Pride Month Sale + Reading List!
Happy Pride! At Book*hug, we’re celebrating our LGBTQ2S+ authors in a few ways. Firstly, we’re holding a Pride Month Sale! Save 25% off all available titles from June 15 to June 30 at 11:59pm. Use code PRIDE2023 at checkout. Discount applies to all print books, eBooks, and audiobooks. Excludes all forthcoming fall 2022 releases.
We also have a reading list below, spotlighting some of our incredible LGBTQ2S+ authors and stories. And if you haven’t already heard, we’ve partnered with curated streaming service MUBI for weekly film and book pairings. As a Book*hug reader, we’re offering 30 days of Pride Unprejudiced, MUBI’s hand-picked collection of great queer cinema—entirely free. Read on for our reading list and to learn more about our partnership with MUBI!
Read with Pride!
Lent by Kate Cayley
In these peculiar times, we are thrust back into ourselves in a kind of suspension: one in which only private life exists yet threatens to become trivial through a sense of mutual, overarching dread.
Lent from award-winning writer Kate Cayley is built from this tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary—large and small—converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments.
Crying Wolf by Eden Boudreau
Crying Wolf is a gripping memoir that shares the raw path to recovery after violence and spotlights the ways survivors are too often demonized or ignored when they belong to marginalized communities. Boudreau heralds a new era for others dismissed for “crying wolf.” After all, women prevailing to change society for others is also a tale as old as time.
Plenitude by Daniel Sarah Karasik
Shaped by Daniel Sarah Karasik’s experience of grassroots social and political advocacy, these poems are an offering to those engaged in struggles for a better world—and an acknowledgement of the sometimes contradictory meanings of those struggles. How do individual erotic desires relate to collective desires for deliverance from alienation and exploitation? How might we dream of a more humane future, and work towards building it, without minimizing the challenges that stand in our way?
Suture by Nic Brewer
Suture shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art. Each artist baffles their family, or harms their loved ones, with their necessary sacrifices. Eva’s wife worries about her mental health; Finn’s teenager follows in her footsteps, using forearm bones for drumsticks; Grace’s network constantly worries about the prolific writer’s penchant for self-harm, and the over-use of her vitals for art.
Permanent Revolutions: Essays by Gail Scott
From iconic feminist writer Gail Scott comes Permanent Revolution, a collection of new essays gathered alongside a recreation of her groundbreaking text, Spaces Like Stairs. In conversation with other writers working in queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories, including l’écriture-au-féminin in Québec and continental New Narrative, these essays provide an evolutionary snapshot of Scott’s ongoing prose experiment that hinges the matter of writing to ongoing social upheaval. Scott herself points to the heart of this book, writing, “Where there is no emergency, there is likely no real experiment.”
One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks
One Hundred Days of Rain exposes the inner workings of a life that has come apart. Readers will engage with Brooks’ poetic and playful constraint that unfolds chapter by chapter, where the narrator’s compulsive cataloguing of rain’s vicissitudes forms a kind of quiet meditation: an acknowledgement of the ongoing weight of sadness, the texture of it, and its composition—not only emotional weight, but also the weight of all the stupid little things a person deals with when they’re rebuilding a life.
Just Pervs by Jess Taylor
In Jess Taylor’s sophomore story collection, contemporary views of female sexuality are subverted, and women are given agency over their desires and bodies. Through these characters, sex is revealed to be many things at once: gross, shameful, exhilarating, hidden or open—and always complicated. Reminiscent of the works of Maggie Nelson, Mary Gaitskill and Chris Kraus, the stories in Just Pervs explore the strange oppression and illumination created by desire, the bewilderment of adolescence, and the barriers to intimacy both discovered within and imposed upon ourselves.
Cyclettes by Tree Abraham
Part travelogue, part philosophical musing, Tree Abraham’s work probes the millennial experience, asking what a young life can be when unshackled from traditional role expectations yet still living in consistent economic and environmental uncertainty.
Text is interspersed between drawings, scientific charts, ephemera, maps, arcane designs, and diagrams of cycles—of vehicles and of life, from the Buddhist Eightfold path to patterns of depression, desire, and motion. The result is a disarming, welcoming work that asks us to consider what the interflux of exploration and ennui mean to our locality within the universe.
Dream Rooms by River Halen
Part essay, part poem, part fever dream journal entry, Dream Rooms is a book about personal revolution, about unravelling a worldview to make space for different selves and realities. Set in the years that led up to author River Halen coming out as trans, this collection concerns itself with what sits on the surface of daily life, hidden in plain view, hungry for address. Deeply queer and trans not only in its content but in its thinking, Dream Rooms invites readers to that place in consciousness where fear and desire, hidden information and common knowledge brush up against each other and are mutually transformed.
Duct-Taped Roses by Billeh Nickerson
In Duct-Taped Roses, Billeh Nickerson shares heartbreaks and offers odes and elegies in reflections on family, community, life, and loss. As a bush pilot, Nickerson’s father would duct-tape his planes to keep them flying. The poignancy of his relationship with his father is celebrated here in the long poem “Skies.” Other poems reminisce about love and the complex resiliency of gay men.
Through his signature irreverence, honesty and wit, Nickerson explores what can be repaired, what must be celebrated, and what—inevitably—is lost to time.
Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty by Bahar Orang
Part lyric essay, part prose poetry, Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty grapples with the manifold meanings and possibilities of beauty. Drawing on her experiences as a physician-in-training, Orang considers clinical encounters and how they relate to the concept of beauty. Such considerations lead her to questions about intimacy, queerness, home, memory, love, and other aspects of human experience. Throughout, beauty is ultimately imagined as something inextricably tied to care: the care of lovers, of patients, of art and literature, and the various non-human worlds that surround us.
Cane | Fire by Shani Mootoo
Throughout this evocative, sensual collection, akin to a poetic memoir, past and present are in conversation with each other as the narrator moves from Ireland to San Fernando, and finally to Canada. The reinterpretations and translation of this journey and its associated family history give meaning to the present. Through these deeply personal poems, and Mootoo’s own artwork, we begin to understand how a life can not only be shaped, but even reimagined.
We All Need to Eat by Alex Leslie
We All Need to Eat is a collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolves around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver. Through thoughtful and probing narratives, each story chronicles a sea change in Soma’s life. Lyrical, gritty, and atmospheric, Soma’s stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person’s journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment.
Umbilical Cord by Hasan Namir
Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winner Hasan Namir shares a joyful collection about parenting, fatherhood, and hope. These warm, free-verse poems document the journey that he and his husband took to have a child. Between love letters to their young son, Namir shares insight into his love story with his husband, the complexities of the IVF surrogacy process, and the first year as a family of three. Umbilical Cord is a heartfelt book for parents or would-be parents, with a universal message of hope.
This selection of books is far from complete; we encourage you to explore our online shop, or your local independent bookstore, for more equally brilliant books by members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community.
Book*hug Press x MUBI presents Pride Unprejudiced!
To celebrate Pride Month, we’re partnering with MUBI for a weekly pairing of a title by one of our LGBTQ2S+ authors with a film from MUBI’s Pride Unprejudiced collection of queer cinema. So far we’ve looked at Permanent Revolution: Essays by Gail Scott with James Ivory’s The Bostonians, Duct-Taped Roses by Billeh Nickerson with Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced, and Suture by Nic Brewer with João Pedro Rodrigues’s Two Drifters. Check back on our Instagram for the last two pairings in the coming weeks!
Don’t forget that all of these books are 25% off as part of our Pride Month Sale! And all films can be streamed with a 30 day trial from MUBI, on us.
That’s all from us for now, happy Pride and happy reading!
