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For Disability Pride Month, discover literature from authors who identify as persons with disabilities…

Flannelwood
by Raymond Luczak
Kindle price: $9.49

Spontaneous combustion occurs when Bill, a forty-year-old barista and a failed poet, meets James, a disabled factory worker and a daddy hunk, at an OctoBear Dance.

For six months they share weekends of incredible passion at James’s house up north in the country. Winter has never seemed hotter in their flannel sheets. But on the first day of spring James abruptly informs Bill over the phone that it’s not going to work out and hangs up. No further explanation: just the static of silence.

Feeling haunted like Djuna Barnes while she wrote her novel Nightwood in the 1930s, Bill searches for answers in his recollections of James and others who’d departed too early from his life. When he does discover why James left, the answer comes from a mysterious stranger with secrets of his own.

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Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
by Amanda Leduc
Kindle price: $9.95

Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?

If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.

“Leduc persuasively illustrates the power of stories to affect reality in this painstakingly researched and provocative study that invites us to consider our favorite folktales from another angle.” —Sara Shreve, Library Journal

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Pain Studies
by Lisa Olstein
Kindle price: $12.99

“A thrilling investigation into pain, language, and Olstein’s own exile from what Woolf called ‘the army of the upright.’ On a search path through art, science, poetry, and prime-time television, Olstein aims her knife-bright compassion at the very thing we’re all running from. Pain Studies is a masterpiece.” —Leni Zumas, author of The Listeners and Red Clocks

In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition.

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Only Bread, Only Light: Poems
by Stephen Kuusisto
Kindle price: $12.99

Planet of the Blind, a bestseller and New York Times Notable memoir that landed Kuusisto on Oprah, Dateline and other shows in 1998, has a companion volume in this slim, winning collection. Kuusisto successfully melds music, memory, and his wide-ranging erudition into quiet depictions of his experiences, presenting everything from evocations of a boyhood in Helsinki to earnest poems for Ted Berrigan, “Rachmaninoff’s Curtains” and Ogden Nash. Some of its most powerful moments reside in the poet’s accounts of his failing eyesight: “Each morning/ I live with less color:/ The lawn turns gray,/ The great-laurel is gravid/ With flint as if it might burn/ In the next life./ Even the persimmon tree/ Is clear as a wine stem.” Showing considerable dexterity, Kuusisto also works at times in a more traditional style that draws on surrealism, folklore and metaphysical verse. While too many poems suffer from decorative passages and tidy closure, others show Kuusisto marshalling considerable skills to create finely tuned descriptions of events past and present. In its best moments, this book succeeds in rendering the world both beautiful and strange: “The trees are foreign soldiers/ Talking low in a different tongue.”

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