Queerly Beloved

Out today in paperback, a trio of short stories by Shira Glassman: Knit One, Girl Two, Fearless, and Your Name Is Love!

Knit One, Girl Two:
Small-batch independent yarn dyer Clara Ziegler is eager to brainstorm new color combinations--if only she could come up with ideas she likes as much as last time! When she sees Danielle Solomon's paintings of Florida wildlife by chance at a neighborhood gallery, she finds her source of inspiration. Outspoken, passionate, and complicated, Danielle herself soon proves even more captivating than her artwork...

Fearless:
Lana Novak hasn’t played violin in over twenty years, her musical life these days confined to being a devoted band mom to her clarinet whiz daughter Robin. She didn’t think she could get back into it after this long, but Melanie Feinberg, the outgoing, enthusiastic, Jewish, and very cute butch orchestra director from Robin’s school, has other ideas.

Your Name Is Love
Energetic royal guard Hadar takes her artist wife Halleli on a scavenger hunt around the city to cure her artist’s block about the lesbian graphic novel she’s supposed to make for the queen.



Longtime followers may remember some of my previous giveaways, which included copies of Knit One, Girl Two, and Tales From Perach, a short story collection that Your Name Is Love originally appeared in. While Your Name Is Love was already available in paperback, this is the first time that Knit One, Girl Two and Fearless are appearing in physical form! But if electronic editions are more your jam, you can also get those from Amazon or Shira's Gumroad account (where Shira will get a bigger kickback than Amazon gives her).

A kind soul on Tumblr has offered to buy folks copies of shiraglassman's books! Folks who have been here a while may remember my June giveaway of Knit One, Girl Two, Shira's incredibly popular (and super-duper adorable) contemporary romance between two Jewish women; now you have a chance to get not only a free copy of that, but of everything else in Shira Glassman's catalogue!

If you want to know about any of her titles, just comment here and I can gush at you for a while 😉 Her most recent release is "Gifts of Spring", a short romance between a trans woman mage and a Jewish acrobat, previously available in (IIRC) the Queerly Loving anthology.

Check out the details right over here. If you have any trouble requesting things from that generous soul, let me know and I'll do my best to help get things sorted!

Dear readers, if you haven't heard of her already, please allow me the privilege of being the first to tell you about Shira Glassman (found here on Tumblr).

Shira is a bisexual Jewish woman who writes the most adorable fluff you can imagine, pretty much all of which has at least one Jewish and/or queer main character. She is best known for her Mangoverse series, and her novella, Knit One, Girl Two.

The Mangoverse is a light/cozy fantasy series set in a fantastic version of Florida, starring an almost entirely Jewish cast. The main characters are Queen Shulamit, a lesbian who's allergic to poultry and has a gluten intolerance; Rivka, a demisexual warrior woman disguised as a man and Shulamit's newfound BFF; Aviva, the bisexual palace chef who was the first person to take Shulamit's food problems seriously and helped her find out what she could and couldn't eat; and Isaac, a wizard who can transform into a dragon. It's currently four books long with a collection of short stories. Every book and story has a happy ending guaranteed for all queer characters and their loved ones, all of whom find whatever kind of love they want. Each book is designed to be read as standalone and in any order, though you will be slightly spoiled for something that happens in the first book if you read any other one first. There's also a collection of short stories, one of which features Rivka rescuing an aro-ace damsel in distress.

Knit One, Girl Two is a cute, contemporary romance between two young Jewish women in Florida. They're both artists of different types: The main character, Clara, is a small-batch yarn dyer, and her love interest, Danielle, is a painter. The story is about the struggle to find inspiration, even when the world seems its bleakest. Fun side note: Both of the main characters are into the same imaginary fandom, which Shira later expands on in the high-heat short story, Cinnamon Blade.

You can find out more about the majority of Shira's work in her post on LGBTQ Reads (it was published before Knit One, Girl Two and Cinnamon Blade were published).

I do have a few warnings for the stories, but by and large they are very quick and not the focus. If you need to know them before going in, though, click the cut and learn more: ( A series of very mild warnings )

One last thing: If you're interested in any of these books, specified here or in Shira's own list of her work, improfem has very generously offered to buy them for people who can't afford them.

Note: As of yet, there are no audio versions for any of these. I live in hope, though!