Lez Talk: a collection of black lesbian short fiction

What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s picaresque novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive “we” encounters “hunger in two places at once.

The Wide Road is a collaborative investigation of the female body, friendship, writing, community, activism, travel and the nature and possibility of human thinking.

Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, two of the most honored innovators of language, began writing The Wide Road in 1991. Over the following twenty-years, the co-writing occurred in turn by letters, by walking, in cabins, together and apart, and finally together again. The reader of this original and major work will find that it is no longer possible to distinguish who wrote what. Instead, one finds a joyful new feminist voice breaking out new possibilities for the future of writing.

The event of the making-writing of this book is now matched by the event of the making-book object of the book, for which the artist Nancy Blum drew two botanical panels, the fruit and the flower of the strawberry tree. HR Hegnauer, in discussion with editor, Rachel Levitsky and the authors, came up with two designs, and in celebration of the book’s multiple origins, Belladonna* Collaborative printed both!

Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort.

At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility.

Nathan Alexander Moore is a Black transfemme writer. She is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research explores Black transfemininity, speculative fictions and temporality. Their debut chapbook, small colossus, was published in 2021, and their fiction was shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. She was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry.

The narrator of Information Age is a journalist at an online news site reporting on technology, the economy, and politics in the late 2010s. The rate of increasingly short news cycles shapes her working life and her personal life, as she assumes the role of reporter while talking with engineers, analysts, wonks, artists, writers, musicians, friends, family, and lovers. Told in vignettes and dialogue—overheard and divulged—Information Age is spare, funny, and attentive, a playful blurring of public and private life.

Cora Lewis is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York, and she previously worked at BuzzFeed News. She lives in Brooklyn near Sunset Park.

A generative, genre-bending collection of nineteen intertwined stories by legendary writer, theorist, and activist Gloria E. Anzaldúa.

Best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria E. Anzaldúa was also a prolific fiction writer. Prieta Is Dreaming, a speculative novel-in-stories, follows the precocious Prieta from her childhood in South Texas to college and beyond as she tries to find her way in the world. Imbued with supernatural powers, Prieta traverses time, changes form, explores her desires, and defies convention. Started in the 1970s and revised up until Anzaldúa's death in 2004, Prieta Is Dreaming comes as a revelation, affirming Anzaldúa's place at the forefront of contemporary feminist, queer, and border theory, while transforming what we think about both her writing and ourselves. In these nineteen intertwined stories, we find some of Anzaldúa's most adventurous, inspired ideas about gender, sexuality, and the very nature of existence—as well as a character, la Prieta, as bold and memorable as the book itself.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) was a poet, metaphysical philosopher, and scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Her books include Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. She was coeditor, with Cherríe Moraga, of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, the 40th anniversary edition of which was also published by SUNY Press. Kelli D. Zaytoun is Professor of English Language and Literatures at Wright State University. She is the author of Shapeshifting Subjects: Gloria Anzaldúa's Naguala and Border Arte. AnaLouise Keating is Professor of Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies at Texas Woman's University. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of many books, including most recently The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook. Suzanne Bost is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Loyola University, Chicago. She is the author of four monographs, the most recent being Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.