Fat and Queer

While anyone adjusting to a new body size as we reemerge into society could take comfort and pleasure in its pages, Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives, a new anthology edited by Bruce Owens Grimm, Miguel M. Morales, and Tiff Joshua TJ Ferentini, is too complex, joyful, and determined for a pat reference to the “quarantine fifteen” to serve as a news hook. Instead, the book is a collection of “radical odes” to “radical bodies,” as Roy G. Guzmán writes in the introduction, connecting the experience of being both fat and queer and detailing how the two identities overlap and affect each other. The stories, essays, and poems, collected from a wide-ranging group of writers (including Aubrey Gordon, a.k.a. Your Fat Friend, Carmen Maria Machado, Caleb Luna, and 30 other contributors), are “acts of witness for how the human body continues to be an, if not the, ultimate threshold between and the now and what the world can be,” Guzmán writes. Celebrate the book’s launch with Loyalty Bookstores’ online event, where the editors will be joined by local contributors L. Harris and D. Nolan Jefferson; donations will go to BLM DC. The event begins at 8 p.m. on May 27. Registration is available at loyaltybookstores.com. Pay what you want, starting at $1.