Last year’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature went to Kacen Callender for King and the Dragonflies, which was the first LGBTQ book and the first LGBTQ middle grade book to win the title. Yash: I just wanted to start by telling you how excited all of us were and what an accomplishment this win is. After covering her award announcement, I was lucky to catch up with Malinda to discuss how she brought Lily, Kath, and their milieu to life.
In Lo’s hands, 1950s Chinatown is so close you could almost touch it. This novel tells the story of a Chinese-American teenager in San Francisco named Lily who comes of age in the mid-50s, dreaming of space travel, covertly reading chapters of drug store lesbian pulp novels, and sneaking out to the Telegraph Club, the dyke bar of our dreams (based on the real San Francisco institution Mona’s!). Malinda Lo’s National Book award win last month for her latest novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, affirmed everything that I love about this genre: the vivid and well-researched specificity, the emotional stakes of complicated historical moments, and the commitment to bringing queer community to life in ways that honor both the perseverance of the time and the progress we’ve made since. I was put on this earth to read gay historical fiction, and let me tell you, what a time to be alive. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.
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