Looking for some Christmas gifts for the LGBT bookworm in your life? Here are some we recommend. All are new and in stock on our website, and we've got some special deals for the weekend after Thanksgiving: get 10% off everything on Friday when you use Plaid Friday at checkout, and 20% off on Saturday when you use promo code Small Saturday at checkout. We're also offering free delivery if you live in Baltimore in addition to the promo codes. Links to buy are highlighted and bold.
1. Daughters of Frankenstein: Mad Lesbian Scientists, edited by Steve Berman
In the field of mad science, women have for too long been ignored, their triumphs misattributed to mere men. Society has seen the laboratory as the province of men. Jacob's Ladder electric arcs, death rays, even test tubes have phallic connotations, subliminally reinforcing the patriarchy. The mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, advocated that women appear more masculine to earn respect. If Marie Curie had been allowed to develop her Atomic Gendarmerie for the Institut du radium, surely she would have been awarded her third Nobel Prize, for Peace.
Thankfully, the women working to dangerous and/or questionable ends in the pages of Daughters of Frankenstein are unafraid of the patriarchy--indeed, as lesbian mad scientists, they prefer the company and comforts of their own gender. Androids? Pfeh, the gynoid is superior. Etheric dynamos have a more pleasing design, one that is vulvar, than Tesla coils. Eighteen imaginative, if not insane, women; eighteen stories told by some of the finest writers working in queer speculative fiction today. $30. Buy it here.
2. Heretic to Housewife, by Rahne Alexander
Heretic to Housewife is the debut book of collected essays by Baltimore-based artist Rahne Alexander. In ten essays, Alexander connects the dots between her conservative Mormon upbringing and her emergence as a vocal queer trans feminist performer and creator, and does so with withering wit and hard-won wisdom. This collection is a bubbling bouillabaisse of love, sorrow, awkward strip club encounters, Facebook 2, "The Operation,” and incredibly specific complaints about the patriarchy and computer operating systems. $9.99. Buy it here.
3. Trouble and Her Friends, by Melissa Scott
Less than a hundred years from now, the forces of law and order crack down on the world of the computer nets. The hip, noir adventurers who get by on wit, bravado, and drugs, and haunt the virtual worlds of the Shadows of cyberspace, are up against the encroachments of civilization. It's time to adapt or die.
India Carless, alias Trouble, got out ahead of the feds and settled down to run a small network for an artist's co-op.
Now someone has taken her name and begun to use it for criminal hacking. So Trouble returns. Once the fastest gun on the electronic frontier, she had tried to retire-but has been called out for one last fight. And it's a killer. $20. Buy it here.
4. Elegy for the Undead by Matthew Vesely
Jude and Lyle's newlywed life is shattered when a vicious attack leaves Lyle infected with a disease that transforms him into a violent and often incomprehensible person. With no cure for the "zombie" virus in sight, the young husbands begin to face the last months they have together before Lyle loses himself completely.
Fond remembrances of young love meet the challenges of navigating a partner's terminal illness in this bittersweet tale that explores both how we fall in love and how we say goodbye when the time comes far too soon. New, $14. Buy it here.