On the way home, I read the book while walking, keeping one eye on downtown crowds and the other on Greenwell's long, questing sentences. I started reading What Belongs to You right before I had to go to the dentist, and for once I was grateful to be kept waiting. It's a gorgeous, unsettling book narrated by an American high school teacher in Bulgaria who meets-and perhaps falls in love with-a hustler named Mitko. Greenwell's new novel provides exactly that kind of correction. "Where humiliation is the law of the land, queer literature offers a necessary, lifesaving correction: a vision of queer lives imbued with dignity, by which we mean a full measure of humanity." "HB2 is meant to humiliate queer people, as are all of the laws like it across the United States," Greenwell and Conley wrote. Along the way, the two provided moving updates from the tour on Twitter and Lit Hub. The author of the highly acclaimed novel What Belongs to You read at independent bookstores across North Carolina with author Garrard Conley, whose memoir, Boy Erased, chronicles his time in "ex-gay" therapy. Debut novelist Garth Greenwell took a different tack to protest HB2.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |