Around this time last year, the USB hookup in my car stopped working. I started to listen to the radio more and began to buy CDs again, something I hadn’t done much since I was a teenager. Greg Mendez played a concert in Nashville, and before he went on, I bought two from his merch table: his self-titled album from 2023, and Live at Purgatory, from 2022. I put them in my car. I try not to skip songs on either one. But I am happy when I hear him introduce the sixth track on Live at Purgatory, “Bike.”

It’s a short song. Mendez sings the lyrics only once. This is what I hear, which is different from what I see on Genius but is the same as in a handwritten lyric card I can partially see in a picture on Bandcamp:

I wanna ride your brother’s bike
I wanna stab his friends sometimes
I wanna tell a million lies
I wanna steal your partner’s heart
I wanna turn your pain to art
I wanna cry in your mother’s arms
I wanna wear your daddy’s jeans
I wanna drink the way he did
I wanna smoke menthol cigarettes
and I wanna fight
I wanna fuck on ecstasy
I wanna love, but what’s that mean?
I wanna go back on EBT

Those words take a little more than fifty-five seconds. It’s instrumental for a minute more. I only recently realized how short it is. It was a strange realization, because I love this song and talk about it to my friends, and would have thought I would have already noticed that it was so brief, or that it doesn’t have a chorus, or a bridge, or even more than one verse. But by the end of the lyrics, I am often so struck by his voice and by the way his voice says these things—which in his mouth are so beautiful, even if they are not necessarily beautiful things to say—that my mind has gone into outer space, and I guess the rest of the song, or its absence, has been lost on me.

Here’s a look at all the news Book Riot covered this week.

As long-time readers of Our Queerest Shelves know, I keep a giant spreadsheet of upcoming queer book releases. I use it to make monthly new queer book roundups, like 11 Must-Read New Queer Books Out in March 2025. Some of the biggest releases I hear about six months or even more than a year before the publication date (shout out to Cemetery Boys: Espíritu by Aiden Thomas, which won’t come out until September 2026). Others I only discover days before their pub date or, sadly, afterward, which means it missed its window to be featured in these roundups.

Currently, I have more than 500 queer books out in 2025 on this spreadsheet, and it will only grow, especially as we learn more about fall new releases. Today, I thought I’d share five of the most recent additions to the spreadsheet. They have pub dates ranging from April to October. There’s a gay middle grade fantasy book in the world of Percy Jackson, an essay collection about horror movies and trans narratives, nonfiction about the “myth of LGBTQ+ solidarity” by a Black feminist writer, a collection of LGBTQ fairy tale retellings, and a sapphic gothic retelling.

Exclusive content for All Access members continues below. A membership is $6 a month or $60 for the year and gives you access to all of Book Riot’s bonus content as well as community features.

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.

Just a little over a month since adding two additional titles to its ever-growing list of books banned in every public school across the state, this week, Utah’s “sensitive materials” law has added another book to its ranks. Tricks by Ellen Hopkins was added to the list this week, and now, school officials must work to remove the title from their institutions. It is the second book by Hopkins to be banned in the state. Tricks was published in 2009.

Utah passed one of the strictest bills related to books in public schools last year. House Bill 29 (HB 29) allows parents to challenge books they deem “sensitive material” and it also outright bans books from all public schools in the state if those books have been deemed “objective sensitive material” or “pornographic” per state code in at least three public school districts or two public school districts and five charter schools statewide. The bill went into effect July 1, 2024, and it started with 13 titles on it.

The bill is retroactive, meaning that titles which met the state’s guidelines prior to the bill’s start date were included on the list. Per HB 29, any time a public or charter school removes a book deemed “sensitive material,” they must notify the State Board of Education. If that book meets the threshold of removals, all schools will be notified and expected to dispose of it.

There are now 17 books prohibited in any Utah public school. Of them, 15 are written by women, and their average publication date is 2011. This means that most of these books have been on shelves and available for many years and caused no issues until this manufactured crisis. The list is as follows:

What is important to understand about the law is that despite claims this is about “local control,” schools in the state are forced to follow the decisions made in other districts. There are 42 public school districts in Utah, but two districts account for nearly 80% of the books banned statewide: Davis School District and Washington School District.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Who Are the Best Villains in Literature?

It’s March on the internet, and that means brackets galore. Why should basketball get all the glory? The play-in matches have started for The Morning News‘s annual Tournament of Books; voting is open in the first round of March Book Madness, a global program originally created by two Ohio school teachers; and now the folks at Lit Hub have gotten in on the action with a more specialized spin. Their inaugural “Ides of March Madness” asks readers to identify the best villains in literature. The bracket divides 64 literary baddies into four categories: Authority Figures, Monsters & Boogeymen, Manipulative Bastards, and Anti-Villains. Don’t worry if you don’t recognize all the names on sight—the bracket is accompanied by short descriptions of each character that include their weapon of choice (poison, cannibalism, rodents!) and other pertinent info. Voting in the opening round is open now through 7pm Eastern this Sunday. May the worst man win.

Who Gives a F*ck About an Oxford Comma? This Lady.

Grammar nerds, rejoice! A new documentary called Rebel With a Clause (A+ pun work there, folks) follows Ellen Jovin, a real American hero who traveled to all 50 states with her “grammar table,” which she set up in public places to invite strangers to ask her questions about how the English language is supposed to work. Per the NYT‘s Katherine Rosman, the film captures Jovin “dispensing lessons that are precise but not pedantic, engaging in the sort of face-to-face conversations with strangers that are so absent from quotidian contemporary life.” Jovin, who is a writer and writing instructor and has studied 25 languages, first popped up to help passersby understand dangling modifiers and the like in New York in 2018. Now, she gets to host events where attendees wear t-shirts bearing bedazzled messages like “Grammar is groovy” and are mortified when they accidentally ask “Can I sit here?” rather than “May I sit here?” Honestly? Goals.

“Live Free or Die” is a false dilemma as well as the state motto of New Hampshire, where Gary Indiana was born and raised. The aphorism originated with the American Revolution and was revived in the sixties to boost up the boys sent to kill and die in Vietnam. New Hampshire began stamping it onto license plates in 1970, when Gary was twenty. By then he was living in California (state motto: “Eureka!”), having fled west at sixteen. What has proven true in the ensuing decades is that Gary lived freely and died anyway.

Gary’s lifelong quarrel was with the unexamined, dangerous, and ridiculous banner definitions of his time, fallacious state mottos and all. The grudge survives in his work as one long argument in favor of nothing left to lose. He often homed in on death or threat of it, writing characters, sometimes, who would just as soon take life as spit on it. And if dignity isn’t even on the table for most, what difference does death make? To him it was a personal question. Also edifying. “One still hopes some widely held notion of the common good will compel human beings to value empathy over the easy options of self-interest and violence,” he wrote at the 2014 Whitney Biennial in a tract titled A Significant Loss of Human Life. “If the existence of persistent, principled, rationalist resistance to barbarism ceases to be the case in the time ahead of us, the world will belong to any tyrant who claims it,” in Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt, 2005. From his memoir, 2015: “I wanted to scream from pain but didn’t. I looked at the baby and saw a future of scrapes and bruises. Life is short and full of pain and always beautiful, besides.” 

Gary resisted, celebrated, skewered, and suffered enormously. Living was his way of preparing for death, even when the cancer limited his abilities to move, snarl, laugh, and cause uproar. I have felt sadder than usual these past several weeks. I have also felt challenged and inspired by the righteous superiority of his intellect, his observational power, his appetites, the clarity and direction of his demanding yet lyrical insight. 

He knew what was happening, even as he dwindled just so before going. He was too smart to not know. When last we spoke, three days before he died, he rehearsed or repeated a few funny lines. Funny not because I found them amusing, funny because they passed through the lips of an expert still adamantly in need of pleasure, still in possession of a sense of timing despite time running out.

Ensuring that information being shared is coming from a valid and reliable source has always been crucial. But for many, this hasn’t been especially important for a variety of factors—it’s easy to believe what’s posted if the person posting is one you generally trust; some information being shared feels intuitive and thus is likely not wrong (or if it is wrong, it won’t cause actual harm); media literacy skills are generally not a cultural strong suit; and, frankly, not caring for any number of reasons.

But in an era where our information is continuing to be skewed by those with power, it is well beyond time to begin asking questions about the information you’re reading. We know that we can no longer rely on some of the basic media literacy skills once taught. Websites with a .gov address after them are no longer going to provide the breadth and depth of information they once did. With one executive order, any and all history related to trans people in America has been erased.

Turning to the 5Ws, 1H, and TOADSRIG, as outlined in this piece, can be helpful tools for navigating information you’re presented. But how do you begin to even assess whether the information is worth assessing? You have to begin with the source of that information.

It’s your responsibility to explore whether information is reliable and whether it is valid. These are two separate, but related, concepts. Reliability is about consistency. With information, reliability applies to whether what you’re reading is consistent across sources. There will certainly be differences in slant, but at heart, the information being shared is the same from outlet to outlet. Validity is about accuracy. With information, validity is about where something falls on the spectrum of fact to fiction.

Here’s an example.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day and here in the U.S., it’s Women’s History Month all March long. In that spirit, let’s spotlight some graphic novels and comic books that feature fascinating, beautiful, and badass trans girls and women!

Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!

Valentine’s Day is over, which means we’re no longer in the throes of Cuffing Season. But some of us—including the characters in this book—are desperate for love all year round.

I picked up this thriller the day after Valentine’s Day, and it was the perfect post-love season read. Forget about pure love and romance. None of these characters can be trusted, there are surprises around every turn, and nothing is what it seems.

Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!

Sorting through library news (or any news, really) feels a little like sticking your hand into a pit of hungry alligators. It’s mass firings of federal workers, bad management strategies from someone who isn’t authorized to manage anything at the federal level, book ban legislation…the list goes on. I’ve waded through the chaos and found a few news stories that managed to stand out from the blaring cacophony of WTF-ery. Time to pay attention.

In a shady-ass move, the Library of Congress released a list of proposed subject heading changes on February 18th, which included changing “Mexico, Gulf of” to “America, Gulf of” and changing Denali to Mount McKinley. They also set February 18th as the deadline for public comment submissions, even though the list was only posted earlier that day. When you consider how long it normally takes to make changes to existing subject headings, this rapid turnaround is hella sus.

Hoopla Cuts Back on “AI-Generated Slop”

Hoopla has announced it will do more to prevent the spread of low-quality AI-generated books on its platform. Although the exact details of the plan are unclear, hoopla has already implemented measures like revising its collection development policy, giving librarians a way to contact hoopla directly to better manage the catalog, and removing “summary titles” from all vendors, with the exception of series like CliffNotes. This is all well and good, but considering the sheer number of low-quality and AI-generated titles already in their catalog, hoopla has its work cut out for them.

My father has crossed many borders. Born in northern Việt Nam under French rule in 1933, he was educated in a French Catholic school. More than eighty years later, a widower, he could still sing fragments of French songs when we sat together at the dining table. The meal I could prepare which he most enjoyed was filet mignon, medium rare, with a glass of red wine. He had a cupboard full of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, for when he liked something, he bought it in bulk. When he stopped being able to eat meat and drink wine, I took the last two bottles of Louis Jadot and brought them home with me, where they remain untouched. Perhaps I will drink one when he passes away. Perhaps I will open the second decades from now and see what I remember when I taste it, even if all I will taste is spoilt wine. 

By then, my father will have long ago passed across the last border any of us will see. I know of at least two other borders that he crossed during his life. In 1954, as a newlywed at twenty-one with his seventeen-year-old wife, my father left his childhood home and moved south across the border, where Việt Nam had been partitioned into a communist north and anticommunist south following the defeat of French colonizers by Vietnamese revolutionaries. My mother’s entire family chose to leave the north, along with eight hundred thousand other Vietnamese Catholics fearing communist persecution. My father’s family chose to stay, so my father left behind his parents, his younger sister, and three younger brothers. He would not see them again for forty years. Ulysses was away from home for only twenty years. Does my father’s journey away from home and back to it four decades later deserve the name of an epic? If not, what form should my father’s story take?

The question of form and its relationship to a life lived interests me as a writer and as a border crosser, as my father’s son and as a father myself. A half century after my father left his childhood home, I visited the compound. My aunt had married and moved out long ago, but my three paternal uncles still live there, along with many of their children and grandchildren. From my youth until my visit and past then until the present, my parents have sent home money to the relatives every year to help them survive. On this visit, I gave all the adults envelopes of cash, the amounts determined by my father, and thought about what my life would have been like if my parents had never left in 1954, or in 1975, when they fled from Sài Gòn and crossed yet another border to the United States. If I am inclined to see the journeys of my parents as heroic, the writer Amitava Kumar pushes back against the praise for those who cross borders: the immigrants, the refugees, the undocumented, the expatriates, the tourists, the settlers, the conquerors. He writes that “It is not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.”

It is safe to say that perceptions of migrants are contradictory. In their countries of origin, they are sometimes celebrated for having embarked on adventures and sometimes criticized as having abandoned their homes. In the countries of their arrival, they can appear as terrifying threats in another people’s history or be welcomed as fresh blood. If they face hostility and suspicion, migrants might feel the need to insert themselves into their new nation’s chronicles of conquest. The migrant’s heroism can then harmonize with their host nation’s self-image, as well as affirming that nation’s hospitality and generosity.