Kroll, Eric, ed. The Art of Eric Stanton: For the Man Who Knows His Place. Cologne: Taschen, 2012.
This book collects many of Stanton’s erotic drawings from the 1950s and 1960s, many of which appeared in Irving Klaw’s publications (Klaw is the man who made Bettie Page famous). It fits perfectly with my scholarly interests in the history of print culture and the depiction of sexuality in literature. In flipping through the book, it is clear that it reaches Taschen’s usual high production standards. I look forward to perusing it further.
Bought on amazon.com.
Léger, Tom, and Riley MacLeod, eds. The Collection: Short Fiction From the Transgender Vanguard. New York: Topside, 2012.
I attended a reading featuring six of this book’s contributors last night, and it was probably the most enjoyable reading I’ve been to in the past decade. The stories were both funny and powerful, and the collection is apparently the first collection of transgender fiction to be published in the United States (which is surprising, but that’s what the editors claim), so I was happy to buy it. The best part of the evening was discovering that one of the contributors, Casey Plett, was raised Mennonite in Manitoba! It is always exciting to discover new Mennonite authors, but it is especially exciting to discover new queer Mennonite authors because I am currently working on an essay about the intersection between queer theory and Mennonite literature.
Daniel Shank Cruz 