| Programming note: we’re off next Thursday for the holiday, so look for the Communiqué back in your inbox on July 11. Thanks! —Jordan
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Hot News This Week
June 27, 2024
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| As reported this spring in Publishers Weekly, OR Books is set to publish If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer, the beloved Palestinian poet and literature professor who was killed in December 2023 by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
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| | Time of the Flies
by Claudia Piñeiro, trans. Frances Riddle
Charco Press • August 2024 • 9781913867867
“After their release from jail, friends Ines and Manca form FFF (Females, Fumigations and Flies) focused on non-toxic pest control and private investigation by women for women. . . . An unforgettable book about strong women, mothers and daughters and revenge! Highly recommended!” — Caitlin Luce Baker, Island Books (Mercer Island, WA)
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“[The Body Harvest] follows two outcasts, Olivia and Will, who are addicted to the feeling of sickness, going to more and more extreme lengths to contract diseases. . . . With tight, accessible writing, Seidlinger peels away the skin of his characters and shows us the rot beneath.” — Charlie Marks, Fountain Bookstore (Richmond, VA)
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“A powerful addition to the trope of a dying woman leaving instructions that will change lives. . . . All the misunderstandings and lies fall apart on one fateful night and no one will be the same again. All the varying perspectives are skillfully arranged and prove the power of stories.” — Jan Blodgett, Main Street Books (Davidson, NC)
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| Queer Comics and Banned Books in Libraries
This month, Street Noise Books was featured in a Publishers Weekly story about librarians celebrating comics—particularly those by and about queer people—in the face of escalating book ban threats to graphic novels and LGBTQ+ subjects.
Street Noise founder Liz Francis was interviewed for the piece, noting, “We have a clear mission to provide a platform for the voices of marginalized people and to create books that are unapologetic, authentic, and politically relevant.” Djuna by Jon Macy, a forthcoming graphic novel from the press, is highlighted as an example of this mission at work: it’s a biography of Djuna Barnes, a writer, artist, and queer radical of the Lost Generation in 1920s literary Paris.
In another piece, Publishers Weekly also interviewed Banned Book Club co-authors Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada about their book from Iron Circus Comics being challenged in several US school districts. “We didn’t intend for Banned Book Club to be a metaphor for what was happening to the US, but it accidentally became that,” says Estrada.
Banned Book Club
by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada, illus. Ko Hyung-Ju
Iron Circus Comics • May 2020 • 9781945820427
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| New Digital Review Copies
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“Excellent collection of speculative fiction stories where women inspect their placement in society and revoke it. This collection feels very akin in tone to Margaret Atwood’s works, while still having a style and voice of its own.” — Olivia Stacey, E. Shaver, Bookseller (Savannah, GA)
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This week, TIME ran an op-ed by Zoe Weil, author of The Solutionary Way (New Society Publishers), about how improv comedy can help resolve conflict.
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“Intelligent, Attractive, Powerful Lesbians Conquering the World”: On June 21, the Paris Review published correspondence between Joanna Russ and Marilyn Hacker that’s excerpted from a new edition of Russ’s On Strike Against God (Feminist Press) edited by Alec Pollak.
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Lilith recently included Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire’s We Move Together, illustrated by Eduardo Trejos (AK Press), on a list of books that feature disability writing through a Jewish feminist lens.
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