It’s a Good Time To Be a Sports Gay – www.autostraddle.com
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Hey hello, everyone!
God, is it ever a good time to be a sports dyke. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get any reading done between all of y’all’s Rockford Peaches Halloween costumes, Portland’s NWSL Championship, and the ongoing and truly delightful World Series baseball livetweets. Am I even still literate, or is there only “Dancing On My Own” in my brain where literacy used to be? (Apologies in advance to any Houston fans — we can be friends again in a couple weeks 😉💖) It might be the perfect time to revisit Sally’s beautiful roster of queer sports romances, too!
I didn’t do as much reading the last couple of weeks as I’dve liked, and yet. Fall is always book publishing’s busiest season, my TBR looks like Kilimanjaro, and that’s just the way I like it. Whether you’re sneaking in a few pages here and there between innings, or curled all the way up with cider, blankets, candles, the whole nine yards, these books are home runs. (I know, I know, I couldn’t resist, I’m sorry, I can’t help being what I am.)
Okiedoke, let’s make like glow sticks and get cracking. This week on Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:
Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note
- If you’re not ready to put your Halloween decorations away just yet, Vulture’s rounded up the Best Horror Novels of 2022!
- Yash’s Dahlia Adler Fangirling Continues Apace and Other Reviewers Agree: This anthology is so awesome that it sent a Publishers Weekly reviewer into ecstasies of description. “This simultaneously whimsical, adventurous, and bone-chilling genre-spanning collection smartly riffs on the source material…” Quite the compound adjective/adverb pileup there, buddy! If you would like to be sent into similar raptures, you can get your mitts on At Midnight: 15 Beloved Fairy Tales Reimagined on 11/22.
- Time for some great kids books!
- New Isaac Fellman coming Nov 29! I thought Dead Collections was so much fun, and the premise for his new novella (“Academic magic, but make it grad school”) obviously hooked me. Can’t wait to get stuck in to The Two Doctors Gorski!
- Great news: The Book Eaters is fucking rad. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to take the phrase “voracious reader” just a liiiiiittle too literally, then this is the eerie literary folk tale of your dreams.
- Next week, Even Though I Knew The End hits bookshelves, and you better believe I’ll be tuning in for the virtual launch event of this historical speculative time-travel mystery romance oh my god what a fusion.
- Small press, big feelings: Fever by Shilo Niziolek is a memoir built of poetic essay fragments, and it lit up the part of my brain that misses Bluets and In The Dream House.
- Paging my poetry pals — the new Franny Choi collection is out this week!
- Stephen Spotwood’s Lambda-award finalist detective series Pentecost and Parker is back for its third installment this December! What dark academia is to the autumn, a good mystery is to the winter, so now’s a great time to preorder Secrets Typed in Blood and read the first two books in the series, Fortune Favors the Dead and Murder Under Her Skin!
- Or, if your winter vibe is more romance-y, fret not, I’ve got you covered: Kiss Her Once For Me features a Portland transplant, a bookstore meet-cute, the usual tangle of misunderstandings, and one helluva fake dating scenario.
- Y’all, I got a closer look at Neon Hemlock’s speculative fiction anthology, and it was somehow even better than I expected —this one was so fun!!!
- This fake dating bi barista4regularcustomer (is that a thing? it should be a thing) romance sounds absolutely charming (plus I love that in this M/F age gap, the girl is the older one for once!)
- “A sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue” and no one told me??????? Dropping everything to read Lee Mandelo’s debut Summer Sons now.
- In addition to shea’s review here on Autostraddle, the love for Fatimah Asghar’s new novel When We Were Sisters keeps on rolling at outlets like Vogue India, The Cut, and NPR!
- Really stoked to see more books addressing the sex education gaps for queer and trans folks — Kelvin Sparks’ Trans Sex is out in the UK on 11/21, and Blackwell’s ships to the US for free!
- What an absolutely amazing title; poets really are doing it best. K. Iver’s collection Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco comes out next January!
- Another round of Yashwina Canter Plays The Long Game: Coming next summer, THE NIGHT CIRCUS BUT GAY. J. R. Dawson’s debut novel The First Bright Thing tells the story of queer found family in the Circus of Fantasticals, and it sounds utterly delicious. Mark your calendars, set your reminders, you know the drill!
“A memoir with the scope ofHereticcould easily turn into a tornado of outrage and despair… But there’s an intellectual precision and rigor to Jeanna’s fury. And found within its white-hot flames are engaging stories of sex and love and community care and deep friendships and tarot and astrology and Dungeons & Dragons.
Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!
You already know that I’m going to say how great the books coverage is this week and every week.
That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.
