Queer Square Mile, edited by Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan, and Huw Osborne

Queer Square Mile:  Queer Short Stories from Wales
 
This ground-breaking volume makes visible a long and diverse tradition of queer writing from Wales. Spanning genres from ghost stories and science fiction to industrial literature and surrealist modernism, these are stories of love, loss and transformation.
 
 
In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father's place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus 'utopia'. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one's place in the world.

Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or North Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings - a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places.