Skip to main content

Featured

We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

Upright Women Wanted is a hopeful story about finding people like us in unexpected but wonderful places. The best parts of a western in the gaps of the post-apocalypse set against the specter of a vague forever-war. A scrappy novella with a big heart. 

I know I love most things I read, but I needed something happy right now and this was just the ticket. It's about people in the gaps, the spaces between what's supposed to happen and the edge of the next set of rules, the next scrutinizing town. It takes the wildness and danger of a Western and gives it a modern framing with a post-apocalyptic flair. Some of the backstories are either implicitly or explicitly filled with some terrible events, but it strikes a balance between showing and telling that leaves the really bad stuff to the imagination. It has a fair amount of blood and death for such an ultimately hopeful book, but the ending was so cathartic and lovely, just what I needed right now.

CW for murder, blood, death.

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link


Sideways silhouettes of people around a desert camp





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts