Books

By: Tikva Wolf (Author), Sophie Labelle (Foreword), 2016, Paperback

A hilarious and touching comic about polyamory, queer, and genderqueer issues. If your relationships or your gender are unconventional, you’ll find useful advice and plenty of laughs in this compilation of the wildly popular webcomic Kimchi Cuddles. Quirky, endearing and charmingly (and sometimes painfully) realistic characters, many based on real people, explore polyamory, queer and genderqueer issues. Covering practical matters like time management and serious topics like discrimination, this book unites the best of two years of Kimchi Cuddles comics, organized into a practical and entertaining guide to the real world of alternative relationships. Kimchi Cuddles is a rare mix: fearlessly true to the lives of the people it depicts yet relatable enough to entertain and inform anyone (maybe even your parents). Dealing with both lighthearted and serious subject matter, it avoids clichés and easy answers, choosing instead to give examples of different schools of thought and show the humanity behind each one. Wolf’s honesty and gift for clear explanation have made Kimchi Cuddles a hit with the most dedicated polyamorists as well as curious newcomers.

By: Ashley Herring Blake, 2022, Paperback

An interior designer who is never without the perfect plan learns to renovate her love life without one in this new romantic comedy by Ashley Herring Blake, author of Delilah Green Doesn’t Care.
 
For Astrid Parker, failure is unacceptable. Ever since she broke up with her fiancé a year ago, she’s been focused on her career—her friends might say she’s obsessed, but she knows she’s just driven. When Pru Everwood asks her to be the designer for the Everwood Inn’s renovation, which will be featured on a popular HGTV show, Innside America, Astrid is thrilled. Not only will the project distract her from her failed engagement and help her struggling business, but her perpetually displeased mother might finally give her a nod of approval.
 
However, Astrid never planned on Jordan Everwood, Pru’s granddaughter and the lead carpenter for the renovation, who despises every modern design decision Astrid makes. Jordan is determined to preserve the history of her family’s inn, particularly as the rest of her life is in shambles. When that determination turns into some light sabotage to ruffle Astrid’s perfect little feathers, the showrunners ask them to play up the tension. But somewhere along the way, their dislike for each other evolves into something quite different, and Astrid must decide what success truly means. Is she going to pursue the life that she’s expected to lead or the one that she wants?

By Lauren John Joseph, hardcover

It's four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realize the date is February 29th-the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters, and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago.

Ten years earlier, our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power plays initiates a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims-and culminate in terrible betrayal.

At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco, and New York-a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.

Paperback book. Published by Microcosm! Every autistic person is capable and worthy of having happy, healthy, fulfilling friendships and relationships. This workbook takes you step-by-step through getting to know your own wants and needs and engaging with others whose wants and needs are compatible. The result of a collaboration between autistic publisher Joe Biel and Dr. Faith G. Harper, bestselling author of Unfuck Your Boundaries and Unfuck Your Intimacy, this workbook can be completed on its own or alongside The Autism Relationships Handbook. Exercises include evaluating your relationship history, figuring out what you want in your relationships and what steps you need to take to achieve your goal, how to identify someone who's a good potential friend or date, how to express your needs and boundaries, how to hear and respect the other person's needs and boundaries, and how to have relationship building or strengthening conversations.

By: Roxane Gay (Author), 2014, Paperback

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”  — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

A New York Times Bestseller

Best Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe • Newsweek • Time Out New York • Oprah.com • Miami Herald • Book Riot • Buzz Feed • Globe and Mail (Toronto) • The Root • Shelf Awareness

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generation

In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.

By: Huw Lemmey (Author), Ben Miller (Author); 2023; Paperback

An unconventional history of homosexuality

We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive.

Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century, one central to major historical events.

Bad Gays is a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond questions of identity, compelling readers to search for solidarity across boundaries.

By: Joey Skladany (Author), 2020, Hardcover

Embrace your inner basic bitch with these 100+ everyday recipes for “basic” meals you shamelessly love.

In a world where everyone seeks to be special and pride themselves on their differences, there is one common bond that unites us all—basicness. And while some rock the Ugg boots and drink pumpkin spice lattes more than others, we can all still appreciate the simple pleasures that mimosas, avocado toast, and acai bowls bring. And that’s okay!

Basic Bitchen celebrates and embraces the basic bitch lifestyle through food, offering step-by-step recipes for the most fundamental (and delicious) of all dishes. Recipes include:

-Basic Bitch Lifeblood, aka. the Pumpkin Spice Latte

-Mom’s Definitely-Not-Sicilian Sicilian Caesar Salad

-“I Could Eat This, Like, Every Day” Sushi Rolls

-A Deeply Personal Cauliflower Pizza

-Way Too Easy (If You Know What I Mean) One-Sheet-Pan Dinners

-Antidepressant Red Velvet Cake Pops

In addition to these easy, fun, and flavorful crowd-pleasing recipes, Chowhoundeditor Joey Skladany provides tips and tricks for cooking basics, such as how to build a pantry and cooking tools that every chef needs. Take your cooking skills beyond the microwave and make meals all of your friends will enjoy.

By: P.J. Vernon (Author), 2022, Paperback

Nominated for a 34th annual Lambda Literary Award • A scintillating thriller with an emotional punch: “The tension builds to unbearably claustrophobic levels. To say more would rob readers of the 'no, he didn’t' suspense that makes Bath Haus an unexpectedly twisted, heart-pounding cat-versus-mouse thriller" (Los Angeles Times).

Oliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.

He races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.

What follows is a classic runaway-train narrative, full of the exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon's Bath Haus is perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.

By: The Nib (Compiler), Matt Boss (Editor), Matt Lubchansky (Editor), Sarah Mirk (Editor), Eleri Harris (Editor), 2020, Paperback, Illustrated

The dream of a queer separatist town. The life of a gay and Jewish Nazi-fighter. A gender reveal party that tears apart reality. These are the just some of the comics you'll find in this massive queer comics anthology from The Nib.

Be Gay, Do Comics is filled with dozens of comics about LGBTQIA experiences, ranging from personal stories to queer history to cutting satire about pronoun panic and brands desperate to co-opt pride. Brimming with resilience, inspiration, and humor, an incredible lineup of top indie cartoonists takes you from the American Revolution through Stonewall to today's fights for equality and representation.

Featuring more than 30 cartoonists including Hazel Newlevant, Joey Alison Sayers, Maia Kobabe, Matt Lubchansky, Breena Nuñez, Sasha Velour, Shing Yin Khor, Levi Hastings, Mady G, Bianca Xunise, Kazimir Lee, and many, many more!

By: Cassie Premo Steele (Author), 2023, Paperback

The main character of Beaver Girl is Livia, a 19-year-old girl who has been through a pandemic and climate collapse. She wakes in her house to wildfires that are encroaching upon her neighborhood, and she goes into a nearby forest, Congaree National Park, to try to escape the wildfires. There she befriends a beaver family. The reader learns about beavers as a keystone species for our environment. For example, most of Texas and New Mexico, which we think of as desert areas now, were lush green forests before the Europeans got rid of all the beavers for the fur trade. Beavers create these wetland areas, and even after an individual family has moved on those beaver ponds become part of the water table, which can help us during times of drought in later years. The novel has elements of a morality tale that shows what we have done to help bring about climate disaster. It is also set in a post-apocalyptic time and shows what beavers and humans could do together to restore faith and strength and a sense of family and community.

By: H.L.T. Quan (Author), 2024, Paperback

'Phenomenal ... Offers us possibilities for rescuing the concept of democracy from its fatal entanglement with racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism'—Angela Y. Davis

'Embraces the unruliness of collective struggle, and recognizes freedom not as a destination but practice—an abolitionist, feminist, anticapitalist, antiracist, radically inclusive practice'—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

'A compelling and inspiring book that belongs in our movements and our classrooms'—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism Without Borders

'An elegantly written masterpiece'—Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter

Become Ungovernable is a provocative new work of political thought setting out to reclaim “freedom”, “justice”, and “democracy”, revolutionary ideas that are all too often warped in the interests of capital and the state. Revealing the mirage of mainstream democratic thought and the false promises of liberal political ideologies, H.L.T. Quan offers an alternative approach: an abolition feminism drawing on a kaleidoscope of refusal praxes, and on a deep engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and queer analytics.

With each chapter anchored by episodes from the long history of resistance and rebellions against tyranny, Quan calls for us to take up a feminist ethic of living rooted in the principles of radical inclusion, mutuality and friendship as part of the larger toolkit for confronting fascism, white supremacy, and the neoliberal labor regime.

H.L.T. Quan is a political theorist, award-winning filmmaker and Associate Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Quan is the author of Growth Against Democracy and editor of Cedric J. Robinson.

By: Katie West (Editor), Jasmine Elliot (Editor), Kristen J. Sollee (Foreword), 2019, Paperback

"A fierce and voluble refutation of the patriarchy and its soul-crushing oppression of female power. These writers make clear that as witches, femmes, and queers, they will use their own strength, ingenious rituals, beauty routines, and spells to rise above and beyond the limits of racism/classism and objectifications set by a male-dominated society. While bound by a thread of magic, these are inspiring feminist writings for readers of feminist literature, however identified.” --Library Journal

Edgy and often deeply personal, the twenty-one essays collected here come from a wide variety of writers. Some identify as witches, others identify as writers, musicians, game developers, or artists. What they have in common is that they’ve created personal rituals to summon their own power in a world that would prefer them powerless. Here, they share the rituals they use to resist self-doubt, grief, and depression in the face of sexism, slut shaming, racism, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression.

Contents

Introduction
Notes from the Editors
Content Warning

1. Unfuckable—Cara Ellison
2. Trash-Magic: Signs & Rituals for the Unwanted—Maranda Elizabeth
3. Uncensoring My Ugliness—Laura Mandanas
4. Femme as in Fuck You: Fucking with the Patriarchy One Lipstick Application at a Time—Catherine Hernandez
5. Before I Was a Woman, I Was a Witch—Avery Edison
6. Undressing My Heart—Gabriela Herstik
7. Garden—Marguerite Bennett
8. Reddit, Retin-A, and Resistance: An Alchemist’s Guide to Skincare—Sam Maggs
9. The Future is Coming for You—Deb Chachra
10. My Witch’s Sabbath of Short Skirts, Long Kisses, and BDSM—Mey Rude
11. Buzzcut Season—Larissa Pham
12. The Harpy—Meredith Yayanos
13. Fingertips—merritt
14. Red Glitter—Sophie Saint Thomas
15. Touching Pennies, Painting Nails—Sim Bajwa
16. Ritual in Darkness—Kim Boekbinder
17. Gayuma—Sara David
18. Pushing Beauty Up Through the Cracks—Katelan Foisy
19. Ritualising My Humanity—J. A. Micheline
20. Simulating Control—Nora Khan
21. I Am, Myself, a Body of Water—Leigh Alexander

Contributors
Acknowledgements

By: Amy Ellis Nutt, 2015, Paperback

The inspiring true story of a transgender girl, her identical twin brother, and an ordinary American family’s extraordinary journey to understand, nurture, and celebrate the uniqueness in us all, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning science reporter for The Washington Post

When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin boys, they thought their lives were complete. But it wasn’t long before they noticed a marked difference between Jonas and his brother, Wyatt. Jonas preferred sports and trucks and many of the things little boys were “supposed” to like; but Wyatt liked princess dolls and dress-up and playing Little Mermaid. By the time the twins were toddlers, confusion over Wyatt’s insistence that he was female began to tear the family apart. In the years that followed, the Maineses came to question their long-held views on gender and identity, to accept and embrace Wyatt’s transition to Nicole, and to undergo an emotionally wrenching transformation of their own that would change all their lives forever.

Becoming Nicole chronicles a journey that could have destroyed a family but instead brought it closer together. It’s the story of a mother whose instincts told her that her child needed love and acceptance, not ostracism and disapproval; of a Republican, Air Force veteran father who overcame his deepest fears to become a vocal advocate for trans rights; of a loving brother who bravely stuck up for his twin sister; and of a town forced to confront its prejudices, a school compelled to rewrite its rules, and a courageous community of transgender activists determined to make their voices heard. Ultimately, Becoming Nicole is the story of an extraordinary girl who fought for the right to be herself.

Granted wide-ranging access to personal diaries, home videos, clinical journals, legal documents, medical records, and the Maineses themselves, Amy Ellis Nutt spent almost four years reporting this immersive account of an American family confronting an issue that is at the center of today’s cultural debate. Becoming Nicole will resonate with anyone who’s ever raised a child, felt at odds with society’s conventions and norms, or had to embrace life when it plays out unexpectedly. It’s a story of standing up for your beliefs and yourself—and it will inspire all of us to do the same.

By: Kit Heyam (Author), 2024, Paperback

A “vital” (New York Times Book Review), groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity

Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.

Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam chronicles expressions of trans experience that are often left out of the historical record. Drawing on their own experience of transition and gender nonbinarism, Heyam reveals that what constitutes a man, a woman, or gender itself has continually been defined, contested, and redefined.

A groundbreaking, radically inclusive trans history, Before We Were Trans reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written—and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.

By: Jazz Jennings, 2016, Paperback

Jazz Jennings is one of the youngest and most prominent voices in the national discussion about gender identity. At the age of five, Jazz transitioned to life as a girl, with the support of her parents. A year later, her parents allowed her to share her incredible journey in her first Barbara Walters interview, aired at a time when the public was much less knowledgeable or accepting of the transgender community. This groundbreaking interview was followed over the years by other high-profile interviews, a documentary, the launch of her YouTube channel, a picture book, and her own reality TV series--I Am Jazz--making her one of the most recognizable activists for transgender teens, children, and adults.

In her remarkable memoir, Jazz reflects on these very public experiences and how they have helped shape the mainstream attitude toward the transgender community. But it hasn't all been easy. Jazz has faced many challenges, bullying, discrimination, and rejection, yet she perseveres as she educates others about her life as a transgender teen. Through it all, her family has been beside her on this journey, standing together against those who don't understand the true meaning of tolerance and unconditional love. Now Jazz must learn to navigate the physical, social, and emotional upheavals of adolescence--particularly high school--complicated by the unique challenges of being a transgender teen. Making the journey from girl to woman is never easy--especially when you began your life in a boy's body. See Jazz's story come to life with two inserts featuring personal photos.