queer and genderbending book recs
My reading this summer has been quite a lot of lgbt-themed things, and because I feel like summer's over, I bring you my favourites: some new, some older.
Girl meets boy - Ali Smith.
A retelling of a Greek myth - the girl Iphis is raised as a boy, meets the girl Ianthe, falls in love, and begs the gods to make her a man so they can marry. Gorgeous poetic prose, political and sharp and funny. Old myth, modern day love story, and the places where they meet. This is the best book I’ve read this summer.
The.powerbook - Jeanette Winterson.
Winterson is one of my favourite authors (Lighthouskeeping, oh, ♥), and she always does a wonderful job with queer things. Powerbook is the story of a writer who writes stories on demand, offers freedom for a night, from somewhere in cyberspace, and how the stories change both the reader and author. And so of course I adore it.
The first chapter is a gloriously well-done piece of genderbend, where a girl with a tulip becomes a princess’ boy lover.
Oh, and there are several classic love stories interwoven in this - including one very pretty Lancelot/Guinevere section, which should please some of you Merlin folks. Winterson writes them both as strong, and so in love, or as being love itself.
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides.
Begins like this: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
Chronicle of a family, from Smyrna and Greece in the early 20th century, where two siblings grow up and fall in love, across an ocean and two generations to Cal in Middlesex, America, a girl/boy in between. I couldn’t put it down. A novel to immerse oneself in.
Brass - Helen Walsh
An anti-heroine who does drugs, messes up her relations, goes to female prostitutes and sees her society with an unforgiving gaze. I love this book for existing. Reading it, however, I found almost depressing. It’s well-written and interesting, but the world of this book is a dark and gritty place.
Drömfakulteten (The Dream Faculty) - Sara Stridsberg.
I can’t not mention this wonder of a novel, even though it tragically still hasn’t been translated into English. Stridsberg writes a literary fantasy about Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol and wrote the SCUM (society for cutting up men)-manifest. Feminist, queer, dark, beautiful, heartbreaking, brilliant.
Have a bit, in my translation: “The student bed is a place of darkness and lonely veritgos. Cosmo in the sheets in her yellow hair, conviction and desire, that body that wants to work its way into you and disappear there. Your own is a target that has nothing to do with Valerie. Only that blistering carbonated feeling again in your arms, do what you want and whatever you do let it go fast, like everything closes its eyes and waits and the rigor mortis takes over the room. At first you’re afraid of everything at Maryland, of Cosmo, of her kisses, of the professors, the lecture halls, the middle class girls, the middle class boys. Then you burst through the corridors with Cosmo in your hand, unbeatable, with the brain burning from longing for science and future.”
(Sara Stridsberg, Drömfakulteten, p. 171).
Have you read any? Got other recs? Please tell! :)
Girl meets boy - Ali Smith.
A retelling of a Greek myth - the girl Iphis is raised as a boy, meets the girl Ianthe, falls in love, and begs the gods to make her a man so they can marry. Gorgeous poetic prose, political and sharp and funny. Old myth, modern day love story, and the places where they meet. This is the best book I’ve read this summer.
The.powerbook - Jeanette Winterson.
Winterson is one of my favourite authors (Lighthouskeeping, oh, ♥), and she always does a wonderful job with queer things. Powerbook is the story of a writer who writes stories on demand, offers freedom for a night, from somewhere in cyberspace, and how the stories change both the reader and author. And so of course I adore it.
The first chapter is a gloriously well-done piece of genderbend, where a girl with a tulip becomes a princess’ boy lover.
Oh, and there are several classic love stories interwoven in this - including one very pretty Lancelot/Guinevere section, which should please some of you Merlin folks. Winterson writes them both as strong, and so in love, or as being love itself.
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides.
Begins like this: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
Chronicle of a family, from Smyrna and Greece in the early 20th century, where two siblings grow up and fall in love, across an ocean and two generations to Cal in Middlesex, America, a girl/boy in between. I couldn’t put it down. A novel to immerse oneself in.
Brass - Helen Walsh
An anti-heroine who does drugs, messes up her relations, goes to female prostitutes and sees her society with an unforgiving gaze. I love this book for existing. Reading it, however, I found almost depressing. It’s well-written and interesting, but the world of this book is a dark and gritty place.
Drömfakulteten (The Dream Faculty) - Sara Stridsberg.
I can’t not mention this wonder of a novel, even though it tragically still hasn’t been translated into English. Stridsberg writes a literary fantasy about Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol and wrote the SCUM (society for cutting up men)-manifest. Feminist, queer, dark, beautiful, heartbreaking, brilliant.
Have a bit, in my translation: “The student bed is a place of darkness and lonely veritgos. Cosmo in the sheets in her yellow hair, conviction and desire, that body that wants to work its way into you and disappear there. Your own is a target that has nothing to do with Valerie. Only that blistering carbonated feeling again in your arms, do what you want and whatever you do let it go fast, like everything closes its eyes and waits and the rigor mortis takes over the room. At first you’re afraid of everything at Maryland, of Cosmo, of her kisses, of the professors, the lecture halls, the middle class girls, the middle class boys. Then you burst through the corridors with Cosmo in your hand, unbeatable, with the brain burning from longing for science and future.”
(Sara Stridsberg, Drömfakulteten, p. 171).
Have you read any? Got other recs? Please tell! :)