A Little Queer Natural History by Josh Davis

Practically every day, I wake up to news of more horrific anti-trans legislation or another queer book being banned. In an absolutely devastating recent decision, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of woman is based on biological sex. Just typing that sentence fills me with bottomless rage. I am terrified and heartbroken and angry and exhausted.

Being queer is one of the great joys of my life; loving and being loved by trans people is another. I can’t fight the current onslaught of hate alone, but I can fight it alongside comrades and the community by contacting my representatives, speaking up loudly, supporting trans authors, giving money to mutual aid and trans justice organizations (Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network and Project Rainbow Turtle are two I’ve donated to), and more.

And when the despair threatens to overtake me, when I need some queer joy, when I need to remind myself that queerness and transness are natural, sacred, and endless, I turn to books. My people, nature is extremely queer. It is very, very queer. I cannot overstate how queer it is. I recently immersed myself in a book that revels in just how deliciously queer nature is, and it was exactly what I needed. Maybe it’s what you need, too.

A Little Queer Natural History by Josh L. Davis This is a very short book; you can easily read it in an afternoon. It’s accessible and engaging—more of a Queer Nature 101 than an in-depth lecture. It includes a series of profiles on various plants, animals, and fungi, as well as the astonishing array of sexual, biological, reproductive, and behavioral diversity they display. From trees and flowers to frogs and fish, from giraffes and gorillas to common birds and elusive eels, the natural world is overflowing with queerness.

The book includes a truly delightful variety of organisms and cites dozens of scientific studies. In each profile, accompanied by stunning photographs, Davis highlights the wonderfully surprising and complex ways that plants and animals mate, reproduce, and live. There’s a mushroom with 30,000 mating types (no, that’s not a typo); tomatoes that can reproduce in multiple ways simultaneously; insects that choose the sex of their offspring; and fish that change sexes throughout their lifetime. Animals of all kinds form same-sex families in which they raise young. Queer sex is wildly prevalent in nature–despite this and other queer behaviors being repeatedly ignored and/or covered up by researchers–from primates to penguins to dolphins.

Binaries like male and female are a human invention. The idea that something as complicated as sex and gender, both biological and social, can be defined by a neat, static, and never-changing set of criteria is absurd. Just how absurd it is becomes abundantly clear when you start looking closely at how plants and animals actually act. Nature contains very few, if any, binaries. Every rule has an exception. In the natural world, queerness is the norm. Rigidity—the idea that homosexual behavior is abnormal, for instance, or that biological sex is a fixed category—is a made-up human fallacy. It’s just not how the world works.

I’d like to shove this book into the hands of all the bigots, including the judges on the UK Supreme Court. But even more than that (because what good would it really do?), I want to give this book to any queer or trans person who has ever felt alone, who has ever felt like they don’t belong. If you’ve ever felt like your body, your desires, your ways of loving, your family, or your gender isn’t “natural”, this book is for you. Nature is beautiful, creative, mysterious, strange (complimentary), and overwhelmingly queer, and you are a part of nature.

The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.

We love a good cover, and this week, we’re highlighting a list of the best short story covers. Trust us when we say that these will look so demure on your bookshelves!

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In the course of writing about great book covers, there’s one thing that I’ve noted several times: short story collections have some of the most innovative, memorable, and eye-catching covers of them all. Why is that? Perhaps part of it is because short story collections are a harder sell to the average reader, so the first line of marketing has to be for the bookshop browser, whether they’re perusing on or off line. Perhaps part of it is that many great short story collections are coming from smaller presses, so pushing boundaries with design is part of what’s possible because there are fewer stakeholders to please in the process. Perhaps it’s also simply that short story collections, by nature of their diversity, invite more creativity into the cover design process.

Whatever the reason or reasons, I suspect anyone who appreciates a good book cover is here for it.

Let’s take a look at some of the banging short story book covers that have hit shelves this year, as well as look at some of the upcoming covers of collections you’ll want to pop on your TBR ASAP. If you’re reading this when the piece publishes in mid-May, know you’ll be reading it in time to partake in Short Story Month, too. Any month can be short story month, of course, but May gives extra reason to dive into bite-sized fiction.

As always, caveats abound here. It is still unnecessarily difficult to track down cover designers and artists for book covers, especially if you don’t have the book in your hand to double-check. Many publishers still don’t put this information on the landing pages for these books, so it takes good Googling and a lot of luck to dig up names to credit.

Autocorrect by Etgar Keret, translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston (May 27) If you’re looking for a collection of darkly funny stories, this cover is not going to steer you in the wrong direction. It’s a squirrel that’s clearly been launched right into the book title, and he looks completely unfazed by it all. There’s a lot of nice movement in this design, especially as it is very simplistic.

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