Queer Authors Spotlight
This Pride Month, we wanted to highlight a few titles by queer authors from our catalog to add to your shelves and reading lists this summer, from a queer coming of age Brazilian road trip novel to a 1950s modern classic of repressed queer desire:
The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong (tr. Kristin Gehrman)
Elena Ferrante meets Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt in this 1950s classic of repressed queer desire, set against the rising threat of WWII. A groundbreaking work in its time for its frank and sensitive depiction of the love between two women torn between desire and taboo in the years leading up to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.
“De Jong depicts the darker, dangerous side of the world of same-sex desire, and the way it’s a source of torment—physical and psychological—for those who exist within it.”—The Paris Review
We All Loved Cowboys by Carol Bensimon (tr. Beth Fowler)
Two women reunite after a falling out to embark on a long road trip through Brazil. Bensimon offers an intimate exploration of desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of female sexuality in this queer, Sad Girl coming-of-age road novel.
"This short but profoundly moving novel by the young Brazilian writer is one of the finest explorations of love you will find anywhere this year."—The Boston Globe
Lecture by Mary Cappello
Blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history, Cappello explores the lecture in its many forms―from the aphorism to the note―and gives new life to knowledge’s dramatic form. Drawing on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, it is an attempt to restore the lecture's capacity to wander, question, and excite.
“A lively and playful challenge to resuscitate a form that has been considered all but dead.”—Kirkus Reviews
Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver (tr. Julia Sanches)
Moving through geographic and intellectual spaces with an abiding curiosity and poetic ease, Oliver presents a brilliant collection of essays that asks us what it means to leave the familiar behind and make the unfamiliar our own.
“Oliver debuts with a thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and home. In intimate pieces studded with references to history and literature, Oliver ponders such topics as the tug of home and the consequences of dislocation... Fans of lyrical essays will enjoy this literary global odyssey.”—Publishers Weekly