If you haven’t read “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk” yet, you are cheating yourself of an important moral guide for these troublesome times. Also, you’ll miss the opportunity to laugh so hard that you snort. How often can you get a two-for-one deal like this?
“Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk” is the most recent book by gay humorist David Sedaris, who brings his sardonic wit and intellectual humor to Atlanta Symphony Hall on Oct. 27.
“Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk” is a collection of 17 fables, little stories featuring animal characters illustrating some moral lesson, set in contemporary urban America. You’re free to interpret them as taking place in New York City, but Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, or Miami would work just as well.
Dustin Brookshire, 29, credits Anne Sexton for his love of poetry and the ability to express himself through words. That love has grown to create his new chapbook, "To the One Who Raped Me." The book is currently available through pre-order by publisher Sibling Rivalry Press with a launch party for the book set for Aug. 7 at 7:30 p.m at the Phillip Rush Center. We talked to him about the book and its haunting title and why it was important to him that $1 from each book sold go to the DeKalb Rape Crisis Center.
Tell us about the new chapbook you have coming out and why it is benefiting the DeKalb Rape Crisis Center.
My chapbook, “To The One Who Raped Me,” is currently in the pre-order phase from the fantastic Sibling Rivalry Press. The poems in the collection come from a period where I was trying to come to terms with the fact that I had been raped.
While popular with authors and LGBT Atlantans, Outwrite has publicly struggled financially. This morning, the gay bookstore announced it would close at its current location at the corner of 10th and Piedmont and try to relocate. The store's financial problems echo a trend for bookstores around the nation.
A press release from Outwrite owner Philip Rafshoon said he is looking for a new location and noted that the current space, which anchors the corner that is often referred to as the epicenter of gay Atlanta, was just too expensive.
"Our landlord has been extremely cooperative and has worked with us longer than expected. Our departure is amicable," he wrote. "The bottom line is simply we can no longer afford to rent this desirable space regardless of what business model we try to engage."
Darian Aaron wants people to know that black gay men are in committed relationships with each other — something that that people don't typically see in the movies, TV shows, even in magazine ads.
As a black gay man in a committed relationship, he said he was tired of seeing images in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community that did not represent him. So, he wrote his own book about black, same-gender male couples titled, "When Love Takes Over: A Celebration of SGL Couples of Color."
"There's a quote from Toni Morrison that I truly believe in, 'If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it,'" Aaron says.
'Big Sex, Little Death' captures the life of radical, sex positive feminist
Susie Bright is grateful President Barack Obama is not in Atlanta today. He's been making the same stops as her book tour for her memoir "Big Sex, Little Death" and wreaking all kinds of havoc.
"He's been stalking my tour. Holding up my plane, gridlock on the roads. It's been a mess," she says with a sigh.
Bright, famously known as "Susie Sexpert" from her days as editor of "On Our Backs," the feminist lesbian porn magazine, stops in at Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse today to read from her new memoir. This memoir differs from other autobiographical books Bright has written because it casts a long glance back over her life instead of writing about the here and now.
In fact, while writing "Big Sex, Little Death" over the past few years, Bright said she relived moments even more clearly than when they occurred.
The news best-selling author Jodi Picoult received while writing her latest novel, “Sing You Home,” wasn’t exactly a surprise.
The novel, Picoult’s eighteenth, was released earlier this month and debuted at #1 on both the USA Today and New York Times book lists. It introduces Zoe, a music therapist who is divorced by her husband, Max, after their long-awaited baby is stillborn. After years of infertility, Max retreats into alcoholism and later a fundamentalist church, while Zoe stumbles through her days in a blur until Vanessa — a school counselor who just happens to be a lesbian — helps her find joy again.
In Picoult’s gently crafted romance, Zoe falls in love with Vanessa. After a Massachusetts wedding, the two women set out to have a baby using the embryos Zoe froze during her marriage to Max.