Aunt Lute Books – förlag

Two vampire stories, two authors, two striking meditations on dependency and desire.

For readers of Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, and Gwendolyn Christie, comes Caramelle, Jewelle Gomez’s latest addition to the universe of The Gilda Stories. This short story offers a supernatural alternate history where vampires seek love, laughter, and blood in 1860s slavery America.

Inspired by a glimpse of affection in Joseph Le Fanu’s 1872 classic vampire novella Carmilla, Caramelle follows two vampires who arrive at a way station on the Underground Railroad not to stalk their prey but to seek sanctuary, intertwining the haunting legacy of American slavery with gothic horror and the resilience of Black women.

In Carmilla, included here alongside Caramelle, Le Fanu serves the sensual, sapphic, and spooky packaged into the experience of girlhood in 19th Century Austria. This original vampire story predates Dracula and introduces the genre as reliant on themes of gender, sexuality, and race.

Gomez’s foreword deftly links the two works by exploring the historical and cultural contexts that surround these two powerful iterations of the vampire genre.

“As in the past we still hold our freedom and our pleasure in our own strong hands. Hands made even stronger when holding on to the hands of others.” —Jewelle Gomez

Caramelle & Carmilla is the first book in the new series Aunt Lute Colloquy, a publishing space dedicated to fostering feminist conversations across literary generations.

Forced by Circumstance gathers in one volume foundational essays by, and interviews with one of the most highly esteemed intellectuals in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Feminist Studies. Reading Alarcón’s essays—from her early work on Mexican feminist writer Rosario Castellanos to her recent reflections on the carceral state and the political debacle that our contemporary situation presents—not only offers readers a sense of the intellectual trajectory of one of our most important Chicana feminist thinkers but also brings to a new generation of scholars and readers classic essays in Chicana/o Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, and Literary Studies.

"In El Mundo Zurdo I with my own affinities and my people with theirs can live together and transform the planet." —Gloria Anzaldúa, 1981

As a publication of selected works from El Mundo Zurdo 2024, the sesquiannual meetings of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, this collection features innovative and emergent applications, extensions, and fusions of Anzaldúan theory, method, philosophy and cosmology. The theme of the 2024 conference, Les Atravesades en Comunidad: Coalition Building as Light in the Dark, is embodied in these contributions from both senior and emergent scholars, as well as cultural producers, community activists, and students.

“Girls appear and disappear, but so do women. We know this because blood talks to blood.”

The town of Larissa, Texas, has secrets. Native girls are going missing, decades-old conflicts are hiding just below the surface, and Emily Howard is speaking to her ancestors. At eleven years old, the peculiar Emily does not fit in. It might be her bizarre fear of doorways, or the strange illnesses that plague her, or the obvious fact that she is not a blood relative of her mother. Regardless, Emily’s arrival to Larissa, Texas, changes the search for the missing children and the way the women of Larissa relate to each other. A story wrought with the griefs of womanhood, the burdens of ancestral trauma, and the realities of indigeneity in the United States, The Diving Season follows as the community of Larissa reels with its profound losses and Emily discovers where in this tangled world of the living, the dead, and the missing that she fits in.