Lu Chieregati’s Curated Selection – October 2025

Obviously, I was completely absorbed by the exercise Raquel suggested to me. To indicate four books (two from Graner’s collection and two from outside it) seems to me like a huge gesture for someone who loves books. Among the infinite possibilities that exist, how can one choose?

The first title, which is not in the collection, was crystal clear to me from the start: it’s a book I love. And I thought: what better criterion than love when choosing a book? It’s called Dawn, the first volume of a science fiction trilogy written by Octavia Butler. If you get hooked on this one, there are two more, and they’re really worth it because the entire trilogy is wonderful.

The second book is Ancestral Futurism, by Indigenous Action Media, Iki Yos Piña Funes, and Yáskana Elena A. Gil. I chose this one because it connects directly with my research: thinking (and practicing) outside the linearity of Western-colonial-heterosexual time.

The third book, which is in Graner’s collection, is Lessons on Gravity by Anne Juren, published by Varamo (and, by the way, I recommend all of Varamo’s titles that you’ll find in Graner’s library). For me, this book by Juren is a way of doing science fiction through somatic practices. It makes me realize that, deep down, my whole life I’ve been doing exactly that in order to be able to dance: inventing stories with the body, weaving fictions that open worlds, suggest ideas, and cross portals.

The fourth title, also in the collection, is a good example of the opposite of all the previous titles: a bad book. The kind you read because it’s what’s there, because no one before managed to capture the real stories its characters had to tell. It’s Tórtola Valencia: una mujer entre sombras, by María Pilar Queralt. I read it because I’m looking for information about Tórtola’s life, and it’s precisely in the interlines of texts like this that one has to speculate, read against the grain, in order to recover what normativity prefers to silence.

I hope you enjoy this selection! For more, I’m around.

Yours,
Lu Chieregati