Recommendations based on "The Motion of Light in Water Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village"

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, ANOTHER COUNTRY tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.A New York Times Bestseller!Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Today Show, and MSNBC feature storiesFrom the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy. Johnson's emotionally frank style of writing will appeal directly to young adults.Velshi Banned Book ClubIndie BestsellerTeen Vogue Recommended ReadBuzzfeed Recommended ReadPeople Magazine Best Book of the SummerA New York Library Best Book of 2020A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020 ... and more!

Pecola Breedlove, the main character of the novel, is a young black girl who comes from a financially unstable family. Between a combination of facing domestic violence, bullying, sexual assault, and living in a community that associates beauty with whiteness, she intensely suffers from low self-esteem and views herself to be ugly. The title The Bluest Eye refers to Pecola's fervent wishes to have beautiful blue eyes. Her insanity at the end of the novel is her only way to escape a world where she cannot be beautiful and to get the blue eyes she desires from the beginning of the novel.

Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

A major work of American literature from a major American writer that powerfully portrays the anguish of being Black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war."Baldwin is one of the few genuinely indispensable American writers." —Saturday ReviewAt the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable.For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty.Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is overpowering in its vitality and extravagant in the intensity of its feeling.

In this tender-hearted debut, set against the tumultuous backdrop of life in 1973, when homosexuality is still considered a mental illness, two boys defy all the odds and fall in love.The year is 1973. The Watergate hearings are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is still officially considered a mental illness. In the midst of these trying times is sixteen-year-old Jonathan Collins, a bullied, anxious, asthmatic kid, who aside from an alcoholic father and his sympathetic neighbor and friend Starla, is completely alone. To cope, Jonathan escapes to the safe haven of his imagination, where his hero David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and dead relatives, including his mother, guide him through the rough terrain of his life. In his alternate reality, Jonathan can be anything: a superhero, an astronaut, Ziggy Stardust, himself, or completely "normal" and not a boy who likes other boys. When he completes his treatments, he will be normal--at least he hopes. But before that can happen, Web stumbles into his life. Web is everything Jonathan wishes he could be: fearless, fearsome and, most importantly, not ashamed of being gay.Jonathan doesn't want to like brooding Web, who has secrets all his own. Jonathan wants nothing more than to be "fixed" once and for all. But he's drawn to Web anyway. Web is the first person in the real world to see Jonathan completely and think he's perfect. Web is a kind of escape Jonathan has never known. For the first time in his life, he may finally feel free enough to love and accept himself as he is.A poignant coming-of-age tale, Ziggy, Stardust and Me heralds the arrival of a stunning and important new voice in YA.

Billie Holiday describes her early childhood in an East Baltimore ghetto, her career as an internationally acclaimed jazz vocalist, and her years in bondage to a drug habit

Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but a deep-seated horror and dread accompany him through his self-destructive college days and after, until the day he meets a beautiful young student named Warden and is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.

"A bombastic coming-of-age novel....The White Boy Shuffle has the uncanny ability to make readers want to laugh and cry at the same time."--Los Angeles TimesThe first novel from National Book Critics Circle Award and Man Booker Prize-winning author of The SelloutPaul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually to reluctant messiah of a "divided, downtrodden people."

The inspiration for the upcoming feature film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins'Achingly beautiful' GuardianHarlem in the 1970s: the black soul of New York City. Tish is nineteen and the man she loves - her lifelong friend and the father of her unborn child - has been jailed for a crime he did not commit. As their families come together to fight for his freedom, will their love be enough?'Soulful . . . Racial injustice may flatten "the black experience" into one single, fearful, constantly undermined way of life - but black life, black love, is so much larger than that . . . It's one of the signature lessons of Baldwin's work that blackness contains multitudes' Vanity Fair'If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family' Joyce Carol Oates