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42 of 421 products
42 of 421 products
By: James Baldwin (Author), 2013, Paperback
One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this “truly extraordinary” novel (Chicago Sun-Times).
Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
Pulitzer Prize Winner
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view
In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg • A Best Book of the Year of the Year so Far for 2024: The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, W Magazine, Bustle, LitHub
"Genius"—The Atlantic • "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."—Chicago Tribune • "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."—The Boston Globe • "Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."—The New York Times
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
"...a love letter to a friend, a community, a youthfulness gone, a sweet song to relationship in all its joy and heartbreak."—Eleanor Anstruther, author of In Judgement of Others
"Lamb struck me as only rare books do: I found myself haunted equally by its joyous celebrations of identity, and the elusive nature of loss we all carry with us."—Kathleen Clare Waller, author of An Interpreter in Vienna
D is shaken when his mercurial friend Lamb vanishes just before they're set to move in together. The news of his death three years later shadows him like a ghost.
Sifting through Lamb's journals decades later, D uncovers a raw, intimate portrait of a sensitive misfit navigating a world that never understood him.
From their first meeting at an elite all-boys school to the chaos of 1990s San Francisco, Lamb's story unfolds in a tangle of tenderness and rebellion, anguish and adventure. Through journal entries, letters, poetry, and stories, Lamb is a coming-of-age in snapshots that captures the dazed spirit of young men searching for belonging in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis.
A Tales of the City for Generation X—a dark afterparty of gay awakening both aching and unforgettable.
By: Lev AC Rosen (Author), 2022, Paperback
A "Best Of" Book Amazon * Buzzfeed * Rainbow Reading * Library Journal * CrimeReads * BookPage * Book Riot * Autostraddle
A delicious story from a new voice in suspense, Lev AC Rosen's Lavender House is Knives Out with a queer historical twist.
Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret―but it's not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they've needed to keep others out. And now they're worried they're keeping a murderer in.
Irene’s widow hires Evander Mills to uncover the truth behind her mysterious death. Andy, recently fired from the San Francisco police after being caught in a raid on a gay bar, is happy to accept―his calendar is wide open. And his secret is the kind of secret the Lamontaines understand.
Andy had never imagined a world like Lavender House. He's seduced by the safety and freedom found behind its gates, where a queer family lives honestly and openly. But that honesty doesn't extend to everything, and he quickly finds himself a pawn in a family game of old money, subterfuge, and jealousy―and Irene’s death is only the beginning.
When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever. Running a soap empire can be a dirty business.
(The Exalted)
What good is it to know the truth if you're powerless to change it?
Philadelphia, 1950.
Nobody suspects that private detective Katsumi Okazaki uses prophecy magic to solve her cases. But her uncanny "intuition" at finding the truth can't help her prove that her new client's wife was murdered. Not when everyone else is convinced the death was accidental. To make matters more complicated, Kat's new client is an Exalter--afflicted with unpredictable magical abilities as collateral damage from the war--and her story stirs up Kat's own painful memories of displacement and the love she lost.
Luckily, Kat has plenty of practice burying her personal problems under a mountain of work. She sets out with her ethically questionable but trustworthy assistant to find evidence and catch the killer. But dread creeps in when she realizes she's being tailed. Is someone trying to thwart her investigation, or does the government still not trust her?
Either way, Kat can't let her client down. And if what her magic tells her is real, then catching the killer might not be enough... not if she's going to be able to live with herself when it's done.
The first book in The Exalted series, Marigolds and Murder is a queer fantasy murder mystery that blends WWII history with magic.
By: Rasheed Newson (Author), 2022, paperback
Earl "Trey" Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at 17, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind.
In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships―all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death.
Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning.
By: Gore Vidal (Author), Camille Paglia (Introduction), 2019, Paperback
The outrageous and immortal, gender-bending and polymorphously perverse, over-the-top, and utterly on-target comic masterpiece from the bestselling author of Burr, Lincoln, and the National Book Award-winning United States.
With a new introduction by Camille Paglia
"I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess."
So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees.
Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent ("Has literary decency fallen so low?" asked Time), Myra Breckinridge's moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.
By: AC Rosen (Author), 2024, Hardcover
Set in atmospheric 1950s San Francisco, Rough Pages asks who is allowed to tell their own stories, and how far would you go to seek out the truth.
Private Detective Evander “Andy” Mills has been drawn back to the Lavender House estate for a missing person case. Pat, the family butler, has been volunteering for a book service, one that specializes in mailing queer books to a carefully guarded list of subscribers. With bookseller Howard Salzberger gone suspiciously missing along with his address book, everyone on that list, including some of Andy's closest friends, is now in danger.
A search of Howard’s bookstore reveals that someone wanted to stop him and his co-owner, Dorothea Lamb, from sending out their next book. The evidence points not just to the Feds, but to the Mafia, who would be happy to use the subscriber list for blackmail.
Andy has to maneuver through both the government and the criminal world, all while dealing with a nosy reporter who remembers him from his days as a police detective and wants to know why he’s no longer a cop. With his own secrets closing in on him, can Andy find the list before all the lives on it are at risk?
Dive into the full Evander Mills series:
Lavender House
The Bell in the Fog
Rough Pages
Will Darling came back from the Great War with a few scars, a lot of medals, and no idea what to do next. Inheriting his uncle’s chaotic second-hand bookshop is a blessing...until strange visitors start making threats. First a criminal gang, then the War Office, both telling Will to give them the information they want, or else. Will has no idea what that information is, and nobody to turn to, until Kim Secretan—charming, cultured, oddly attractive—steps in to offer help. As Kim and Will try to find answers and outrun trouble, mutual desire grows along with the danger. And then Will discovers the truth about Kim. His identity, his past, his real intentions. Enraged and betrayed, Will never wants to see him again.But Will possesses knowledge that could cost thousands of lives. Enemies are closing in on him from all sides—and Kim is the only man who can help. A 1920s m/m romance trilogy in the spirit of Golden Age pulp fiction.
By Leslie Feinberg, 2014, Paperback
20th Anniversary Author Edition
Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? That’s the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950’s, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist ’60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early ’70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence. Leslie Feinberg is also the author of Trans Liberation, Trans Gender Warriors and Transgender Liberation, and is a noted activist and speaker on transgender issues.
By: KJ Charles (Author), 2021, Paperback
Will Darling is all right. His business is doing well, and so is his illicit relationship with Kim Secretan--disgraced aristocrat, ex-spy, amateur book-dealer. It’s starting to feel like he’s got his life under control.And then a brutal murder in a gentleman’s club plunges them back into the shadow world of crime, deception, and the power of privilege. Worse, it brings them up against Kim’s noble, hostile family, and his upper-class life where Will can never belong.With old and new enemies against them, and secrets on every side, Will and Kim have to fight for each other harder than ever—or be torn apart for good.
By: Kate Chopin (Author), 1899, Paperback
The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics.
The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature; it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern works of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.
By: Lev AC Rosen, 2023, Hardcover (Evander Mills, 2)
The Bell in the Fog, a dazzling historical mystery by Lev AC Rosen, asks―once you have finally found a family, how far would you go to prove yourself to them?
San Francisco, 1952. Detective Evander “Andy” Mills has started a new life for himself as a private detective―but his business hasn’t exactly taken off. It turns out that word spreads fast when you have a bad reputation, and no one in the queer community trusts him enough to ask an ex-cop for help.
When James, an old flame from the war who had mysteriously disappeared, arrives in his offices above the Ruby, Andy wants to kick him out. But the job seems to be a simple case of blackmail, and Andy’s debts are piling up. He agrees to investigate, despite everything it stirs up.
The case will take him back to the shadowy, closeted world of the Navy, and then out into the gay bars of the city, where the past rises up to meet him, like the swell of the ocean under a warship. Missing people, violent strangers, and scandalous photos that could destroy lives are a whirlpool around him, and Andy better make sense of it all before someone pulls him under for good.
(Evander Mills, 2)
The Bell in the Fog, a dazzling historical mystery by Lev AC Rosen, asks―once you have finally found a family, how far would you go to prove yourself to them?
San Francisco, 1952. Detective Evander “Andy” Mills has started a new life for himself as a private detective―but his business hasn’t exactly taken off. It turns out that word spreads fast when you have a bad reputation, and no one in the queer community trusts him enough to ask an ex-cop for help.
When James, an old flame from the war who had mysteriously disappeared, arrives in his offices above the Ruby, Andy wants to kick him out. But the job seems to be a simple case of blackmail, and Andy’s debts are piling up. He agrees to investigate, despite everything it stirs up.
The case will take him back to the shadowy, closeted world of the Navy, and then out into the gay bars of the city, where the past rises up to meet him, like the swell of the ocean under a warship. Missing people, violent strangers, and scandalous photos that could destroy lives are a whirlpool around him, and Andy better make sense of it all before someone pulls him under for good.
Dive into the full Evander Mills series:
Lavender House
The Bell in the Fog
Rough Pages
By: Sylvia Plath (Author), 2005, Paperback
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels
A realistic and emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath.
“It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath’s voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal.” — USA Today
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: young, brilliant, beautiful, and enormously talented, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s neurosis becomes completely understandable and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such thorough exploration of the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche - and the profound collective loneliness that modern society has yet to find a solution for - is an extraordinary accomplishment, and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
This P.S. edition features extra insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.