The ALA's Gay Lesbian Bi Trans Round Table announced the Over the Rainbow List of their ten favorite books and a longlist of 84 published between July 2011 and December 2012 that "exhibit commendable literary quality and significant authentic lgbt content." The ten favorites:
- Ellis Avery, The Last Nude
- Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?
- Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
- Shannon Cain, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors
- Justin Hall (ed.), No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics
- Saeed Jones, When the Only Light Is Fire
- Thomas Keith (ed.), Love, Christopher Street: Reflections of New York City
- Jana Marcus, Transfigurations
- Luisa Lopez Torresgrosa, Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution
- Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
I can't have an opinion about these 10 and the 74 other titles on the longlist until the GLBTRT clarifies whether Stonewall Book Award winners and finalists are or are not eligible for the Over the Rainbow list. If books are not allowed to appear on both the Stonewall and Over the Rainbow lists, it could potentially be good news for a few of the many missing titles below. Surely Lisa Cohen's brilliant NBCC finalist All We Know deserves some recognition from the GLBTRT?
**Separate from the Over the Rainbow list is the ALA GLBTRT's Rainbow list, aimed at readers up to age 18. This year the Rainbow list consists of 49 titles including some quite grownup titles like Sassafras Lowrey's submissive leather adventures in Roving Pack and Michael Graves' story collection Dirty One. And, yes, there's some overlap between the two lists: Cordova, Coyote, Miller, Schwartz, Wahls, and Batwoman.
Just a handful of the worthy queer titles missing from the Over the Rainbow list:
Carol Anshaw, Carry the One
Cheryl B., My Awesome Place
Scotty Bowers, Full Service
Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard
Peter Cameron, Coral Glynn
Andy Cohen, Most Talkative
Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives
Emma Donoghue, Astray
Jonathan Galassi, Left-handed
Daniel Halperin, How To Be Gay
Lisa Jarnot, The Ambassador from Venus
Richard Kramer, These Things Happen
E.J. Levy, Love, in Theory
Clayton Littlewood, Goodbye to Soho
Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians
Stephen Motika, Western Practice
Nobel Prize winner Herta Mueller, The Hunger Angel
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children & the Search for Identity
Jonathan Strong, More Light
Paul Vitagliano, Born This Way: Real Stories of Growing Up Gay
Books *can* both receive Stonewall Award/Honors and appear on the Rainbow List. But they are decided by different committees, and books must be individually nominated to both in order to be considered by both. It's interesting to see the differences in which books are recognized by whom.
Posted by: Lisa Jenn Bigelow | January 28, 2013 at 09:23 AM
And to think people ever wonder what to read next ...
Posted by: Glenn I | January 28, 2013 at 10:31 AM