In this week’s edition: Sales of books featuring LGBTQ characters are soaring; with Roe v. Wade now overturned, a recent book about the challenges 20th-century female writers and artists faced between making art and raising children has new relevance in the 21^st century; why more literary novels don’t deal with the subject of work and money; and more.. 

LGBTQ Book Sales Surging
USA Today
While states and school districts across the country ban books featuring LGBTQ protagonists, the number of books with LGBTQ characters sold in the U.S. has doubled in the past year, according to NPD Book Scan. Many of the books feature LGBTQ characters in secondary roles, suggesting that stories with gay or lesbian characters are becoming increasingly normalized.

Awards this Week Include the Walter Awards and the John W. Kluge Prize
Washington Post Book Club
Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter and Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White, and Whole both won Walter Dean Myers Awards, which recognize the year’s best children’s literature that “features diverse main characters and addresses diversity in a meaningful way.”Columbia University history professor George Chauncey (Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940) won the $500,000 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity from the Library of Congress.

The 14 Literary Newsletters You Need in Your Inbox
Electric Literature
These email newsletters help keep both writers and readers apprised of what’s happening in the book world.

If They Want to Be Published, Literary Writers Can’t Be Honest About Money
Lit Hub
Though money concerns or talk of work occupies much of most Americans’ lives, they’re rarely the subjects of literary fiction. This essay explores the reasons for this, arguing that it comes down to marketability.

The Enduring Legacy of L.A.’s Eso Won Books — Uplift and the Written Word
The Los Angeles Times
An elegy to Eso Won Books, a neighborhood bookstore that became a home to Black authors everywhere.

The End of the Art-Baby Problem
The New Republic
A new book explores the challenges (and solutions) women artists, including writers like Doris Lessing, Audre Lord, Alice Walker, Ursula le Quin, and Adrienne Rich, experienced when it came to balancing their creative lives and raising children.