"Waiting On" Wednesday - Beyond Binary edited by Brit Mandelo

"Waiting On" Wednesday spotlights upcoming releases that everyone's excited about (created by Jill at Breaking The Spine.)

Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction edited by Brit Mandelo:

From the introduction: There are many ways to break, transcend, challenge, subvert, and fuck with strict binary ideas about gender, sexuality, and identity. Speculative writers like James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon and Samuel Delany have done it for decades; in 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness posited a world in which people are agendered for the majority of their lives, and the novel won both the Hugo and the Nebula. We still have the Tiptree Award, devoted to fiction that plays with and challenges ideas about gender, and it’s been going strong for two decades. After all, speculative fiction is the literature of questions, of challenges and imagination — and what better for us to question than the ways in which gender and sexuality have been rigidly defined, partitioned off, put in little boxes?

The thing is, stories about genderqueer and sexually fluid identities are still hard to find, even in a field active with speculation on gender and sexuality. They tend to pop up here and there, scattered throughout magazines and collections, and in queer publications that tend to get less attention from the SF readership. This book is an effort to collect and present some of the best of those stories in one place. [May 1, 2012]

I cannot WAIT to read this one. Not only does it speak to my heart and soul, and not only does it fit in wonderfully with my Transcending Gender Reading Challenge, but it's edited by the wonderful Brit Mandelo! Here's hoping I can get my hands on an advance copy . . .hint, hint, cough, cough. :)

How about you? What are you waiting on this week?

♥