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486 books match the query 'LGBTQ+' and 14 start with h

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Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking

C. T. Salazar

Acre Books, 2022

The coming-of-age chronicle of a queer Latinx Southerner.

In C. T. Salazar’s striking debut poetry collection, the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South’s historic and ongoing violence. His restless relationship with religion (“a child told me there was a god / and because he was smiling, I believed him”) eventually includes a reclamation of the language of belief in the name of desire. “I felt myself become gospel in your hands,” the speaker tells his beloved. And, as the title poem asserts, a headless body “leaves more room for salvation.”

Though Salazar’s South is not a tender place, the book is a petition for tenderness, revealing in both place and people the possibilities for mercy, vulnerability, and wonder. The lyric I, as it creates an archive of experience, is not distanced from the poems’ subjects or settings, but deeply enmeshed in a tangled world. In poems with lush diction, ranging from a sonnet crown to those that explore the full field of the page, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking seeks—and finds—where the divine resides: “Praise our hollow-bell bodies still ringing.”

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Henry James and the Queerness of Style

Kevin Ohi

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Kevin Ohi begins this energetic book with the proposition that to read Henry James—particularly the late texts—is to confront the queer potential of style and the traces it leaves on the literary life. In contrast to other recent critics, Ohi asserts that James’s queerness is to be found neither in the homoerotic thematics of the texts, however startlingly explicit, nor in the suggestions of same-sex desire in the author’s biography, however undeniable, but in his style.

For Ohi, there are many elements in the style that make James’s writing queer. But if there is a thematic marker, Ohi shows through his careful engagements with these texts, it is belatedness. The recurrent concern with belatedness, Ohi explains, should be understood not psychologically but stylistically, not as confessing the sad predicament of being out of sync with one’s life but as revealing the consequences of style’s refashioning of experience. Belatedness marks life’s encounter with style, and it describes an experience not of deprivation but of the rich potentiality of the literary work that James calls “freedom.” In Ohi’s reading, belatedness is the indicator not of sublimation or repression, nor of authorial self-sacrifice, but of the potentiality of the literary—and hence of the queerness of style.

Presenting original readings of a series of late Jamesian texts, the book also represents an exciting possibility for queer theory and literary studies in the future: a renewed attention to literary form and a new sounding—energized by literary questions of style and form—of the theoretical implications of queerness.

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Here Is a Game We Could Play

A Novel

Jenny Bitner

Acre Books, 2021

A dreamlike novel set in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Here Is a Game We Could Play is the story of Claudia, an intelligent eccentric trapped in the rundown industrial town she grew up in—a place plagued with troubling memories and hidden threats. Seeking escape from tedium, loneliness, and her obsessive fear of poisoning, Claudia retreats into books. . . and into a fantasy life with her perfect lover, to whom she addresses letters about her life, all the while imagining outlandish sexual scenarios.

In each fantasy, her lover takes a different form, ranging from a prison guard in a world where metaphor is forbidden, to a more-than-brotherly Hansel from the Grimms’ fairy tale, to a tentacled mind-reading space alien. All share a desire for a deep intimacy that eludes Claudia, even as she forms new real-life relationships and reconsiders her sexual identity—building a rapport with an elderly volunteer at the library, striking up a friendship with a wily temp at her dead-end job, and embarking on a passionate affair with Rose, the town’s new librarian. When paranoia threatens to ruin her relationship with Rose, Claudia is forced not only to combat her anxiety but to face the unresolved trauma in her past—the disappearance of her father on a night she has long repressed.

Funny, dark, inventive, and moving, Here Is a Game We Could Play is an original debut novel recalling the work of Aimee Bender, Angela Carter, Rebecca Brown, and Margaret Atwood.

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Hidden Path

Elena Fortún

Swan Isle Press, 2020

Set in early twentieth-century Spain, Hidden Path is a lyrical coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of a woman painter who struggles to find her way with art and with the women she loved. The novel is narrated in the first-person, following María Luisa as she reflects on her life from the turn of the twentieth century through the outset of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939). She recalls growing from an imaginative tomboy into a docile wife and mother before claiming her independence as a portrait painter in Madrid’s bohemian and queer circles. Along the way, she introduces us to a lively cast of characters who both hinder and encourage her efforts to blaze her own path. The poetic and sensuous language of María Luisa’s private reveries comingles with agile dialogue as the protagonist leads us through her life.

Best known in Spain as a writer of children’s literature, Elena Fortún left this manuscript unpublished at the time of her death in 1952, as its semi-autobiographical content risked provoking homophobic backlash under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The first Spanish edition appeared in 2016 and was hailed as Fortún’s adult masterpiece, a previously unknown complement to her children’s saga Celia and Her World. This edition, with Jeffrey Zamostny’s sensitive and nuanced translation, marks the novel’s first time appearing in any language aside from Spanish; it is also the first of Fortún’s works to appear in English. With an insightful foreword by scholar Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles, this volume will be an influential contribution to women’s studies, LGBT histories, and Spanish literature and culture.

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Hidden San Francisco

A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes and Radical Histories

Chris Carlsson

Pluto Press, 2020

"Carlsson brings his unique combination of erudition, curiosity and passionate progressivism to a remarkably wide range of subjects—from the city’s profaned natural glories, to little-known episodes in its labor history, to a Homeric list of people, organizations and movements" —Gary Kamiya, Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle

Hidden San Francisco is a guidebook like no other. It’s a radical, alternative guidebook and history of San Francisco, complete with maps detailing walking and bike routes around the city.

San Francisco is an iconic and symbolic city. But only when you look beyond the picture-postcards of the Golden Gate Bridge and the quaint cable cars do you realize that the city's most interesting stories are not the Summer of Love, the Beats or even the latest gold rush in Silicon Valley.

Carlsson delves into the Bay Area's long prehistory, examining the region's geography and the lives of its inhabitants before the 1849 Gold Rush changed everything, setting in motion the clash between capital and labor that shaped the modern city. Structured around the four major themes of ecology, labor, transit and dissent, Chris Carlsson’s book peels back the layers of San Francisco's history to reveal a storied past: behind old walls and gleaming glass facades lurk former industries, secret music and poetry venues, forgotten terrorist bombings, and much more.

From the perspective of the students and secretaries, hippies and beatniks, longshoremen and waitresses, Hidden San Francisco uncovers dozens of overlooked, forgotten and buried histories that pulse through the streets and hills even today, inviting the reader to see themselves in the middle of the ongoing, everyday process of making history together.

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High Ground Coward

Alicia Mountain

University of Iowa Press, 2018

Alicia Mountain’s urgent and astonishing debut collection maps a new queer landscape through terrain alive and sensual, defiant and inviting. With a voice that beckons while it howls, Mountain nimbly traverses lyric, confessional, and narrative modes, leaving groundbreaking tracks for us to follow. High Ground Coward offers fists full of soil, leftovers for breakfast, road trip as ritual, twins of lovers and twins of ourselves. This world blooms with hunger-inducing detail, its speakers asking us to consider what it will take to satisfy our own appetites while simultaneously trying to nourish one another. “Ferocious, even the softest part,” Mountain shows us “a way to fall in love with wanting,” leaving us “ravenous, but gradually.”

Bearing witness to identity formation in solitude and communion, High Ground Coward is an almanac of emotional and relational seasons. Mountain’s speakers question the meaning of inheritance, illness, violence, mythology, and family architecture. Whether Mountain is at work revealing the divinity of doubt, the entanglement of devotion, or the dominion that place holds over us, High Ground Coward heralds a thrilling poetic debut.

From “Scavenger”

We three eat food and are in love. This is the easy way to say

there are stores beneath the floor.

Potatoes and shallots,

hard-necked garlic streaked purple,

jars beside jars, themselves

each staving globes of suction.

Preservation, a guardian hunger.

In the evening I whisper to the boiled beet,

like a naked organ in my flushed hand:

You are ground blood,

you are new born,

you have never been nothing—

thawfruit seedflower greenstart rootbulb

handpull shedscrub mouthsweet

and again.

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Hogg

A Novel

Samuel R. Delany

University of Alabama Press, 2004

A fearless descent into the darkest corners of human desire and violence.

First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, award-winning author Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg is one of America’s most famous “unpublishable” novels. It recounts three days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, Delaney’s novel portrays an exploration of erotic depravity, a capacious landscape of sexuality that transgresses social and erotic boundaries.

While testing readers’ tolerance, what transfigures the novel into a work of literature is Delany’s refusal, faced with moral anxieties and revulsion, to mutilate or disown his creation. Hogg’s characters wear recognizable human faces, possessing intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and a kind of integrity. Hargus fascinates. He is the embodiment of what society can turn people into, the decaying condition of the human soul.

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