It’s Pride Month, and the Book Club is celebrating with stories about Southern Queer and Genderqueer experience: Manywhere by Morgan Thomas.

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to be reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas’s subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery. A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father. Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves shape the people we become.

About the Book Club

NWA Equality’s Reading Between the Lines LGBTQ book club typically meets on the fourth Tuesday of each month from 6:30-7:30 p.m. at rotating locations in Benton and Washington Counties. Reading selections include a variety of cross-cultural and Queer subjects and works by LGBTQ authors. The book club is open to LGBTQ individuals and our allies, 18 and older. Please fill out a one-time registration here.

Books are available through our local program partners Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville and Two Friends Book Shop in Bentonville. Follow us on social media to win free books courtesy of program sponsor Tyson Foods.