Tag Archive for "Not Oprah’s Book Club"

Posts Tagged Not Oprah’s Book Club

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Havana Real

This review originally appeared at the Ms. Magazine Blog.

As a lefty progressive and a child of Cuban exiles, I’ve always been privy to two dominant narratives about Cuba. From family members who were forced to leave for political and economic reasons after Fidel Castro’s rise to power, I have heard the very typical anti-Castro perspective of Cubans in the U.S. My family mythology was shaped by exile and loss; by the livelihood that was left behind and then torn from our fingers forever by the Cuban Revolution.

The other narrative I’ve encountered about Cuba has been a stark contrast to my family’s personal disdain for the revolution, steeped in the palpable ...

This review originally appeared at the Ms. Magazine Blog.

As a lefty progressive and a child of Cuban exiles, I’ve always been privy to two dominant narratives about Cuba. From family members who were ...

By Jos Truitt • 12 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme is a new anthology edited by Ivan E. Coyote (who you might know from this great femme appreciation piece) and Zena Sharman that explores butch and femme identities from a variety of viewpoints. The book is dominated by lesbian writers talking about the butch-femme dynamic in their own communities, but there are also a number of pieces exploring deliberate performance of masculinity and femininity by folks with a range of identities and experiences.

A number of essays stood out to me for offering new, exciting perspectives. Feministing’s own Miriam Zoila Pérez deftly combines personal experience with gender theory (I might be biased). B. Cole’s essay about people of color who don’t see themselves ...

By Courtney • 12 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Parable of the Talents

God is change.

This is the main belief of Earthseed, a new religion developed and popularized by the main character in Octavia Butler’s Nebula-Award winning science fiction novel, Parable of the Talents. Since plowing through her book last week, those three little words have floated to the top of my brain many, many times.

As someone interested in morality and faith, this book couldn’t have been more interesting. Essentially, it is about the relationship between a daughter and a mother, both aiming to survive in dystopian America where evangelical religion, violence, and ignorance have taken hold in a frightening way. Lauren Oya Olamina, the mother, is a fierce, single-focused, survivalist who has charismatic leadership qualities and, arguably, prizes her ideas above ...

God is change.

By Chloe Angyal • 12 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Maine

Maine is the second novel from J. Courtney Sullivan, who I interviewed last year, and who co-edited the anthology Click with our own Courtney.

Like Sullivan’s first novel Commencement, Maine shows us the world through the eyes of four different women. This time, however, the women are connected not by the bonds of friendship, but by blood and by marriage – which, as we all know, sometimes fail to bind us together in the ways we might hope. And because the main characters in Maine are older than those in Commencement, Maine feels like a more adult version of Sullivan’s first book, as though Sullivan has grown up, and so too have the people through whom she tells ...

Maine is the second novel from J. Courtney Sullivan, who I interviewed last year, and who co-edited the anthology Click with our own Courtney.

Like Sullivan’s first novel Commencement, Maine shows us the world through ...

By Courtney • 12 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene

I’m not going to lie. I am often nostalgic for a time in New York that I never got to experience. Pre-Giuliani, pre-cupcake mania and hipster bars, pre-incredibly-expensive-rents-that-make-creative-collaborations-tough. It just seems like it was easier to make things–art, books, salons, change, community–with good friends, back then.

One might argue that I am romanticizing, and indeed I probably am, but Prestel has just put out a book that does nothing but feed by tendency (as did Patti Smith’s Just Kids, of course). It’s called Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene New York 1970s. It focuses on how these three friends and collaborators fed one another’s work on performance, the body, the urban environment and found spaces, ...

By Jos Truitt • 12 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Nina Here Nor There

Nick Krieger’s memoir Nina Here Nor There tells a story of coming out as transgender that’s different from the narrative that dominates mainstream media. Nina didn’t grow up with an overwhelming sense she was in the wrong body and she doesn’t reach some all man, macho end point (Krieger’s asked that the character be referred to as Nina/she, and the author as Nick/he). Nina’s almost 30 when she moves in with a group of younger queers in the Castro in San Francisco and discovers a community that’s pushing and transcending the boundaries of gender – having top surgery, taking hormones, changing names and pronouns – or not. Nina begins a process of exploring her own gender identity, something she ...

By Courtney • 12 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: MEAN Little deaf Queer

In Terry Galloway’s funny, fast-moving, family-oriented memoir, MEAN Little deaf Queer, the reader gets the sense that there couldn’t possibly be anyone more entertaining to have a beer with than Galloway. She’s a storyteller of the most exquisite variety–focusing on all the right, telling details, taking you into literal and emotional worlds that feel both familiar and fascinating at the same time, and proving inexhaustible in the creative opportunities she sees in her own trials and tribulations.

Essentially, this memoir (rumor has it she’s working on a sequel) takes you through her early life growing up deaf and randy and rebellious, becoming a guerilla theater star in Austin, and on through to that land called Adulthood. Galloway writes so beautifully ...

By Courtney • 12 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Hey, Shorty!

This irresistible little yellow book has a humble subtitle: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets. Fair enough. All of us need a guide like this, whether we’re strutting down the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, or contending with shouts from trucks barreling down rural roads in Texas towns. The appendix is chockfull of great resources on what sexual harassment is and how to prevent, identify, and stop it.

But beyond being a “guide,” Hey, Shorty! is really a manifesto for community-based solutions and enlightened social change at the intersections of race, gender, class, ability etc. Whether it’s reading Joanne N. Smith’s tale of how she started Girls for Gender Equity (GGE), ...