisexual author Cynthia Bond‘s 2014 title Ruby (Hogarth) so much that she named it a title in her book club in early 2015. Bond’s style echoes Black literary foremothers-the haunting qualities of Morrison’s prose, the daring psychological tension of Hurston-as her protagonist Ruby transcends the racial violence of her birth and upbringing to find love (including with a woman).

Out lesbian Chinelo Okparanta was inspired to write Under the Udala Trees (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) from her own life experiences. Her protagonist, Ijeoma, labors to salvage her relationship with her mother who disapproves of her sexuality while mourning the death of her father. Ijaw and Urhobo Nigerian dyke performance activist Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene tells the story of Taylor, a queer Nigerian college student, who explores her own femme identity through two very different relationships, in For Sisakele (RedBone Press).

Out writer Annie Liontas’s debut novel, Let Me Explain You: A Novel (Scribner), offers a modern-day Greek drama, packaged as the American Dream. Lointas unpacks family myth and familial archetypes as her protagonist, Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, attempts to find peace with his three daughters-including the eldest, a masculine lesbian-before his death.

With a protagonist seemingly out of Pretty Little Liars, Sara Jaffe’s YA novel Dryland follows a teen girl into the swimming pool and into the arms of a swim team crush (Tin House Books). M.E. Kerr (also, Patricia Highsmith’s ex!) has written a collection of 15 YA stories, titled Edge: Collected Stories (Open Road Integrated Media), that address the gamut of issues facing teenagers, including sexuality. Queer literary favorite Sassafras Lowrey reimagines the story of Peter Pan-butch bois, queer punks, and all-in the deliciously fun Lost Boi (Arsenal Pulp Press).

Lidia Yuknavitch explores the ethical contract between the artist and her subject in The Small Backs of Children (Harper), in which her protagonist, a bisexual photographer, realizes that making children of war-torn Eastern Europe the subjects of her art does not come without moral obligation.

Non-lesbian content by lesbians: Out lesbian author Jeanette Winterson put a male homoerotic twist on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in her modern-day adaptation of the play in her novel, The Gap of Time (Hogarth Shakespeare). Out lesbian writer Lori Ostlund delivered one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the year with After the Paradise (Scribner), which explores the psychic trauma of the breakup of an intergenerational gay couple. After the Paradise is Ostlund’s debut novel, and it won the Edmund White Award and the Flannery O’Connor Award.

NON-FICTION

With 2015 being the year of federal marriage equality, two books captured the historic moment from two different angles: Kerry Eleveld takes a policy-oriented perspective in Don’t Tell Me to Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Changed America and Transformed Obama’s Presidency (Basic Books), and Roberta Kaplan details her milestone Supreme Court case in Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA (Norton).

And, one of our favorite historians, Lillian Faderman documents the history of the LGBT civil rights movement, from the 1950s onward, in The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon & Schuster).

Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff edited the much-talked-about collection of feminist musings in The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future (The Feminist Press). The “visions” are offered by a diverse set of voices, including by Jill Soloway, Janet Mock and Miss Major Giffin-Gracy, to name just a few.

Professor Emily Bingham finds a treasure trove of family materials and reconstructs the life of her aunt, the flapper and sometimes dapper bisexual wild-child Henrietta Bingham, in Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Harvard physicist Lisa Randall offers an easy-to-read scientific genealogy of dark matter in Dark Matter and Dinosaurs (Ecco).

AUTOBIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR

Two of the most critically acclaimed memoirs of 2015 were written by queer women: Maggie Nelson’s stunningly beautiful The Argonauts (Graywolf Press) is a must-read for those of us who are thinkers, writers, and scholars, who live in our minds and try to make a life in the world. Portlandia star and Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein wrote a cunningly deep and sophisticated memoir in Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir (Riverhead Books).

Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images

Cat Cora‘s remarkable memoir Cooking As Fast As I Can: A Chef’s Story of Family, Food, and Forgiveness (Scribner) delves into her childhood of sexual abuse, and how she overcame her trauma to become a successful, celebrity chef. Ginny Gilder’s memoir Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX (Beacon Press) is much more than just about rowing in the 1970s; it’s a story about how one athlete’s understanding of her gender and sexuality gave her strength to become a champion.

Sister Spit founder and queer literary icon Michelle Tea recounts her journey into adulthood, pregnancy and all, in How to Grow Up: A Memoir (Plume). The real Alex Vause, Cleary Wolters, explains what really happened behind bars, in Out of Orange (HarperOne).

What happens at an all-girl camp? Probably scissoring. But you can find out for sure by reading Maggie Trash’s graphic novel, Honor Girl (Candlewick), which will transport you to being a 15-year-old all over again.

POETRY

This year in poetry was punctuated by history-the archives of lesbian and queer women poets emerged in conjunction with the production and publication of new poems by some of our favorites: Eileen Myles’s I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (Ecco); Elana Dykewomon’s What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (Sapphic Classics); Mary Oliver’s Felicity (Penguin Press); and Marilyn Hacker’s Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014 (Norton).

A collection of out lesbian Catherine Brees Davis’s poetry has been edited by Martha Collins, Kevin Prufer, and Martin Rock, and published with additional commentary and writings, in Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press).

Daphne Gottlieb takes us to the gritty and glitzy tech streets of San Francisco in the Digital Age, in Pretty Much Dead (Ladybox Books), and Joy Ladin explores the themes of beauty and truth in relation to bodies and how bodies live gender in her collection of poems, Impersonation (Sheep Meadow Press).

ACADEMIC PRESS

Colm Tóibín recounts the life of Elizabeth Bishop with memories of his own, including an analysis of how Bishop addressed-and avoided-writing about sexuality, in On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton UP). Cassandra Langer dives into the salacious life of one of our favorite queer women of modernism, in Romaine Brooks: A Life (University of Wisconsin Press). Emily Van Buskirk gives us the first full-length, English study of the Russian lesbian writer Lydia Ginzburg, in Lydia Ginzburg’s Prose: Reality in Search of Literature (Princeton UP). Also historically contextualized in the early twentieth century is Laurie Marhoefer‘s Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (University of Toronto Press), which analyzes how Weimer culture gave rise to, seemingly, a generation of fabulous gays (and lady gays!).

If you’re looking to recharge and update your feminist theory with a substantive dose of science, check out Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Gut Feminism (Duke UP), which aims to reintroduce biology to feminism.

GENRE FICTION

Lesbian presses churned out a number of books to satiate our hearts in 2015. Ellen Hart continues to keep us in thrall with The Old Deep and Dark (Minotaur Books), the new volume in her Lammy Award winning Jane Lawless series. Kelly Sinclair’s Accidental Rebels (Regal Crest), the first book in the Tantona Trilogy, is a small town suspense novel about paranoia born from prying neighbors’ eyes.

In Teaching Can Be Murder (Regal Crest), Jane DiLucchio offers a story about a teacher who becomes a super-sleuth after finding a dead body in her classroom. Readers who love real estate, crime and seduction, can drive into Ann Roberts’s four-volume Ari Adams Mystery Series (Bella Books). Pulitzer Prize nominated Victoria Brownworth takes us on a bloody thrilling ride in Ordinary Mayhem (Bold Strokes Books). And Lisa Shea’s Sniffing Out a Crime (Amazon Digital Services) crafts a fantastic character in Cindy Lange, a woman who accidentally becomes a stolen art detective, with the help of her newly adopted dog, shortly after discovering her partner of seven years is cheating on her.

If you’re looking for a little romance, check out Ali Vali’s The Romance Vote (Bold Strokes Books), which explores how same-sex relationships are compromised in the realm of politics. Linda Morganstein packs a punch (literally) in the relationship between her lesbian protagonists in Girls in Ice Houses (Regal Crest). Jenny Frame’s A Royal Romance (Bold Strokes Books) is a historical fiction with a lesbian British monarch. With a touch of magic, D. Jordan Redhawk puts a twist on the good-versus-evil trope in the lesbian sci-fi romance Darkstone (Bella Books). For some erotica a la Orange is the New Black, editors Salome Wilde and Talon Rihai deliver in the collection Desire Behind Bars (Hillside Press).

FORTHCOMING IN 2016

If the following titles are any indication, 2016 is going to be a fantastic year for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women’s literature. In January, the incredible trio of Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan present their history of queer women’s theater in Memories of the Revolution: The First Then Years of the WOW Café Theater (University of Michigan Press).

In February, civil rights activist, scholar, and legendary icon Angela Davis will see the publication of a new collection of her writings on the current incarnation of the civil rights movement, in Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket).

In March, Sarah Schulman offers readers her captivating reimagining of Balzac‘s Cousin Bette with The Cosmopolitans (The Feminist Press).

In April, Kristen Hogan takes us through the history of the feminist bookstore-will there be Portlandia references?-in The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Duke UP).

In May, bisexual writer Anna Castillo tells a deeply emotional and unsettling story of a single, queer women of color raising a child in the 21st-century world of racism and mass incarceration, in Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me (The Feminist Press).

Also in May, Angela Willey contends that we are not biologically geared toward monogamy, in the academic book Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology (Duke UP). And, that same month, Susan Stryker and Talia M. Bettcher edit a fantastic collection of essays, titled Trans/Feminisms (Duke UP), which endeavors to show how feminism is and can be trans inclusive.

The wait is almost over: Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir will be published in June (Harper).

And in July, Katy Rex’s Strange Wit, a graphic portrayal of the life of lesbian writer and playwright Jane Bowles, will be available for purchase online (Kickstarter).

Happy reading in 2016!

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