BiblioBitch

Need some new reading material? These three new indie comics by Kate Skelly, Angie Wang, and Julia Gfrörer will take you from an outer galaxy to a zombiefied forest, and will keep you occupied (and perhaps up all night with every light turned on). Click through for more!

  

GeekRadical.org is in its final push in a Kickstarter campaign to publish a Feminist Speculative Fiction anthology through PM Press. The goal is to “emphasize women's speculative fiction from the mid-1970s onward, looking to explore women's rights as well as gender/race/class/etc. from as many perspectives as possible.”

The Vanishers is four-time novelist and Believer founding editor Heidi Julavits's new work, and it has a really, really bright cover. It's a good book, for the most part, and an interesting book, and I promise I'll talk about it in an interesting way for the rest of this post, but first I have to talk about the cover. Remember folks, never judge a book by its cover! Except I feel like this one, with its masses of blinding and hyperdetailed flowers crowding the dust jacket and threatening to take over the text of the title itself, captures pretty well what's going on between those pieces of cardboard, which is: a LOT.

In this age of literary Jonathans, I am always on the lookout for some good solid realism by women, about women's experiences, that doesn't feel like it has to scream from its pink and lime green cover, "WARNING: YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ A BOOK ABOUT A WOMAN." Thankfully, I have found Katherine Karlin's new book. Send Me Work is an extremely thoughtful and often funny collection of short stories about people who also happen to be women who also happen to work.

CALYX Journal begins its 36th year of publishing fine art and literature by women with its winter 2012 issue (vol. 27, no. 3). This self-described feminist literary journal allows women’s voices to be front and center, which is why its four female founders created it in 1976.  Referencing a recent survey conducted by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts the introduction in the summer 2011 issue of CALYX points out that women’s voices are still highly marginalized in the literary journals and magazines, making their mission as relevant as ever.

One of my 2012 resolutions is to get back in the books game. I'm resolving to read two new(ish) books a month, even if it means cutting down on the number of TV episode recaps I read online. What about you? Do you have any literary resolutions (or suggestions for contemporary books to add to my growing list)?

Sometimes the best books about sex simply state the obvious: masturbation feels good, most women require direct clitoral stimulation to orgasm, fat people have and (gasp!) enjoy sex (and with all kinds of partners!). Hanne Blank's newly released edition of Big, Big Love is a prime example of how sex shame can be fought hardest by basic acknowledgment and normalization, sending us the big, big, loving message that no one should be deprived of a pleasurable, healthy and satisfying sex life. The second-coming (har-har) of Big, Big, Love (first published in 2000) is more of a total overhaul of the old version, complete with new illustrations, modern gender- and sexual-identity inclusion, interviews that tackle everything from "fatshion" to the carnal joys of flesh-folds, and a current resource list that makes it clear that Blank isn't the only one having, promoting, and writing about hot n' heavy, sexy, sexy sex.

Dorianne Laux's fifth book of poetry, The Book of Men, was released earlier this year. Spoiler alert: It is NOT ACTUALLY A BOOK OF MEN. It is a book of earth, and sex, and war, and food, and even a book of Cher. Yep. Cher. After reading The Book of Men I immersed myself in Laux's other books, and have emerged remembering what is best about reading poems.

"Our life here is just like an old horror movie," muses the loquacious, inscrutable Raquel Motherwell near the end of Rebecca Wolff's debut novel, The Beginners. "It's like the skeleton of the horror novel hanging in the closet with all the suits and dresses that we never wear. Young couple moves to small New England town. House drafty, locals suspicious. Strange friends, omens of doom. Unreliable narrator. Cows lowing in the fields, arcane pagan religious festivals."

The Beginners does play tantalizingly on Raquel's friendly and familiar formula for a hair-raising tale, though the reader learns early on that one shouldn't trust any story Raquel's telling. We also can't trust her husband, Theo. And to make matters worse, the unreliable narrator that Raquel so self-referentially mentions is actually neither Raquel nor Theo. That distinction belongs to Ginger Pritt, the precocious fifteen-year-old who guides us along her dreamy and sometimes sinister path of awakening in the tiny Massachusetts town of Wick.

What if the Rapture happened, but it wasn't like anyone had expected? In fact, what if "Rapture" might not be the right word, considering that the millions who vanished were of numerous different faiths and the date didn't align with anyone's holy texts? How would the people who lost everyone they loved live with their grief, and how would untouched families manage their guilt?

The Kirkus Review hails The Leftovers as Tom Perrotta's "most ambitious book," a claim that at first seems obvious for a writer whose previous works have centered on realistic suburban angst. However, despite its more imaginative set-up, The Leftovers is about exactly the same things as Perrotta's other novels: struggling to find contentment, doomed love affairs, and growing up.