Mid May 2025
Human book recommendations from a human book reader & writer
Hello from the epistemic collapse! I guess my niche here is going to be “recommended books that actually exist.”
I’m just back from a sweet trip to DC where we saw queer family & celebrated Black lesbian love & ate delicious food & watched homosexual bocce (go Pink Pallino Club!) & spent time at the phenomenal Blacksonian & basically only interacted with leftists & queers & lawyers holding the line against creeping fascism & that was a relief. We took the train & I read three books with such deep pleasure & will discuss below. Take a train! Highly recommended.
Stray thoughts:
I met a really nice chatty grandpa at the Y this morning who wanted to tell me about his trans granddaughter & also about how he expresses his dislike of Netanyahu via yarmulke decor.
Did you already know that in the Signalsphere, the kids say “the People's Valley”? As you might imagine, I will be adopting that usage going forward.
I’m sad Alice Notley died & I’m glad Alice Notley lived. I have a strong good memory of reading The Descent of Alette on Downey Street, in that funny little downstairs bedroom, then writing my Persephone story, one of the first myths I re-wrote. Thank you for the poems, Alice Notley.
Reading log (mid-April to mid-May)
Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot (2024). Recommended by Charlie Jane Anders, found on the shelf at the marvelous Head House Books in Philly. I could not put this book down & fell asleep holding it only to wake up & finish in the morning. A smart & satisfying feminist novel about Annie, an “autodidatic Cuddle Bunny” aka sentient android designed as a sex robot who comes to understand herself as a person, through her conflictual relationship with Doug, the adult human man who buys & trains her after his divorce from an adult human woman who didn’t take his bullshit. One of the most compelling explorations of the limits of “passing” I’ve ever read.
Vivian Blaxwell’s Worthy of the Event (2025). Keywords: disappointment, Buddhism, animals, translation, sex, friendship, shit. I can already tell I’ll return to this powerful series of essays, just to spend more time thinking alongside the brilliant & luminous Vivian Blaxwell. Also she has an extremely cute cat, with whom I have a parasocial relationship, full disclosure. Also, if you aren’t automatically buying everything Little Puss puts out, it’s not too late to start!
Shon Faye’s Love in Exile (2025). A deep exploration of love & thus sex, romance, social media, friendship, addiction, family, self-knowledge, being a writer, success, despair, community. I read this straight through & only later realized it was a book of essays. I think this will pair nicely with Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season if you are looking for a little syllabus on love this summer.
Rav Grewal-Kok’s The Snares (2025). Do you need a satisfying, smart, twisty, political thriller with actually good politics? Yes! Worth buying a ticket on a long train journey to read this book as it should be read. Makes this a series, Hollywood!
Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men (1995), trans. Ros Schwartz (2022). A gorgeous new translation of this weird Belgian novel from the 90s, this “ambiguous heterotopia” (as Delany subtitled Triton). Jess Row literally bought me this book at the AWP bookfair & pressed it into my hands, an epic friendship-solidifying flex I will never forget. He was like, you have to read this. Very serious. I get it now. The unnamed narrator is the youngest of 40 women held captive by mysterious guards in an underground bunker & becomes their leader. It’s intense but not, like, Octavia Butler intense. More like Beckett intense. Do you need more than that? Better if you go in cold.
Anna Maria McElmore’s The Influencers (2025). Super fun mystery with actual surprises & pleasurable for those of us with lightly parasocial relationships to, say, The Holderness Family! So fun to read McElmore’s first novel explicitly for adults! We were Lambda Retreat buddies in 2011 & I’m always rooting for them. Notably, this is another title from the list of a great young queer editor, Katy Nishimoto. I should probably do a profile on the great queer & trans editors of our day. Do you want that?
Maggie Nelson’s Pathemata (2025): In some ways a followup to Bluets, but so much dreamier. The poet in midlife. I love thinking along Nelson’s lines, how she put sentences together such a familiar pleasure. It’s always strange to read memoir by writers you know & that kind of dreamy slippage is in many ways the book’s investigation, though it’s “about” chronic pain.
Olga Ravn’s The Employees (2020), trans. Martin Aitken (2022). Argh! So good. I’m reading this quite slowly & thinking many thoughts about the archive.
We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America. Ed. Brando Skyhorse & Lisa Page (2017). Charlie Jane made a comment that she hadn’t thought of Annie Bot as a novel of passing, then I read The Lilac People, then I saw this book at the Odyssey & now I’m back down the rabbithole of narratives of passing. I once took a graduate class on the topic & the professor had an interesting pedagogy where he never lectured but had a different graduate student teach each class of the semester. I think I taught Danzy Senna’s Caucasia. Anyway, I can’t get enough. Gabrielle Bellot’s piece in this anthology is a standout.
Milo Todd’s The Lilac People (2025). Perfect for anyone interested in Magnus Hirschfield, Weimar Germany, transmasc WWII stories! I had such a lovely conversation with Milo recently at the Odyssey. Read his essay on writing historical fiction here!
Hotly Anticipated! Pre-order these babies!
Caro de Robertis’s So Many Stars: an Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color (May 2025). Out now! I am going to go get it!
Alison Bechdel’s Spent (June 2025). Um you guys, Alison Bechdel has a new book! Summer is saved!
Shoshana von Blankensee’s Girls Girls Girls (August 2025). All I ever want is to know what it feels like for a femme, & Girls Girls Girls delivers, big-time. I mean, what’s not to love about queer teenagers running away to San Francisco after high school, working at the Chez Paree, discovering the mid-90s Mission, & having adventures far from home? Shoshana Von Blankensee’s first novel is luminous, insightful, tender, & hot. I love this book!
Kay Gabriel’s Perverts (September, 2025). Kay Gabriel is one of my favorite poets. Have you read A Queen in Bucks County yet? Or Kissing Other People? I am super excited for this one & will report back when I get my hot little hands on it.
Lana Lin's The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (September 2025). Excited to read this! I would 1000% have bought this for the cover alone but Lana Lin is brilliant & I’m excited.
George Whitmore’s Nebraska (October 2025). The great Ben Estes & Song Cave are bringing this queer treasure back into print. Here’s my blurb: George Whitmore's rawboned disturbing masterpiece chronicles working-class queer Midwestern life in the 1950s through the coming-of-age of a boy & his uncle. Nebraska belongs in the canon of novels that look tenderly on the horrors of familial homophobia & state repression. Whitmore’s prose calls to mind Willa Cather & William S. Burroughs & even Jack Kerouac. Too much of our literature has been lost to the ongoing pandemics of AIDS & homophobia. We are very lucky to have this gorgeous edition of this lost classic, to be so haunted.
Erin O. White’s Like Family (November 2025). Excited for this novel about queer family, from a long-time Western Mass writer!
Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn (March 2026). My bestie’s second novel is coming soon! Dude! So good! Not just saying that! It’s like literally a fictional autobiography of his mom & I am here to tell you that she was an intense lady with a legendary sense of humor (obviously hereditary) & is an amazing character. All hype aside, Jordy has done something remarkable here, using fiction to investigate gender, familial homophobia & transphobia, Jewishness & Zionism, memory & self-delusion, all at an angle & including birds.
Max Delsohn’s Crawl: Stories (2026). My dude. Young melancholy trans guys & various masc-gendered people behaving badly in early adulthood — I mean, you knew I was going to love this & I do! There’s a bit of a transmasc Mary Gaitskill vibe to the stories if that makes any sense. It’s a pleasure to have some transmasc literary realism for once in our lives. I am going to write a proper blurb but you heard it hear first. Watch this guy. Max Delsohn.
Natalie Adler’s Waiting on a Friend (May 2026). I’ve read this gorgeous & heartbreaking novel a few times now (not to brag) & each time I’m completely sucked in & devastated & awash in a feeling of somebody gets it! about the moment of queer life in NYC that was ending right as I showed up in the late ‘80s. I am astonished by the success of Adler’s “affectual accuracy” (to use Hugh Ryan’s term) — Adler gets the feeling of the time more right than almost any historical fiction I’ve read about the early-middle height of AIDS in NYC. It’s funny, moving, wildly perceptive about queer relationships. Did I mention that it’s a sort of retelling of Ghostbusters, where the Ghostbusters are the bad guys in the 80s queer downtown world? Go pre-order now, thank me later.
Art & Museums
Is anything the matter? Drawings by Laylah Ali. UMass Amherst Museum of Contemporary Art: I’m so glad I got to see this retrospective before it closed in May! Here’s a comic about the show. A person forgets how many good art museums there are here in the People’s Valley.
National Museum of African American History and Culture: My first time. The architecture is profound, the built environment, how you follow a narrative from underground to the top floor. Feels more like an archive than a museum in some ways. There’s so much material, presented beautifully. Now that I’ve had the overview, I think next time I will try to do one floor per visit? Anyway, see it while you can (sorry to be grim).
Western Mass QT Lit Events & Online
05/29: Kaveh Akbar’s “Poetry and Spirituality,” 7 pm ET. Academy of American Poets, via Zoom.
06/05: Emet North, 7pm reading, 8:30pm dancing, Federal Street Books, Greenfield
06/22: Mike Curato, 7pm, Bombyx, Florence
08/13: Shoshana Von Blanckensee, 7pm, Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley
Workshops & Writing Coaches & Editorial, Mostly Online:
One of my favorite prose writers, Sara Jaffe, is once again offering A Writer in the World. Makes a terrific present (for yourself or others) for someone who’s just graduating college & wonders “How do I figure out how to be a writer in the world?”
One of my favorite poets, Oliver Baez Bendorf, is offering summer online workshops & coaching! Get on this.
John Cameron Mitchell is doing a Workroom masterclass: “Is This My Story to Tell?” this August, via Zoom. So cool! I love listening to JCM talk about making work. The high energy inspo we all need!
Do you need help with an academic book proposal or re-booting your academic book? Craig Willse is your guy.
Check out whatever’s being offered at Workshops for Gaza, Shipman Workroom, 24 Pearl Street, & Grub Street. These make good gifts too.
Small Press Traffic benefit auction has lots of cool opportunities!
What I’m Watching
Big Bang Theory S8-10 (Max). I’m sort of glad Wolowitz’s mom’s gone—maybe that will cut down on the exhausting fatphobia & ableism? I agree with Sheldon about Penny’s haircut.
Hacks S3 (Max). I did not like the beginning of this season at all but I stuck with it (through a few unpleasant episodes which apparently were part of the point) & was rewarded.
The Last of Us S2 (Max). Ugh okay I am all caught up. Dina! I’m going to be a dad! I love how everything Pedro Pascal does becomes about nongestational masc parenting. Also Bella Ramsey! Little buddy, I feel you. I do have to skim past the gore so it’s a quick watch for me but then many feelings after the fact.
The Studio S1 (Apple TV+). Hilarious & smart & fun & so so stressful. We had to play phone games during some of the most stressful episodes. When I was a child, I used to have to leave the room when Gilligan did something hijinks-y; now I just go tend to my Township. Anyway, this series is beyond delightful.
Tidbits
Two new substacks to check out: Téa Jones-Yelvington’s Transitional Wisdoms & Miranda Mellis’ You Are in Love with the Impossible.
Hey do you want a free month of Courtney Maum’s Before & After the Book Deal? Worth the paid subscription, but take a free month & see if you like. I have 3 left to give, just DM me & I will hook you up.
Cool Stuff Happening in The People’s Valley, As Per Usual
Drop-in classes at Spirit of the Heart. This queer/trans/feminist/inclusive martial arts studio offers self-defense classes & martial arts training & more for kids & adults. First class is free! Sometimes people need a safe place to hit things & also learn self-defense.
Support immigrant teens in the People’s Valley to get their licenses! (License is super hard to spell, btw. Thank you for your patience with my typos in this email.)
Trans Relocation Support WMass. If you need help relocating to Western Massachusetts from a hostile environment, check this out. Also, if you’re in Western Mass & can help, check this out. We are the ones who will help us!Relatedly, do you know about these Move to Thrive loans & The Rainbow Railroad?
Also, can you sign this if you are local? Northampton Divestment Petition: Divest From Entities Complicit In Human Rights Violations In Israel and Palestine
What else?
Exciting news! Paul is being translated into French, so glamorous! Stay tuned for a cool French cover. Somebody please invite me to France! I’ve never been, which feels slightly tragic. Relatedly, if you want to bring me to your campus (or somewhere else fun) next year, please contact Leslie Shipman at the Shipman Agency to hammer out details. I want to come places & am overwhelmed by logistics.
Also! Does anyone have an inexpensive (or free) place for a queer artist family member of mine to stay in Provincetown anytime during June 15-28? Lmk if you have a lead & I will be eternally grateful!
Sending love to you & yours,
AL
heck yes peoples valley.
I bloody love your Substack - so grateful for you sharing all these gold nuggets with us!