The book Shades of Love, with photographs of Dimitris Yeros is in the shortlist of top ten books honoured by the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow Books.
Separate from the Stonewall Book Awards, the American Library Association's GLBT Round Table annually honors a few dozen titles as "Over the Rainbow Books." This year's Top Ten, after the jump, are eight familiar titles and two surprises: Issy Festing's Nagpur novel The Bird Keeper [Kindle] and the coffee table book Shades of Love: Photographs Inspired by the Poems of C. P. Cavafy with photos by Dimitris Yeros, foreword by Edward Albee, an introduction by John Wood and a new translations by David Connolly. Two of the ten are graphic books, including Howard Cruse's groundbreaking The Complete Wendel.
Their longlist of 74 books includes fiction by Tove Jansson, Colm Tóibín, Matthew Gallaway, Daniel Allen Cox, Bob Smith, Armistead Maupin, Kathleen Winter, Jameson Currier, Tomas Mournian, and Ralph Sassone. An even greater pleasure is finding the unexpected here too, like Rose Tremain's novel of two pairs of adult siblings in southern France, Trespass [Kindle], Heather Newton's North Carolina novel Under the Mercy Trees [Kindle], Tony O'Neill's Hollywood noir Sick City [Kindle], J.A. Pitts' present-day Pacific Northwest magic novel Honeyed Words [Kindle], Vicki Weaver's novel about Billie Girl "raised by two women who are brothers," and Andre Carl Van der Merwe's South African novel set during the Angola Bush War, Moffie [Kindle], from the always-reliable Europa Editions.
Among the list's anthologies and short fiction collections is Alex Jeffers' The Abode of Bliss [Kindle], a ten-story cycle told in the sometimes credible, sometimes forced voice of a Turkish student at Harvard. This is a double leap as Jeffers says he's never been to Turkey, but the heartfelt stories are nicely crafted and generous with details. An authentic queer hyphenate experience is found in West Virginia-born Rahul Mehta's fiction of Indian-Americans, Quarantine [
The ALA "Over the Rainbow Books" Top Ten
Michael Alenyikov, Ivan and Misha
Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States
Ivan Coyote (ed.), Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme
Howard Cruse, The Complete Wendel
Issy Festing, The Bird Keeper
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
Rahul Mehta, Quarantine
Ilike Merey, a + e 4ever
Lucia Puenzo, The Fish Child
Dimitris Yeros et al., Shades of Love: Photographs Inspired by the Poems of C. P. Cavafy
