Lambda Awards 2023

In "Auntland," a steady stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking surreptitious kisses from women at temple, buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests, and hatching plans to name their daughters "Dog." In "The Chorus of Dead Cousins," ghost cousins cross space, seas, and skies to haunt their live cousin, wife to a storm chaser. In "Xífù," a mother-in-law tortures a wife in increasingly unsuccessful attempts to rid the house of her. In "Mariela," two girls explore one another's bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark, while in "Virginia Slims," a woman from a cigarette ad comes to life. And in "Resident Aliens," a former slaughterhouse serves as a residence to a series of widows, each harboring her own calamitous secrets.With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory.

An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals.“I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.” In The Black Period, Hafizah creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase.At nineteen, she lost her mother to a sudden stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. By her thirties, she was constantly in pain, pinballing between physical therapy appointments, her grief, and the grind that is the American Dream. Hafizah realized she'd spent years internalizing the narratives that white supremacy had fed her about herself. Suddenly, she says, I was standing at the cliff of my own life, remembering.Recalling her parents’ lessons on the art of Black revision, and mixing history, political analysis, and cultural criticism, alongside 70+ stunning original artworks created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter, Hafizah maps out her own narrative, weaving between a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives; her days in a small Catholic school; a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother; and the feelings of joy and community that the Black Lives Matter protests engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, she forms a new personal and collective history, addressing the systems of inequity that make life difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color while capturing a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love.A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, in The Black Period, Hafizah manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself.Endorsements“Hafizah Augustus Geter is a genuine artist, not bound by genre or form. Her only loyalty is the harrowing beauty of the truth.” — Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

Hussam and Wassim are teenage boys living in Syria during America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. When a surprise discovery results in tragedy, their lives and those of their families are shattered. Wassim promises Hussam his protection, but ten years into the future he has failed to keep that promise.Wassim is on the streets, seeking shelter from both the city and the civil war storming his country. Meanwhile Hussam, now on the other side of the world, remains haunted by his own ghosts, doing his utmost to drown them out with every vice imaginable.Split between war-torn Damascus and unforgiving Vancouver, The Foghorn Echoes is a tragic love story about coping with shared traumatic experience and devastating separation. As Hussam and Wassim come to terms with the past, they begin to realise the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.EndorsementsWinner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

Anvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st-century queer society—picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups—The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community.A novel written in verse, The Call-Out recalls the Russian literary classic Eugene Onegin, but instead of 19th-century Russian aristocrats crudely solving their disagreements with pistols, the participants in this rhyming drama have developed a more refined weapon, the online call-out, a cancel-culture staple. In this passionate tangle of modern relationships, where a barbed tweet can be as dangerous as the narrator’s bon-mots, Cat Fitzpatrick has fashioned a modern novel of manners that gives readers access to a vibrant cultural underground.A fast-paced, debut tragicomedy of manners written in verse about queer (mostly trans) women that is funny, literary, philosophical, witty, sometimes bitchy and sometimes heartbreaking.

Premiering at Sundance in 2014, Desiree Akhavan’s acclaimed debut feature, Appropriate Behavior, introduced the indie film world to the deadpan, irreverent wit that had already won over fans of her trailblazing LGBTQ web series The Slope. The first volume in the Queer Film Classics series to spotlight a work by and about a bisexual woman of colour, this book explores Appropriate Behavior as an instant classic of US indie filmmaking in the 2010s, as a radical reappropriation of straight and gay film genres, as an artist’s coming-of-age story, and as a model for feminist-queer creative collaboration. Less than a decade old, Appropriate Behavior captures an urban queer community imperilled by gentrification and homonormativity and serves as exemplar of an innovative wave of independent cinema not yet subsumed by the streaming economy. Maria San Filippo explores how filmmaker and film render a singular voice and story that queers not only its celebrated romcom predecessors but also the gay coming-out film and the lesbian romance alike. The book concludes with an interview with Akhavan. San Filippo pays special tribute to Akhavan’s audacious sensibility and the “inbetweener” moxie that makes Appropriate Behavior an unparalleled portrayal of bisexuality.

In the winter of 2004, a shy woman named Emma sits in Toby’s office. She wants to share this wonderful new book she’s reading, but Toby, her therapist, is concerned with other things. Emma is transgender, and has sought out Toby for approval for hormone replacement therapy. Emma has shown up at the therapy sessions as an outgoing, confident young woman named Katina, and a depressed, submissive workaholic named Ed. She has little or no memory of her actions when presenting as these other two people. And then Toby asks about her childhood . . .As the story unfolds, we discover clues to Emma’s troubled past and how and why these other two people may have come into existence. As Toby juggles treating three separate people, each with their own unique personalities and memories, he begins to wonder if Emma is merely acting out to get attention, or if she actually has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Is she just a troubled woman in need of help? And is “the third person” in her brain protecting her, or derailing her chances of ever finding peace?

Shelley Wong’s debut, As She Appears, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. With both praise and precision, Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that “burst into glamour,” and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California, perfumed fashion runways, to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are.EndorsementsLonglisted for the 2022 National Book AwardWinner of the 2023 Lambda Literary AwardWinner of the Pamet River Prize

In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glasswhatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room wehappen to be sitting inis dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whateverportion of the sky that happensto be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. Theweather also happens,as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other placeswhere it falls into the orbit of the glass.The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.Endorsements'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world.' — Vahni CapildeoWinner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021

What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem— the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?Nicky Beer’s latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books—and her personal one, too—in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious.Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini’s operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation—but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they’re right. “Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music.”Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: which image is the real one? This one—or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both—together, they might contribute to something like truth.

Sonically vibrant, polyphonic, typographic experimentation gleefully strategizes resistance and life under white supremacist capitalism in Kamden Hilliard’s debut collection of poems, MissSettl.In MissSettl, Hilliard presents a funny, joyful, and spiteful debut collection of seriously playful poems; they carry on with impish provocation, engagement, and mourning for what has been done to our living practices. These poems lampoon rigged games of common sense, syntax, and citizenship to expose the mechanics of what Americans have become and what they might be freed into after the end of capitalism, gender, race, money, and property. MissSettl confronts what’s in the way of love; it disrupts what limits our potential.

Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz’s beloved father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the stories of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery — from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love.Three very different American families form the heart of Lost & Found: the one that made Schulz’s father, a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee; the one that made her partner, an equally brilliant farmer’s daughter and devout Christian; and the one she herself makes through marriage. But Schulz is also attentive to other, more universal kinds of how private happiness can coexist with global catastrophe, how we get irritated with those we adore, how love and loss are themselves unavoidably inseparable. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering — a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief.A staff writer at The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives.Crafted with the emotional clarity of C. S. Lewis and the intellectual force of Susan Sontag, Lost & Found is an uncommon book about common experiences.Endorsements“Extraordinary . . . a profound and beautiful book . . . a moving meditation on grief and loss, but also a sparky celebration of joy, wonder and the miracle of love . . . Witty, wise, beautifully structured and written in clear, singing prose.” — Sunday Times“An extraordinary gift of a book, a tender, searching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be human. I wept at it, laughed with it, was entirely fascinated by it. I emerged feeling a little as if the world around me had been made anew.” — Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for HawkWinner of the Pulitzer Prize

This witty memoir traces a touching and often hilarious spiraling path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo—from a cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.—and the bathhouses, night clubs, and drag queens who help redefine pride."I’ve always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas. In particular, effeminate queer men represent a simultaneous rejection and embrace of masculinity... In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold onto pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others."A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a "high-risk homosexual."With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.

Public school teacher Cara Talarico is determined to pay off her student loans by the time she turns thirty-five and has sworn off everything fun to make it happen—including dating. Attending her high school reunion definitely ranks in the not-fun category. The last thing she expects is to reconnect with Lauren Havemayer, her unrequited crush from ten years ago.Having just returned from Europe, Lauren barely remembers Cara from their school days but can’t deny the sparks flying between them now. It’s too bad Lauren is abstaining from romance—love has caused her nothing but pain, and she doesn’t trust herself or anyone else.They embark on a cautious friendship with benefits—no feelings allowed. But with their chemistry off the charts no matter how much they try to fight it, feelings are being felt. They both agreed to the rules at the start, but keeping them is more complicated than it seems.

Running from 1990 to 1999, the annual OutWrite conference played a pivotal role in shaping LGBTQ literary culture in the United States and its emerging canon. OutWrite provided a space where literary lions who had made their reputations before the gay liberation movement—like Edward Albee, John Rechy, and Samuel R. Delany—could mingle, network, and flirt with a new generation of emerging queer writers like Tony Kushner, Alison Bechdel, and Sarah Schulman.This collection gives readers a taste of this fabulous moment in LGBTQ literary history with twenty-seven of the most memorable speeches from the OutWrite conference, including both keynote addresses and panel presentations. These talks are drawn from a diverse array of contributors, including Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Essex Hemphill, Patrick Califia, Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus, Chrystos, John Preston, Linda Villarosa, Edmund White, and many more.OutWrite offers readers a front-row seat to the passionate debates, nascent identity politics, and provocative ideas that helped animate queer intellectual and literary culture in the 1990s. Covering everything from racial representation to sexual politics, the still-relevant topics in these talks are sure to strike a chord with today’s readers.

Thirteen-year-old Nikhil Shah is the beloved voice actor for Raj Reddy on the hit animated series Raj Reddy in Outer Space. But being a star on TV doesn't mean you have everything figured out behind the scenes. When his mom moves them from Los Angeles to a small town in Ohio to be with her aging parents, Nikhil feels as out of orbit as his character. His fame lands him the lead role in the school musical, but he's terrified that everyone will realize he's a fraud once they discover he has stage fright. To make things worse, some conservative parents are not happy with an openly gay TV star being in the starring role. Nikhil wakes up one morning and hears a crack in his voice, which means his job playing Raj will have to come to an end. Life on Earth is way more complicated than life on television. And some mysteries—like new friendships or finding the courage to speak out about what's right—don't wrap up neatly between commercial breaks.

Sixteen-year-old Yamilet Flores prefers to be known for her killer eyeliner, not for being one of the only Mexican kids at her new, mostly white, very rich Catholic school. But at least here no one knows she's gay, and Yami intends to keep it that way.After being outed by her crush and ex-best friend before transferring to Slayton Catholic, Yami has new priorities: keep her brother out of trouble, make her mom proud, and, most importantly, don't fall in love. Granted, she's never been great at any of those things, but that's a problem for Future Yami.The thing is, it's hard to fake being straight when Bo, the only openly queer girl at school, is so annoyingly perfect. And smart. And talented. And cute. So cute. Either way, Yami isn't going to make the same mistake again. If word got back to her mom, she could face a lot worse than rejection. So she'll have to start asking, WWSGD: What would a straight girl do?A debut novel about a queer Mexican American girl navigating Catholic school, while falling in love and learning to celebrate her true self.

When twelve-year-old Esther disappears on the way home from school in a small town in rural Australia, the community is thrown into a maelstrom of suspicion and grief. As Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels arrives in town during the hottest spring in decades and begins her investigation, Esther's tenacious best friend, Ronnie, is determined to find Esther and bring her home.When schoolfriend Lewis tells Ronnie that he saw Esther with a strange man at the creek the afternoon she went missing, Ronnie feels she is one step closer to finding her. But why is Lewis refusing to speak to the police? And who else is lying about how much they know about what has happened to Esther?Punctuated by a Greek chorus, which gives voice to the remaining children of the small, dying town, this novel explores the ties that bind, what we try and leave behind us, and what we can never outrun, while never losing sight of the question of what happened to Esther, and what her loss does to a whole town.Who's lying about what happened at Dirt Creek? In Hayley Scrivenor's Dirt Creek, a small-town debut mystery described as The Dry meets Everything I Never Told You, a girl goes missing and a community falls apart and comes together.Endorsements"Blends a taut psychological thriller with a suspenseful police procedural... Fans of Liane Moriarty and Jane Harper won't want to miss this page-turner." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)."A novel of sharp-edged tempers, accidents waiting to happen and dark inheritances." — New York Times Book Review.

It’s been months since aspiring journalist Kian Andrews heard from his ex-boyfriend, Hudson Rivers, but an urgent text brings them together at a café. Maybe Hudson wants to profusely apologize for the breakup. Or confess his undying love... But no, Hudson has a favor to ask—he wants Kian to pretend to be his boyfriend while his parents are in town, and Kian reluctantly agrees.The dinner doesn’t go exactly as planned, and suddenly Kian is Hudson’s plus one to Georgia’s wedding of the season. Hudson comes from a wealthy family where reputation is everything, and he really can’t afford another mistake. If Kian goes, he’ll help Hudson preserve appearances and he’ll get the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in media. This could be the big career break Kian needs.But their fake relationship is starting to feel like it might be more than a means to an end, and it’s time for both men to fact-check their feelings.A chance to rewrite their ending is worth the risk in this swoony romantic comedy from Kosoko Jackson.

In this clever twist on a traditional tale, a boy who loves his frilly, swishy riding hood turns the tables on a big, bad, bullying wolf!Better not mess with Little Red when he's got on his favorite frilly red riding hood! It makes him feel happier than a pig in mud, more special than a birthday cake, and mighty as a firecracker. Nothing's going to stop him from being himself... Not even a big ol' bully of a wolf! With admirable spunk and a heaping helping of southern humor and hospitality, Little Red finds a way to crack the shell of the closed-minded wolf's perception of frills and bows.This refreshingly spirited version of the classic tale of Little Red Riding Hood explores the challenge of staying on your path when confronted by strangers who don't want to understand you.

Cartoonist Sas Milledge's first original graphic novel answers the question of how we reconcile our responsibilities with our dreams for the future. Orla O’Reilly, the youngest in a long line of hedge witches, is compelled to return home after the death of her grandmother, Mamo. In the wake of Mamo’s passing, seas are impossible to fish, crops have soured, even Jo Manalo’s attic is taken over by a poltergeist! To make matters worse, it appears that the cause is Mamo, or her mislaid bones. Can Orla shoulder the responsibility of quieting her Mamo’s spirit and saving her hometown, and will she have to step up as the new witch of Haresden like Mamo always wanted?Family matters aren’t just hocus-pocus for this young witch!

Led by people of colour, these darkly comedic plays depict recognizable plights for justice. Iphigenia and the Furies (On Taurian Land) highlights the repetition of hate and colonialism that occur in ancient myths through a mischievous lens. Since Iphigenia was rescued from the sacrificial altar, she has served as a high priestess to the goddess Artemis on Tauros, where she in turn is to sacrifice any foreigners who try to enter. When she discovers that an exiled prisoner is her brother, they together plot their escape, but are soon confronted by a force beyond their control. Antigone is set against the backdrop of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement and Tiananmen Square Massacre protests. When citizens challenge a state’s traditional doctrine, the ruling family is divided between their own interests and those of its citizens. After brothers Neikes and Teo kill each other in the protests, their sister Antigone defies her father’s orders to retrieve Neikes’s body, causing the government—and what’s left of their family—to reach a reckoning.

The author of The Charm Offensive returns with a festive romantic comedy about a woman who fakes an engagement with her landlord…only to fall for his sister.One year ago, recent Portland transplant Ellie Oliver had her dream job in animation and a Christmas Eve meet-cute with a woman at a bookstore that led her to fall in love over the course of a single night. But after a betrayal the next morning and the loss of her job soon after, she finds herself adrift, alone, and desperate for money.Finding work at a local coffee shop, she’s just getting through the days—until Andrew, the shop’s landlord, proposes a shocking, drunken plan: a marriage of convenience that will secure his recent inheritance and alleviate Ellie’s financial woes and isolation. They make a plan to spend the holidays together at his family cabin to keep up the ruse. But when Andrew introduces his new fiancée to his sister, Ellie is shocked to discover it’s Jack—the mysterious woman she fell for over the course of one magical Christmas Eve the year before. Now, Ellie must choose between the safety of a fake relationship and the risk of something real.Perfect for fans of Written in the Stars and One Day in December, Kiss Her Once for Me is the queer holiday rom-com that you’ll want to cozy up with next to the fire.

Singapore, 1927.Verity Edevane needs blood.And not just anyone's blood. She craves the sweet, salty rush from a young woman's veins, the heady swirl of desire mixed with fealty—such a rarity in this foreign colony. It’s a lot to ask. But doesn't she deserve the best?Gean Choo needs money.Mrs. Edevane makes her an offer Gean Choo can't refuse. But who is her strange, alluring new mistress? What is she? And what will Gean Choo sacrifice to earn her love?Po Lam needs absolution.After decades of faithfully serving Mrs. Edevane, Po Lam can no longer excuse a life of bondage and murder. She needs a fresh start. A clean conscience. More than anything, she needs to save Gean Choo from a love that will destroy them all.Love demands sacrifice. Her blood. Her body. Even her life. A destitute maidservant must choose whom to love: her vampire mistress, or the woman trying to save her life in The Wicked and the Willing, a standalone, F/F, steamy historical gothic horror vampire novel with a love triangle, a choice of endings and no cliffhangers. This novel contains two mutually exclusive endings, although most of the story is not interactive. Due to the mature content and dark themes, it is intended for adult readers only. It contains potentially disturbing scenes and an abusive romantic relationship between two women. Further content information is available from the author’s website and inside the book.Endorsements2023 Lambda Literary Award Winner, LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction2023 Golden Crown Literary Award Winner, Paranormal/Occult/Horror

Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of Black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naïve and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can serve as the catalyst for engaging the Black radical imagination.Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy is an exploration of how fantasies of Black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It examines representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary “realist” fiction centering fantastic conceits.Darieck Scott offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality, and between the imagination and being, as he weaves his personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther and Blade, as well as theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal. Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, Blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry.Reading new life into Afrofuturist traditions and fantasy genres, Darieck Scott seeks to rescue the role of fantasy and the fantastic to challenge, revoke, and expand our assumptions about what is normal, real, and markedly human.Explores Black representation in fantasy genres and comic books.

Reluctant Immortals is a historical horror novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature — from Lucy Westenra, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, to Bertha Mason of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love in 1967, Lucy and Bertha are undead immortals residing in Los Angeles when Dracula and Mr. Rochester make a shocking return in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.Combining elements of historical and gothic fiction with a modern perspective, in a tale of love, betrayal, and coercion, Reluctant Immortals is the lyrical and harrowing journey of two women from classic literature as they bravely claim their own destiny in a man’s world.For fans of Mexican Gothic.EndorsementsGwendolyn Kiste — three-time Bram Stoker Award winner.