A young Palestinian author is stranded in Qatar after Palestinian authorities in the West Bank confiscated all copies of his latest novel and issued an arrest warrant for him — accusing him of including “sexual terms” in a provocative work that takes aim at taboo issues such as fanaticism, religious extremism and homosexuality.
The crackdown on 29-year-old Abbad Yahya has set off a wide public debate between the Palestinian society’s large conservative segment and the small liberal minority.
In a telephone interview, Yahya told The Associated Press that he was visiting Doha when he learned of the ban and the arrest warrant, published by the official governmental news agency. He said he is now stuck in the Qatari capital, fearing he would be arrested as soon as he returns home.
“I don’t know what to do. If I go back, I will be arrested, and if I stay here, I can’t stay far from my home and family,” he said.
The novel, “Crime in Ramallah,” tracks the lives of three young Palestinian men who meet in the city, which serves as the headquarters of the Palestinian government that rules in autonomous enclaves of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The youths work together in a bar, where the murder of a young woman takes place.
One of the three, a gay youth, is arrested and interrogated about the crime. Although he is cleared of any charges, the officers realize he is gay and they beat and humiliate him. He ends up moving to France, looking for a society that accepts him.
The second man faces huge outrage from members of his conservative family after they learn that he works in a bar that serves alcohol, which is banned by Islam. Later in the book, he turns into a religious extremist.
The third man is the boyfriend of the murdered woman. He is haunted by the killing, which he witnessed while remaining paralyzed, unsure whether he should chase the killer or try to save his dying girlfriend.
Unable to stand the torment any longer, he ends up killing himself. The scene is meant to symbolize the Palestinian national movement, which has failed to rescue the nation or deliver independence from Israel’s 50-year-old occupation.
“Like all societies in the region, our society is seeing the growth of fanaticism and extremism and is reproducing social conservativism,” Yahya said. “These trends appear in the society in a mixture of religious and national slogans.”
The novel makes fun of Palestinian leaders and portrays them as losers. It also includes some graphic sexual language that many see as unacceptable in this conservative society.
The criticism of the novel and its author has been widespread, even among his colleagues.
Yahya “went too far in crossing the red lines of Palestinian society,” said literature professor Adel Osta. “The novel presented a bad image of the Palestinian Authority, and it uses unfamiliar sexual words which drove the Palestinian Authority to ban it.”
The head of the Palestinian Writers Union, Murad Sudani, harshly criticized the writer, saying he wrote a “silly novel that violates the national and religious values of the society in order to appease the West and win prizes.”
“The job of the writer in our occupied country is to raise the hope and enlighten people — not to break the national and religious symbols,” Sudani added. “My freedom as a writer ends when the freedom of the country begins.”
Yahya said that since the warrant was issued, critics have started to threaten to harm him and his family. “I don’t know what else they are going to do,” he said.
Ghassan Khader, a Palestinian Facebook user, wrote on his page that Yahya “should be killed or arrested or deported.”
Another Facebook user, Hussein Mihyar, wrote on the page of the attorney general to praise the ban. “This novel serves the Israeli occupation and destroys our young generation,” Mihyar said.
The internationally backed Palestinian Authority has tightened its grip in the West Bank since losing control of the Gaza Strip to the Hamas militant group a decade ago. It has occasionally arrested or harassed critics over comments posted on social media.
The uproar over Yahya’s book, however, has helped increase sales.
One bookshop owner in Ramallah said that he sold 10 copies of the novel in its first two months of release. But on the day of the ban, he sold 17 copies — before police came and confiscated his remaining copies.
The book’s distributor, Fuad Akleek, said he was arrested at a bookshop “in a very humiliating way.”
He said police grabbed him and pushed him into a car without showing a warrant. Akleek said he was held for six hours before the Palestinian culture minister, Ehab Bsaiso, intervened and arranged his release. But he said police confiscated all remaining copies, about 500 in bookstores and 500 in libraries across the West Bank.
Akleek said he was surprised by the rough treatment because there is no legal requirement for obtaining a permit in order to publish or distribute books in the West Bank.
“It is not a crime to distribute a book,” he said. “The one who judges a novel and author is the reader.”
Bsaiso, the culture minister, has also urged the attorney general to cancel the book ban and Yahya’s arrest warrant.
This undated personal photo provided on Thursday, Feb. 9, 2017 shows Palestinian author Abbad Yahya. He is stranded in Qatar after Palestinian authorities in the West Bank confiscated all copies of his latest novel and issued an arrest warrant, accusing him of including “sexual terms” in a provocative work that takes aim at taboo issues such as fanaticism, religious extremism and homosexuality. The crackdown on 29 year-old Yahya has set off a wide public debate between the Palestinian society’s conservative old guard and small, young and liberal minority. (Abbad Yahyia via AP) The Associated Press
The charm of series is that the characters become old friends as we follow them through one book after the other and anxiously wait for the next one. The following mystery series with lesbian protagonists have been chosen for their excellent writing, surprising plot twists, and unusual, interesting characters. There’s a moderate level of romance ”as in most mysteries” but the love interests are not the emphasis. For a definition of “series”, I’ve used at least three books, but I want to mention Blue and The Last Blue Plate Special (Abigail Padgett) featuring Blue Carron, a reclusive lesbian social psychologist who lives in a half-built California desert motel. Although some of the series use professional crime-solvers to pursue the mystery, others feature sleuths in such professions as journalist, author, travel agent, and restaurant owner. Recommendations in alphabetical order.
For the past 25 years, Ellen Hart has been writing good summer reads about Jane Lawless, a restaurant owner in Minnesota, and her wacky sidekick, Cordelia Thorn. Hallowed Murder begins the series; Hart skipped only two years in publishing an annual addition to the series. The latest, The Old Deep and Dark, again features family problems as Jane saves Cordelia from another disaster. Here are the titles of this series in order of publication. https://www.goodreads.com/series/65509-jane-lawless
Another favorite is J.K. Redmann’s Micky Knightseries which begins in 1990 and is still going strong. Her skillful voice creates real settings and believable, caring characters who live in the real world of New Orleans both before and after Hurricane Katrina. Redmann deals with hard topics such as child abuse, human trafficking, and hurricane victims. A recurring character in the series is Dr. Cordelia James, sometimes a suspect in a murder, who is Micky’s on-again, off-again lover.
Death by the Riverside
Deaths of Jocasta
The Intersection of Law and Desire
Lost Daughters
Death of a Dying Man
Water Mark
Ill Will
The Shoal of Time
Katherine Forrest published the first of her series about police detective Kate Delafield in 1984. An LAPD ex-Marine homicide detective, Kate is militarily calm with a dogged determination to find the killer. Dealing more with character studies than mystery solving, the author slowly reveals personalities through the characters’ actions and interactions. Kate’s challenges come from chauvinistic and homophobic people in a world in which homosexuality is still illegal and feminism is still a nasty word.
Amateur City
Murder at the Nightwood Bar
The Beverly Malibu
Murder by Tradition
Liberty Square
Apparition Alley
Sleeping Bones
Hancock Park
High Desert
It’s been over a decade since my all-time favorite writer, Laurie King, published her last Kate Martinelli book in 2003, but I always hope for another one. San Francisco police detective Kate solves intricate, dark crimes of murdered children and homeless people while struggling with her complicated intimate relationship. As author of the Mary Russell series (Sherlock Holmes’ wife), King used a missing Arthur Conan Doyle manuscript in her final book of the series.
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
Night Work
The Art of Detection
The series from Mary Wings features Emma Victor from 1986 to 1999. Reminiscent of the old-time butch world, the clever and witty Emma Victor is a private eye who takes the reader through the compelling lesbian lifestyle in beautiful San Francisco after a rocky start in Boston. Through sub-plotting and meandering, the characters’ interactions, including casual sex and male-like stoic behavior, make the books fun.
She Came Too Late
She Came in a Flash
She Came by the Book
She Came to the Castro
She Came in Drag
Over a decade ago, Nicola Griffith introduced lesbian hero Aud Torvigen, a tough, ex-police lieutenant from the elite “Red Dogs” who has seen it all. Making Atlanta her home, Aud solves crimes as she kills without hesitation and without remorse, emotionally removed from the world. Icy-cold and hot at the same time, Aud is a character to follow.
The Blue Place
Stay
Always
British author Nicola Upson uses the Scottish playwright and murder mystery author Josephine Tey (aka Elizabeth MacKintosh) as the protagonist in this fictional series set in the 1930s. The atmospheric books about Great Britain that move between theater life in London and murders in rural England blend fiction with fact, include real characters in Upson’s world of murder. The first book, published in 2008, includes LGBT characters, but Tey’s lesbian relationship doesn’t occur until midway through the series.
An Expert in Murder
Angel with Two Faces
Two for Sorrow
Fear in the Sunlight
The Death of Lucy Kyte
Sandra Scoppettone’sLauren Laurano, a private investigator in New York City, started to solve crimes with humor and heart over two decades ago. The series begins with humor and ends with sadness but keeps the same charming character who seems like a close friend as she investigates deaths of friends and family.
Everything You Have Is Mine
I’ll Be Leaving You Always
My Sweet Untraceable You
Let’s Face the Music and Die
Gonna Take a Homicidal Journey
Sara Dreher’s slightly off-kilter character Stoner Mc Tavish entertains readers who like the unexpected. Through psychic connection and out-of-body-travel, Stoner is transported into different places and time periods, solving crimes and searching for her lover, Gwen. Helped by her fun-loving friend Mary Lou and her cool aunt, Stoner’s adventures are uplifting and crazy unusual. Sarah Dreher died in 2012, and I am saddened that both she and Stoner are gone.
Stoner McTavish
Something Shady
Gray Magic
A Captive in Time
Otherworld
Bad Company
Shaman’s Moon
Val McDermid was the first writer to hit the UK with a lesbian sleuth. Lindsay Gordon is a very feisty, very funny Scottish journalist who, with friends, family, and lovers, untangles conspiracies and exposes murderers. Her world is sometimes so dark that I’m reluctant to turn the page, but I always do. McDermid leaves the reader with unanswered questions and wanting another Gordon book.
Report for Murder
Common Murder
Open and Shut, Deadline for Murder
Conferences are Murder
Booked for Murder
Hostage to Murder
That’s my top ten – authors who succeeded in bringing back lesbian sleuths again and again, with style and amazing imagination. All these books should be in print and in libraries serving general populations.
Feeling helpless in the impending Trump administration? Author Gene Stone is here to help with his new book “The Trump Survival Guide.”
The new book, out Jan. 10 from Dey Street Books (a HarperCollins imprint), is a trade paperback priced at $9.99 that’s subtitled “Everything You Need to Know About Living Through What You Hoped Would Never Happen.”
Bereft for about eight days after the Nov. 8 election, Stone, a New York Times bestselling author with 40 eclectic titles of several genres to his credit, says he couldn’t bear to watch or read the news. “Survival Guide” was written over the next 12 days (“I’ve had magazine deadlines that were much longer,” he says) with the help of seven co-writers.
Its chapters are devoted to topics like civil rights, the economy, education, energy, national security, LGBT issues and more. It’s billed as a “serious call to action for all anti-Trump dissenters across the political spectrum” that “succinctly analyzes crucial social and political policies, explains how Donald J. Trump has the power to undermine them and provides concrete practical solutions ordinary people can use to fight back.”
Stone spoke to the Blade by phone from his office in New York City. His comments have been slightly edited for length.
Author Gene Stone has written 12 books that have made the New York Times Bestseller list. Five hit No. 1. (Photo courtesy Dey Street Books)
WASHINGTON BLADE: How did you channel your election funk into this project so quickly?
GENE STONE: After about a week of feeling sorry for everything, I decided, you know — and this is the point of the book — it’s one thing to be depressed and mopey and God knows I have friends who are still crying, but you have to do something. Being depressed doesn’t get you anywhere. Being dejected and crying doesn’t solve anything. … Sitting around doing nothing accomplishes nothing. I thought, “Well, I have to do something.” I’m not the deepest thinker in the world, but I’m certainly one of the fastest and I realized I could do this. I knew that I could turn this book around in a short period of time. I have a pretty solid publishing history so I knew I had the credibility to get a book contract for something like this. They knew I was dependable, that I’d done it before and could do it again. All that meant that I should do the book, I could do the book so therefore I felt I had to do the book.
BLADE: How unusual is this tight of a turnaround time in the book publishing world?
STONE: There was a time years ago when instant books were much more common. Bantam Books was famous for being able to turn around books in a couple of weeks. … It has actually gotten much less common because the way those books were often sold was through the bookstores that would support the book, put it on their counters and make people aware of it that way, but as bookstores have less and less market share, it’s actually harder to get something like this out now. A book like this on a counter priced at $10 is a very appealing prospect that doesn’t quite have the same appeal on Amazon …. so it’s become less and less common.
BLADE: Obviously all the chapters were important to you but did the LGBT chapter have any special significance being gay yourself?
STONE: I can’t really say any were less important than the others but when it came time to do the book — I had some friends help me; I couldn’t do it all myself, so I hired a few friends to help write, research and fact check, etc. — but I needed right away to come up with a template for each chapter and the LGBT chapter was the one I wrote first myself the night I got the book contract staying up till God knows when in the morning in order to get the template done because frankly, it was a chapter I knew really well. … That established the pattern for the rest of the book.
BLADE: When you mention the agencies readers may want to support at the end of that chapter, you mention GLAAD, GLSEN, Lambda Legal and others but only sort of mention the Human Rights Campaign, the largest, under “and don’t forget …” Why?
STONE: (pauses) As you can tell, I have some issues there.
BLADE: You also wrote “The Bush Survival Bible.” Did his presidency end up being better or worse than you expected at the outset?
STONE: Well, they’re in fact much different books. The Bush book was actually kind of a funny book. A mix of satire and jokes and some serious advice, but in the guise of a funny book. When Bush won, I was also depressed, unhappy, I didn’t like it, but at least Bush was in the ballpark. I didn’t agree with it, but there was no sense that the world was going to be turned upside down. The Trump book is not a funny book, it’s a serious book because I do have a strong sense that there’s a possibility that the world could be turned upside down and there’s nothing funny about that.
BLADE: Are there any lessons we can glean from the Bush years as a sign of things to come or is it not analogous enough to justify that sort of thinking?
STONE: Well, again, even with that Republican administration, even though we disagreed with so many of their policies, it felt nonetheless that there was some kind of dialogue available between the right and the left …. but I’m not getting that feeling with the Trump administration. Obviously it hasn’t started yet, but in looking at his cabinet picks and watching his first press conference, I’m not getting the sense that things are going to seem as normal as they seemed during the Bush administration so it’s almost like you look back and think, “Gee, could it ever be worse?” and now you realize, “Oh man, it is worse. It’s much worse.” So I’m not sure the lessons we learned in the Bush years really apply because we’re dealing with an entirely new creature and I don’t think he is going to abide by the rules. Previously there’s been a norm in politics and civil discussion that both sides, with a bit of a stretch, have maintained. We’re not seeing that now and that’s one of the things that worries me most.
BLADE: Does Trump’s impulsiveness and reactionary personality lessen the value we would ordinarily perhaps glean from all the endless prognostication and tealeaf reading we see at the outset of any administration?
STONE: Two months ago, I probably would have said yeah, but now we have been seeing a fairly consistent pattern so I’m beginning to think the mixed signals from Trump are a thing of the past. What we’re seeing now is a pretty consistent formula of appealing to the alt right or right policies. We haven’t seen anything to the left or even the center so it’s been pretty consistent. It feels like the inconsistency of the past is melting into this kind of dreary consistency.
BLADE: Ideology aside, is that a good sign or do you still feel he could go off on some crazy limb at any point?
STONE: Yeah, the latter. Obviously we don’t know what’s going to happen till it happens, but all the signals so far have been pretty negative if not very negative.
BLADE: What do you think was the biggest factor in Hillary’s loss?
STONE: That’s something we always want to do in the media, and I’m as much to blame as anybody else, but we want to talk about the thing, the one thing, that made this happen but I would say it was really a combination of the Comey letter, perhaps faulty campaigning on her part, the country wanting change and any number of other factors. I really think it was the imperfect storm of factors and remember — she did win the popular vote. … It was very close. He’s also coming in with the lowest favorability ratings since polling began.
BLADE: By design, this book will have a short shelf life. Are you OK with that?
STONE: That’s just the nature of a book like this — nobody will be reading this in two years. I write a lot of books. I co-wrote a book on how not to die based on plant-based diets and it’s sort of an antidote to the major causes of death in America and I like to think that book will be around for many, many years to come. … I’d be very happy if all the sales of this book took place in the next six months. For the lessons here to be applied, people need to read the book now.
BLADE: There are a lot of things one could point to — eight years of Obama, the Obergefell ruling, the outcry from the Trayvon Martin case and so on, that made it feel like we’d really turned a corner on the straight, white, old boys’ club in politics then bam, in one fell swoop the old boys’ club came roaring back to win the White House and both chambers of Congress. Is it just that entrenched or something else?
STONE: It does speak to entrenchment yes, but it also points to another factor that’s been prevalent in American politics since the beginning, its back and forth nature. Carter to Reagan, Bush to Clinton, Clinton to Bush, Bush to Obama — it’s been a lot of back and forth. And also the fact that they barely made it in this time makes me hopeful. I mean here we had a centrist, liberal woman running with very, very negative favorability ratings and yet she came really close to winning. I also like to think that unless the damage Trump does to our democracy is really overwhelming, that the pendulum will eventually swing back again.
BLADE: Did progressives get too complacent? If this shakes us from our complacency, is that the silver lining?
STONE: I agree with that. I think liberals have a tendency to think that we’re right. We know what’s right, we’re kind and decent and empowering. That’s the way humans are supposed to be but unfortunately, that’s not the way all humans are. We did get very complacent having a terrific president for eight years and this is going to shock us out of our complacency and hopefully make us work in a way we saw the Tea Party work. As much as I don’t agree with anything they stood for, I admire the way they got their objectives into the policies of America and we need to do the same. If my book is really about anything, it’s about fighting back and finding ways to take on the Trump administration, not by waiting four years to vote against it, but by turning every day of your life into some kind of act of resistance. If there’s anything that’s going to make me happy, and I’ve heard it a few times already, it will be to hear people say, “I read your book and I joined an organization or I donated money or now I’m going to go march in the women’s protest. The point of the book is to try to get people to move.
BLADE: But how much can really be accomplished in this environment. How was the Tea Party able to become such a force while, say, the Occupy movement seemed like it had difficulty sustaining itself or harnessing that energy into something with any measurable impact? Is the right just better at mobilizing than the left? How can you be effective when you’re not the group in power at any given moment?
STONE: Well, I think one of the things that motivated the Tea party is that it didn’t have a titular head. You couldn’t say so-and-so ran everything because it was such a grass roots thing taking place in so many parts of the country. We need to learn from that. You don’t need a powerful leader. You don’t need a spokesperson. Every one of us can be a spokesperson just as everybody in the Tea Party felt they could go to the media and say whatever they wanted, we can do the same. … I also think politics tend to trickle up from the local level and we just don’t seem to get that. We get all excited about presidents and senators but it starts with local representatives and school boards. We just don’t seem to organize on the local level the way the Tea Party can do.
For those who enjoy a mix of romance with their mysteries (or is it the other way around?), here are ten of my favorite lesbian sleuths. One characteristic that these series have in common is mature protagonists, although some of the first books begin when they are young. From P.I, FBI, police women, and reporters to a translator and a coffee shop owner, all these lesbians have become friends who I want to follow in future books.
Barbara Wilson’s Cassandra Reilly series are much more sleuthing than romancing, and the twists and turns between schemes and mistaken genders add to the laugh-out-loud humor. Each one is part travelogue as lesbian translator Cass travels the world and maneuvers between old and new girlfriends in her attempt to help friends. Co-founder of Seal Press, Wilson changed her name to Barbara Sjoholm in 2000. These endearing books were published between 1993 and 2000.
Gaudi Afternoon
Trouble in Transylvania
The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman: and Other Adventures with Cassandra Reilly
The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists
Elizabeth Sims’ protagonist Lillian Byrd is a reporter based in Detroit who is continually involved in huge mistakes of her own making. While Byrd fails to keep any long-term relationships, her love liaisons follow her as she frequently finds herself in a mess while summersaulting through funny, suspenseful, and sometimes gritty adventures. Plots in these page-turners are unpredictable, and the quirky well-developed characters go in unexpected directions. Sims is working on her fifth book, Left Field, featuring women’s softball.
Holy Hell
Damn Straight
Lucky Stiff
Easy Street
Erica Abbott partners Internal Affairs investigator CJ St. Clair, both personally and professionally, with Captain Alex Ryan. As a blond, gorgeous southern femme, CJ is a striking contrast to her dark, handsome love interest. No matter how many times this description has been used, Abbott manages to escape the predictable with very different voices and charm for each of them. Set in Colfax, Colorado, the Alex & CJ series, uses fast-paced plotting, sometimes exaggerated, as the two lesbians battle near-death disasters in shootouts while rushing to uncover a mysterious evil presence that could permanently separate the two of them.
Fragmentary Blue
Certain Dark Things
Acquainted with the Night
Jessie Chandler’s caper mystery series features Minnesota coffee shop owner Shay O’Hanlon who not only gets her friends out of trouble but also saves her badge-wearing lover, JT Bordeaux. The plots feature classic character types and the reversal of the protagonist getting her cop girlfriend out of trouble. Frothy and bubbly, this series is the lightest of the ten.
Bingo Barge Murder
Hide and Snake Murder
Pickle in the Middle Murder
Chip Off the Ice Block Murder
Lori Lake’sGun series begins with police patrol officer Dez Reilly saving Jaylynn Savage and her housemate Sara from rape and ends with the two stumbling through fire to finally be together. In between, the two struggle with personal and professional issues to be together as reserved Dez slowly drops her walls to let in love. With excellent pacing and foreshadowing, the strings of the plots and characters comfortably flow to completion in both the exciting police work and the characters’ development. Lake’s flawed characters are honest and believable, and the relationship is sweet as Jay believes that Dez is the same woman who has been protecting her since she was a child battling bad dreams. The fifth in the series, Gunpoint is projected for this winter.
Gun Shy
Under the Gun
Have Gun We’ll Travel
Jump the Gun
Lynn Ames’ Kate and Jay series covers several years between the time that TV reporter Katherine Kyle and news magazine writer Jamison “Jay” Parker first find each other in college only to lose and find each other through career changes and dangerous political conspiracies. The problem-solving within the power structure including politicians, espionage, and secret paramilitary organizations depicts the abilities of strong female role models. Especially notable are the excellent sense of setting, especially from the outdoor activities, and the fresh characterizations delineated through their behaviors. Each book brings in new characters to supplement the existing ones.
The Price of Fame
The Cost of Commitment
The Value of Valor
M. Aguilar’s Shana Niguel series features a private investigator and one-time FBI Agent who solves crimes with uninvited nudges (intuitions) and revelations. Complicated plotting leaves no loose ends as Niguel encounters rancher Kate Wolf, the women she learns to love. The humor of the series is complemented by captivating characters including her cohorts, madcap friend Guadalupe and supportive Aunt Grace as they move into different settings.
Chloe’s Heart
Double legacy
Circle Game
Loves you, Loves Me knot
E. Bradshaw’s FBI Special Agent Rainey Bell takes a leave from her job as a behavioral analyst after she is almost killed by a close friend from her childhood who turns out to be a serial killer. Her new job is her father’s bail bond business with Mackie, her dad’s best friend, as partner and Ernie as office manager. The three very different personalities spark the plotting, and Katie, the widow of Bell’s attacker and Rainey’s love interest, adds to the mix. Through Rainey’s family relationships and her relationship with Katie, the psychologically damaged protagonist slowly recovers from past evil despite her current job’s danger. Bradshaw’s plotting comes from an early fascination with true crime novels followed by an interest in the science of people who profile serial killers.
Rainey Days
Rainey Nights
Rainey Season
Colde and Rainey
Rose Beecham, Jennifer Fulton’s pseudonym, has fashioned a tough, take-charge FBI agent, Jude Devine, who lives and works in the emptiness and desolation of the Four Corners area of southeastern Utah. Posing as a sheriff’s deputy who investigates white supremacists, she is accompanied by her naive side-kick Tully, her wise Native American friend Eddie, and her on-and-mostly-off again lover Dr. Mercy Westmoreland. The author skillfully captures the bareness and desolation of the area and provides an insightful look at cults and extreme groups who band together in this unwelcoming country.
Grave Silence
Sleep of Reason
A Place of Exile
Sonje Jones’ Detective series involves Cornelia Osgood (Oz to her friends), a hard-boiled P.I. who jumps into one fine mess after the other chasing bad guys and women until she gets caught by her best friend, Abby O’Leary. Misunderstanding and trust issues separate them, and the plotting moves back and forth between Oz’s attempts to solve crimes and regain her girlfriend. In the opinionated, tough tone of Oz’s first-person narrative, she overrides and manipulates everyone around her.
“I’m honored and grateful,” author Jake Biondi said about his Boystown book series being included in the BookLikes.com “Best of 2016” book list. With an average customer rating of five stars, the “I’m honored and grateful,” author Jake Biondi said about his “I’m honored and grateful,” author Jake Biondi said about his Boystown book series being included in the BookLikes.com “Best of 2016” book list. With an average customer rating of five stars, the Boystown series continues to receive the highest possible rating on Amazon.com as well.
“I must say that this series just gets better and better,” wrote Marco Manganiello, founder of BookLikes.com. “I have been glued to my Kindle all week. Jake Biondi can’t write the next book fast enough.”
The Boystown series currently contains six books, the most recent of which was released Dec. 12, 2016. “It’s finally here and I couldn’t be more excited,” Biondi said of Boystown Season Six. “The fans’ wait is over and they can now discover what happened to their favorite Boystown characters whose lives were hanging in the balance at the end of the fifth book.”
“Being included in Marco Manganiello’s list of the best books of 2016 is a phenomenal honor and a great way to end a year that has been very good for Boystown.” Not only did 2016 see the release of two new books in the Boystown series, but it also continued the series’ trend of five-star reviews on Amazon.com.
“Jake Biondi is one of the most masterful writers of fiction of our time,” said Roger Ward in his review of the Boystown series. “The saga is told masterfully through several subplots which include unforeseen twists and turns that will leave the reader stunned and speechless.”
The Boystown book covers feature a group of models known as the “Boystown boys.” Created by designer/photographer James Franklin, each book cover showcases several of the famous models. Sean Zevran appears on the cover of Boystown Season Six. “The Boystown series adds life to a genre of literature that has been waning over the last few years,” said Zevran. “I see the potential for much more to come and I’m honored to be one of the faces of the series. Jake Biondi, myself, and the rest of the Boystown team have developed a phenomenal partnership and are planning to go very far with it!”
The introduction of the Boystown series’ first transgender character also occurred in 2016. Musician and YouTube sensation Skylar Kergil, who appears in the sixth book, said, “Jake Biondi’s inclusion of a trans masculine character, Ethan, puts this book on a ground-breaking level. The inclusion of alternative gender identities and diverse bodies allows us, the readers, to also explore our own thoughts about these sweeping, universal issues we all experience: love, identity, and passion.”
Biondi added, “I regularly receive notes from fans who connect with the characters and want to know what the future holds for them. The broad appeal of the Boystown series is incredible. Boystown has a really diverse audience and an equally diverse cast of characters.”
Two people meet under unexpected circumstances—and Heart Trouble abounds. Hope Finlay, ER doctor, has kept people at arm’s length since losing her mother and entering the foster care system at the age of eight. Hope is a loner, preferring to work nights and holiday shifts, sleeping and keeping to herself during the day. Occasionally, she chooses to come out into the daylight and play a game of racquetball with her friend, Jordan, another doctor at Griffith Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles.
Laleh Samadi keeps a long line of men at bay. They are the ones her Persian parents parade before her, hoping she will pull someone suitable out of the queue and marry him. But Laleh finds none of them enchanting enough to give them a second look. Then there’s Laleh’s racing heart issue—not the kind precipitated by a handsome suitor, but a physical issue: heart palpitations that she cannot control and that are growing more and more worrisome until a particular episode sends her to the emergency room, where Hope Finlay is on duty.
When Laleh collapses, Hope must save Laleh’s life using a defibrillator. She succeeds and Laleh finally gets the diagnosis and life-saving procedure she needs to return to a normal life. However, these two women find their lives are far from normal after their encounter in the ER and they find their existence is inexplicably changed.
After the life-saving action Hope takes to keep Laleh alive, the young Persian woman seems to be able to diagnose illness like a well-trained, seasoned physician. Hope can understand and converse in fluent Farsi, a language she didn’t speak or even understand prior to Laleh’s arrival in the ER. Added to these strange occurrences, the two women have exchanged their love of certain foods while harboring distaste for things they once enjoyed. The real upheaval begins when they start to experience each other’s emotions and the strong attraction that grows between them doesn’t help the turmoil, either.
Jae quickly asks us to suspend belief in this one, but the story is so unique, so appealing, so compelling, that it’s easy to do so. The characters of Hope and Laleh, although they come from very different experiences and backgrounds, struggle with similar issues that prevent them from getting too close to anyone who might claim their hearts. Flirty, even a little risqué, Jordan Williams is a challenging friend, who in the end proves herself to be supportive and sympathetic. Laleh’s family members are boisterous, earthy and just a little bit meddlesome. In her search for independence, Laleh’s aunt Nasrin, in whose restaurant Laleh works with aspirations to take over someday, proves to be a strong, loving ally.
Descriptions and medical information are skillfully written to be easily understood. Laleh’s food and cooking knowledge are well written and contribute to the story, enhancing who the character is. Dialogue is crisp and believable. Conversations among Laleh’s parents are especially delightful, even entertaining, as they try to keep her grounded in her heritage.
Within the context of this creative and captivating story, a romance blooms that is both curious and compelling. Consuming page after page, the reader will want to know more about these two main characters and find out if they will reject their heart trouble or embrace it and allow healing and wholeness to grow from their blossoming relationship.
In the end, the message that communication comes in many forms to create the ever-important basis of any relationship comes through loud and clear. Heart Trouble is full of tension and difficulties balanced with humor and romantic interludes that will thrill and entertain. The premise is creative and intriguing. It’s a story filled with sensuousness and imagination, written with skill and delivered with a dash of spice by an award-winning author.
Heart Trouble
By Jae
Ylva
Paperback, 9783955337322, 312 pp.
September 2016
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/fiction/11/14/heart-trouble-by-jae/#sthash.lmsVygHM.dpuf
Princess Princess Ever After is a warm-hearted graphic novel centered on the adventures of two strong-willed princesses. Playful in tone, this colorfully illustrated story was originally published as an online comic, but was later picked up by Oni Press for hardcover release. The story begins when Princess Amira rescues another Princess, Princess Sadie, from an archetypal tower. The two use some creative problem solving skills to make their way past the typical fantasy novel obstacles of ogres and evil sisters. Through the arc of the story, both characters learn to recognize their self-worth, their different strengths, and to appreciate each other.
The book feels as though it aims to reach young readers, giving them a cute story with happy young lesbians; yet some of the language and storytelling feels as though this is the kind of book that will land best with teenagers and older readers. The book does not shy away from addressing what is usually considered mature themes; the narrative directly takes on issues such as sexism and fatphobia. Sadie describes herself as “big-boned” and her sister includes “fat” in many of her tirades against her. Amira’s parents expect her to marry a man when really she wants to go adventuring. These are stories which teenagers can especially relate too as they begin to explore their place in the world. Although, let’s be honest, everyone can relate to the idea of failing parental expectations. I especially loved how the book spotlights Sophie’s kindness and compassion as a strength. The graphic novel also smartly highlights Amira’s fierceness and independence.
Katie O’Neills’ joyful and cute illustrations give the whole book a sense of fun. The ending provides an adorable cap to the story. (I won’t give away any spoilers, but I doubt anyone would be surprised how the story ends.) This is a book with a lot of genuine heart; it is an adorable book whose fable-like story is perfect for any princess or prince in your life.
While unearthing the cultural crossroads that formed the foundation of the Mudd Club and so many vital venues, Tim Lawrence absolutely nails what early the 80s New York City club scene was all about: “The venue was helping establish the foundations for a renaissance marked by convergence and exploration.” That’s right. Renaissance. Disco didn’t die–it shattered into a thousand mirror ball fragments that refracted artistic innovation, new technologies, emerging modes of self-expression, from punk to new wave, to rap and dance music. In a shockingly brief period of time, New York City was the center of an artistic universe in such a forceful way that it reshaped the city in particular and popular culture in general.
Lawrence focuses on the fulcrums: how clubs became spaces that, like never before, served as breeding grounds of cross-pollination: punk quivered and collapsed into New Wave, disco transmogrified (gloriously so) into a more amorphous type of dance music, which influenced rap, all while inspiring Basquiat, Keith Haring and their peers. It’s important to note that this book really digs into these spaces and the value of location, their formations and missions, the crazy or caring owners and the warring DJs and most importantly, the tribal attendees. I mean, what’s a dance floor if it isn’t packed?–meaning out sized personalities take a backseat to the soundtrack of a zeitgeist. And Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor has really deep grooves. The book races around SoHo and then up to the Bronx, down to Brooklyn, and then wherever clubs were popping up or music was being recorded and remixed. It’s a packed, meta-narrative. Exceptionally accessible (the author’s passion for his subject shows through on every page; it’s easy to imagine how his knowledge and genuine interest opened many a door and got people talking, telling tales recorded here that might not otherwise have seen the light of day), the raw, new energy of the city is accurately captured and conveyed. No small feat. But Tim Lawrence had already proven that he knows his stuff, having previously authored Loves Save the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 and Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. So he’s touched down on these various dance floors before. (Surely he played a part in the ongoing revival of Arthur Russell’s music.)
“We know a place where the nights are hot.”
—Afrika Bambaataa, Planet Rock
With advent of The Saint and the Paradise Garage gay nightlife became something to envy. These historic spaces are reverently brought back to life, with significant attention paid to how the DJs curated sensibilities unique to each venue. The arrival of AIDS in 1981 is duly noted and the reader’s knowledge of what is about to be unleashed haunts stories of which songs brought dancers to the edge, how hedonism was, for some gay men, a gateway to community and self-expression; drugs and sex and music were inseparable, confluent forces (which, in total agreement with said sentiment, I would like to add a hearty “fuck yeah”). In the end, The Paradise Garage might net a few more pages than The Saint, primarily because of the out sized personality of its famed resident DJ, Larry Levan. But the book is thick with clubs, from the Pyramid, Danceteria, the Roxy, and many other spaces, some quite short-lived but burning just as brightly.
Also of note: how certain singles (and their remixes), launched new genres, or at the very least quickly and quietly reformatted disco into dance music. The breakdown of Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s Planet Rock as well as The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five are nothing short of gripping and revelatory. Minor quibble: sure, New Order is British, but their 1983 single Blue Monday was so massive, such a game changer, that, though the song is mentioned here and there within the book, it really deserved a bit more attention.
Two huge pluses: each chapter ends with a set list of DJ favorites and the bibliography is like discovering your cool Dad’s secret record collection in the basement. The selected reading list will destroy your wallet, and the catalog of dance tracks will rewrite your playlists. I tend to try out new songs on YouTube and then see where the algorithm takes me; I was constantly setting this book down and trying out new songs or bands from my youth that I hadn’t thought about in ages (The Flying Lizards! And who knew Cyndi Lauper’s Money Changes Everything was a cover of a song by The Brains?), and then the next video would play–occasionally with sparkling synchronicity as it would be the very next group or artist Lawrence would then bring up in the book! Seriously, when’s the last time you read a book you could actually dance too?
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/09/18/life-and-death-on-the-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983-by-tim-lawrence/#sthash.JG7epoGb.dpuf
Is it possible for a novel to both break your heart and to heal it? Lucy Jane Bledsoe was named after her aunt Lucybelle Bledsoe who died when the author was six-years-old. She knew her aunt had left the family farm and moved to Greenwich Village, was intellectually brilliant, had never married, and, in 1966, died in a fire. There were also blurred family memories of a companion named Vera. Bledsoe took these snippets of knowledge and went on an odyssey of discovery where uncovered facts about her aunt’s life, the backdrops of the Cold War and Civil Rights Movement, the emerging science of climate research, and truths that only fiction can provide become combined into a novel honoring the life of her aunt as a scientist and a lesbian as well portraying the queer communities of the 50s and 60s.
I’ve always been intrigued by ice cores. Both for themselves in the way their layers and trapped bubbles of air reveal 800,000 years of stories about volcanoes, the extent of deserts, the rise and fall of sea levels, and the quality of the Earth’s atmosphere, but also because of the way they are a metaphor. If you drill deep enough into one person’s life, the world is revealed.
Odyssey is a good word for the author’s journey in writing this novel and for our experience in reading it, since Bledsoe brings us home. With great care to the history of the era and so much love, she creates a world in which her aunt Lucybelle works in a secret Cold War military research center (this is fact), and meets Lorraine Hansberry at a party and Valarie Taylor on a subway. Rachel Carson inspires her. Will Cather is her muse. Among Lucybelle’s lovers and dalliances are Broadway actors, librarians, photographers who chronicle the civil rights movement, scientists, and (my favorite) a woman who always carried a burgundy velvet satchel. This “trademark accessory was a miniature homosexual library, always stuffed with pamphlets, newspapers clippings, and books.”
Bledsoe is deft in the way she shows Lucybelle surrounded by various models of how to be a lesbian in the world of the 50s and early 6’s. She sees couples hermitically seal their relationship inside a windowless apartment. Only there are they together. Other women and men marry. Some betray their friends and themselves. And others are true to the core of who they are no matter what. At one point in her life, Lucybelle is spending some nights drinking in bars with her scientist coworkers and being one of the guys, and other nights having a passionate affair with a lesbian who then goes home to her long-term lover. Later in life, Lucybelle finds Vera, and here Bledsoe has the joy of creating a careful, wondrous courtship between women who have each decided the world will never allow them an intimate, honest, open relationship.
These days our communities have so much to celebrate as well as much to mourn. Having this story of Lucybelle and her world helps us. We get to know parts of where we came from. So our joy from triumphs in a courtroom or our screams of anger at yet another act of violence exist in a context. With this knowledge of the past, our responses become can become even richer, more poignant, and fierce.
A Thin Bright Line
By Lucy Jane Bledsoe
University of Wisconsin Press
Hardcover, 9780299309305, 336 pp.
October 2016
– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/09/26/a-thin-bright-line-by-lucy-jane-bledsoe/#sthash.8WhCU7lP.dpuf
Cathleen Schine’s They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a novel about reasonably pleasant people to whom nothing much happens except time, in all its ordinariness and brutality. That starts off as a weakness but, by the book’s end, turns into its core strength.
Given the Philip Larkin epigram that also lends the book its title (They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do), one might arrive expecting a somewhat darker look at family dynamics. In truth, nobody in this story of two octogenarians and their offspring—as devoted New Yorkers as they are casual Jews—is notably fucked up. In a moment of loneliness, it’s the matriarch, Joy, who invokes and inverts Larkin’s couplet, swapping in in “your son and daughter.”
But even Joy knows that her kids haven’t done anything so terrible. It’s true that they’re both more and less involved in Joy’s life than she’d prefer as she copes with her husband’s dementia and then death: more prone to judge her increasing disorganization, less physically and emotionally present.
Daniel lives nearby with his wife and precocious kids and does about what can be expected given that he’s a son, not a daughter. By comparison, Molly is the wayward child, having mystified her mother by leaving a perfectly good husband and marrying a woman in California.
Joy’s genial puzzlement in this area lends the book some of its funniest moments, likely to resonate with any woman equipped with both a wife and and elderly relatives. Joy refers to the couple as “The Two Girls,” and, for a holiday present, gives them “an opal and silver ring she’d found that Molly had liked as a child, she told them they could share it, there had to be some advantage to having your daughter marry a woman.”
At first it seems that Molly will be our primary guide through the book’s tour of old age and the way younger generations bob uneasily in its wake. But she never comes fully into focus: she’s a well-meaning and dutiful daughter, a bit of a meddler with a compulsion to tidy up messy surfaces and situations. What we see of her interior life is devoted mostly to her family—understandable, given that her senile father’s pastimes have started to include pantsless strolls through Manhattan. Still, as a dramatic center, she’s a little dull.
So it’s a relief when we realize that the animating consciousness of the story is really Joy. Schine takes pains early on to inform us that Joy is an extraordinary character who has always fascinated everyone around her; she’s “radiantly beautiful,” fathomlessly complex. This is not necessarily convincing, and in the end it’s simply not necessary: Joy is most compelling when she’s giving us an inside view of the universal absurdities of aging and grief.
Once her husband dies, the pace picks up and the humor gets grimmer. “Someday they would understand,” Joy muses about her children, who desperately want to believe in Joy’s façade of resilience. “They would feel sad the same way she felt sad about her own mother, about all the ways she had not been able to understand until she, too, was old. If only everyone could be old together.”
As a balm for sadness, Joy has her beloved New York City, a setting Schine handles nicely. Yes, it glows with nostalgic glamour and a “cosmopolitanism” that, for Joy, manifests mainly in the army of kindly immigrant caretakers and service workers conscripted to help her navigate her days. But it’s also shaded with the dinginess of growing old in such a city. Joy’s fridge is filled with half-covered morsels from the sad deli dinners she parcels out over days; the family apartment with its pullout couches that don’t pull out and oven doors that don’t open all the way feels deeply inhabited, not lifted from sitcoms or Salinger.
She knows the world has other ideas about how the elderly should live, but Joy fights to stay in the city even as she’s cajoled to move in with Molly in California, where a therapeutic rescue chihuahua and adult tricycle await. New York is her home—and it also happens to hold an old flame who reappears on the scene after her husband’s death.
There are many roads a plot development like that could travel down. The one Schine chooses is both non-obvious and highly in character for the sharp old woman who, by the end, has laid full claim to our sympathy and devotion. Clear-eyed and warmhearted, They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a book to make you call up whatever elders you may have and call on the memory of the rest.