May Queer Book Club: The Gilda Stories

Join us at Old Town Books as we discuss our May Queer Book Club pick: The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez

Join a community of LBGTQIA2S+ readers meeting monthly to discuss stories by queer authors, centered on queer life!

Old Town Books' Queer Book Club is free and open to the public. While buying the book at OTB is not required to attend, we would greatly appreciate it to help keep our free literary programming sustainable! Buy your copy of The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez at the shop or online and note "book club" to get 10% off.

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About the Book

Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, now as a new Penguin Classics hardcover, a Penguin Speculative Fiction Special

A Penguin Classic Hardcover

First published in 1991, The Gilda Stories is a groundbreaking speculative fiction vampire novel that begins in 1850s Louisiana, where a young Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who “shares the blood” by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. Taking only blood as sustenance, killing as a last resort, Gilda moves through the centuries up to the dystopian future of 2050. Gomez’s classic, with a Black lesbian heroine, has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of Blackness, radical ecology, redefinitions of family, and the erotic potential of the vampire story.

Penguin Speculative Fiction Special is a hardcover series of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and more published by Penguin Classics. Featuring custom endpapers, specially commissioned cover art, and introductions by scholars and notable figures, these collectible editions celebrate classics that invite us to ask, “What if?” and that, through bold imagination, alternative visions, and magical realms, transform our perception of our world.