Book of the Month
Book of the Month selects titles from a broad range of genres and offers a mix of both fiction and nonfiction titles–making it a perfect gift that keeps on giving.
A Very, Very Bad Thing — Jeffrey Self
Marley is one of the only gay kids in his North Carolina town — and he feels like he might as well be one of the only gay kids in the universe. Or at least that’s true until Christopher shows up in the halls of his high school. Christopher’s great to talk to, great to look at, great to be with-and he seems to feel the same way about Marley. It’s almost too good to be true.
There’s a hitch (of course): Christopher’s parents are super conservative, and super not okay with him being gay.
That doesn’t stop Marley and Christopher from falling in love. Marley is determined to be with Christopher through ups, and downs-until an insurmountable down is thrown their way. Suddenly, Marley finds himself lying to get to the truth and seeing the suffocating consequences this can bring.
In A Very, Very Bad Thing, Jeffery Self unforgettably shows how love can make us do all the wrong things for all the right reasons-especially if we see them as the only way to make love survive.
So Happiness to Meet You: Foolishly, Blissfully Stranded in Vietnam — Karin Esterhammer
After job losses and the housing crash, the author and her family leave LA to start over in a most unlikely place: a 9-foot-wide back-alley house in one of Ho Chi Minh City’s poorest districts, where neighbors unabashedly stare into windows, generously share their barbecued rat, keep cockroaches for luck, and ultimately help her find joy without Western trappings.
Weaponized — Zac Thompson
Truog Island is a desolate place where sexual activity is outlawed. There lives Trip Yash, bored out of his mind. That was until he met Cron. After a night of passion, Cron disappears taking Trip’s virginity with him. A few days later, Trip develops a rash on his hand that eventually blooms into a gun made from his own flesh.
It’s not long before Trip becomes a living weapon locked in a battle against an ancient virus that threatens to ruin his island home. As his body continues to change, terrifying forces emerge with the power to weaponize the dead.
For fans of Clive Barker and David Cronenberg, Weaponized is a nerve-shattering exploration of sexual identity and people’s strange relationship with tools of death. It is a Kafka-esque horror take on sexual orientation and sexually transmitted infections, and how we villainize those who are different.
A Pornographer — Arch Brown
In 2012, in the months following the death of playwright and filmmaker Arch Brown at the age of 76, an unpublished manuscript was discovered while archiving his possessions, a memoir titled A Pornographer. In it, Brown, whose career as a director of sex films stretched from 1967 to 1985, recounts his interviews in the late 1960s and early 1970s with many of the men and women who wanted to star in his sex films—some who did, others who did not. Here, he is all at once receptionist, gopher, casting agent, writer, director, stagehand, cameraman, talent scout, friend, and on-the-spot psychiatrist. You don’t need to have viewed any of Arch Brown’s sex films from this era to appreciate this memoir. Brown goes out of his way to not mention the titles of any of his films, and he only identifies his cast of characters by fictional first names. The result is that A Pornographer is a historical gem, an unexpectedly insightful psychological view of the performers who were drawn to having sex in front of a camera and how and why audiences responded to them.
Jerusalem Ablaze — Orlando Ortega-Medina
For fans of Hanif Kureishi and Margaret Atwood, this collection of thirteen gripping and intriguing short stories are about sexuality, death, obsession, and religion. Sometimes bleak, occasionally violent, and often possessed of dark humor, each story contains characters who are flawed individuals trying their best to make sense of their lives.
