June 8th Reading

LGBTQ Lit for Children and Teens Comes of Age from Publishers Weekly:

When David Levithan wrote the YA novel Boy Meets Boy (Knopf, 2003), he faced a precedent in which books with LGBTQ characters were issue-based: focused on the angst of coming out in a hostile world. “We were tired of the misery plot, and wanted to re-write it,” Levithan recalls. “I wanted to write a romantic comedy.”Today, that “misery plot” is no longer the norm and 2016’s children’s books and YA novels depict a wider range of LGBTQ experiences and family dynamics. Increasingly, the central conflict has little to do with being gay.

Yes, please, let's talk about my favorite of the Harry Potter movies, yes! How Prisoner of Azkaban Changed the Harry Potter Franchise and Young Adult Cinema Forever by Kayti Burt at Den Of Geek

It is super important that Hermione Granger is Black. Jessica Pryde writes about why it is important to her over at Book Riot

Sweet Reads Book Store is open in Michigan. You guys. Yesterday it was books and bikes. Today it is books and candy.

Also books and movies and a massive imaginative mural. Because of course! The Bookshelf in Guelph, Ontario

BBC4 is making a documentary about Virago: International Publisher of Books by Women

Beyoncé is not shining a light on African literature - it's the other way around from Ainehi Edoro for Brittle Paper, part of The Guardian Books Network

Bear in mind that Beyoncé is not simply an individual but the meeting point of a set of global cultural forces. If African literature is circulating globally on the crest of this confluence of culture, power, and capital called Beyoncé, we have to be able to intelligently identify the form of the value it generates. But this value can’t be reduced to a case of Queen Bey knighting her African literary flavor of the month with a patch of her cultural estate.

In news from places where I've lived: The Bookloft in Great Barrington, MA is changing hands. Apparently the owners are going to retire, learn to fish and keep running their other bookstore down the highway in Stockbridge. Because booksellers truly do not retire.

The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles by Michelle Cuevas and Erin Stead looks AMAZING.