Collection: Adult

A manifesto and guide for building mutual aid groups and reclaiming power in a time of perpetual crisis

We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life?

Using examples from the Black Panthers' "survival programs," the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organised polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair -- a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.

THE TIME MACHINE meets MIDNIGHTER & APOLLO in SAINTED LOVE Vol. 1: A Time to Fight - a steamy, genre-blending gay, science fiction, era-spanning, adventure-packed graphic novel!

A SEXY, TIME TRAVEL ROMANCE TOO POWERFUL TO BE CONTAINED IN A SINGLE ERA!
New York City, 1907.
Malcolm "Mac" Irina is the greatest inventor the world's never heard of, and his lover, John Wolf, is the toughest bare-knuckle boxer in the city. Irina's crowning invention, the Chronocorridor, is nearly complete. He dreams of whisking himself and Wolf away to a time when they can live and love freely. But when crazed Detective Felt raids Irina's lab, the couple dive into the freshly powered-up portal to escape capture.

Sainted Love is a steamy time-traveling adventure series, equal parts romance and science fiction as two heroes fight for their love while journeying across centuries of history. It's sexy, it's exciting, it's fast-paced. It's a gay romance that sees queer heroes become legends themselves as they explore and adventure through iconic times in queer history, from the passion of gay saints Sergius and Bacchusto to the Lavender Mafia of the 1970s, and in between. Irina and Wolf first think they need to return home, but they soon realize that their real calling is elsewhere in time, to places where they're free to love and exists as who they are and eras that desperately need their help.

Steve Orlando (Eisner and GLAAD Award nominated writer of Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man 2099, Wonder Woman) and Giopota (artist+creator of beloved webcomic Mothersea) hurl you across time with Irina and Wolf, as they encounter famous queer people throughout history and fight back against all who would see their names and love erased!

SAINTED LOVE Vol. 1: A Time to Fight collects issues #1-3 of the acclaimed series and successfully-funded Kickstarter!

For fans and readers of: Doctor Who, Black Mirror, Quantum Leap, The Time Machine (H.G. Wells), The Star Rover (Jack London), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Mark Twain), Check, Please! (Ngozi Ukazu), Paper Girls (Brian K. Vaugh/Cliff Chiang), Moonstruck (Grace Ellis, Kate Leth, Shae Beagle), The Prince & The Dress Maker (Jen Wang), Bingo Love (Tee Franklin, Jenn St. Onge, Joy San, Genevieve FT) Sunstone (Stjepan Sejic), Money Shot (Tim Seeley), Midnighter and Apollo (Steve Orlando)

Low stakes. High heat. Sharp steel.

"Clever, sparkling, and perfectly indulgent, Swordcrossed feels like stepping into a party already in full swing. Everything is possible; everything is wondrous. This is fantasy romance at its very best."--Grace D. Li, New York Times bestselling author of Portrait of a Thief

A LitHub most anticipated book of 2024

Mattinesh Jay, dutiful heir to his struggling family business, needs to hire an experienced swordsman to serve as best man for his arranged marriage. Sword-challenge at the ceremony could destroy all hope of restoring his family's wealth, something that Matti has been trying--and failing--to do for the past ten years.

What he can afford, unfortunately, is part-time con artist and full-time charming menace Luca Piere.

Luca, for his part, is trying to reinvent himself in a new city. All he wants to do is make some easy money and try to forget the crime he committed in his hometown. He didn't plan on being blackmailed into giving sword lessons to a chronically responsible--and inconveniently handsome--wool merchant like Matti.

However, neither Matti's business troubles nor Luca himself are quite what they seem. As the days count down to Matti's wedding, the two of them become entangled in the intrigue and sabotage that have brought Matti's house to the brink of ruin. And when Luca's secrets threaten to drive a blade through their growing alliance, both Matti and Luca will have to answer the question: how many lies are you prepared to strip away, when the truth could mean losing everything you want?

The Lotus Empire brings Tasha Suri's acclaimed Burning Kingdoms trilogy to a heart-stopping close. As an ancient magic returns to Ahiranya and threatens its very foundations, Empress Malini and priestess Priya will stop at nothing to save their kingdoms--even if it means they must destroy each other.

Malini has claimed her rightful throne as the empress of Parijatdvipa, just as the nameless gods prophesied. Now, in order to gain the support of the priesthood who remain loyal to the fallen emperor, she must consider a terrible bargain: Claim her throne and burn in order to seal her legacy--or find another willing to take her place on the pyre.

Priya has survived the deathless waters and now their magic runs in her veins. But a mysterious yaksa with flowering eyes and a mouth of thorns lies beneath the waters. The yaksa promises protection for Ahiranya. But in exchange, she needs a sacrifice. And she's chosen Priya as the one to offer it.

Two women once entwined by fate now stand against each other. But when an ancient enemy rises to threaten their world, Priya and Malini will find themselves fighting together once more - to prevent their kingdoms, and their futures, from burning to ash.

Praise for the Burning Kingdoms Trilogy

"Will undoubtedly reshape the landscape of epic fantasy for years to come." --Booklist, starred review

"Alluring, action-packed, and gut-wrenching." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"More than lives up to the hype with its rich and expansive world, compelling characters, cool magic system and Suri's excellent writing." --BookPage, starred review

The JSA's greatest hero faces his greatest villain, in a powerful story of courage showcasing DC's original Green Lantern in an all-new light!

The Green Lantern is the most powerful member of the JSA, beloved by all of America, but his personal life is a well-kept secret. Both his public and private life are threatened when he's framed by a mysterious killer, and the victims are people from his past!

This is a story about love, about fear, and most of all about courage to stand up to that fear. Alan Scott's past is the key to his future when the Red Lantern appears, ready to strike down the mighty Green Lantern! Can Alan Scott stop his enemy's monstrous plans?

Alan Scott: The Green Lantern by Tim Sheridan and artist Cian Tormey is the first solo series starring DC's first Green Lantern in decades, telling an emotional story of a closeted gay hero in the 1940s. Alan Scott: The Green Lantern is part of DC's The New Golden Age initiative, alongside Wesley Dodds: The Sandman and Jay Garrick: The Flash, reinvigorating some of DC's most enduring characters.

This volume collects Alan Scott: The Green Lantern #1-6.

A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco.

Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Jhanvi has made a life for herself working at a grocery co-op and saving for her surgeries. But when her friend (and sometimes more) Henry mentions that he and his techie festival-goer friends spent $100,000 to transform a warehouse basement into a sex dungeon, Jhanvi starts wondering if there's a way to exploit these gullible idiots. She returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry for his company's generous healthcare benefits.

Jhanvi enters a world of beautiful, decadent fire eaters and their lavish sex parties. But as her pretensions to cynicism and control start to fade, she develops a Gatsbyesque attraction to these happy young people and their bold claims of unconditional love. But do any of her privileged new friends really like or accept her? Her financial needs expose the limits of a community built on limitless self-expression, and soon she has to choose between doing what's right, and doing what's right for her.

This darkly funny novel skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture, and asks whether "found family" is just another of the 21st-century's broken promises.

A ferocious novel by one of the boldest voices in American fiction and the author of The New Me, the "definitive work of millennial literature" (The New Yorker)

"Butler has crafted a novel in which every character proves to be completely, uniquely crazy. Her perverse sense of humor should be studied and celebrated."--David Sedaris

Margaret Anne "Moddie" Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.

So begins Halle Butler's sadistically precise and hilarious Banal Nightmare, which follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her hometown, throwing herself at the mercy of her old friends as they, all suddenly tipping toward middle age, go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious East Coast artist to take up a winter residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and old loyalties will be tested to their extreme.

Banal Nightmare is filled with complicated characters who will dazzle you in their rendering just as often as they will infuriate you with their decisions. Halle Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal, and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.

The riveting story of QAnon's devastating impact on the American family, grappling with the seductive allure of disinformation, the trauma it causes, and how we might set ourselves free.

The QAnon conspiracy theories--which posit that a nefarious cabal of elites is secretly ruling our society, poisoning our bodies, and harming our children--have come to represent the peculiar mania driven by social media disinformation campaigns and its dire consequences on our politics. But what's often overlooked is the raw destructive power these theories have on the American family. In an age in which partisanship has created deep divides within the home--between parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives--the extreme belief structure of QAnon widens those divides into seemingly insurmountable chasms, leaving people lost, confused, and broken. With studies showing that nearly 19% of Americans believe in QAnon-related theories, the true toll of QAnon on our mental and social health is as vast as it is urgent to confront.

In The Quiet Damage, celebrated reporter Jesselyn Cook unfolds the heartbreaking stories of five representative families from couples young and old to rural white parents to urban Black siblings, to show how QAnon shattered bonds once believed unbreakable. Cook paints a portrait of American suffering, of the vulnerabilities that have left people susceptible to outrageous theories promising order and control in a world where both are increasingly in short supply. Charting the arc of each believer's path from their first intersection with QAnon to the depths of their cultish conviction in the theory's promise, to--in some fortunate cases--their rejection of conspiracy thinking and the mending of broken bonds, Cook offers a fascinating look into the psychology of how and why ordinary people come to believe the unbelievable. Her reporting lays bare how we have been taken hostage by grifters who profit from a network built on false hope--and how we might eventually release our loved ones, and ourselves, from their grasp.

At once a riveting account of the American family in crisis and a sociological exploration of the hidden costs of our global crisis of disinformation, The Quiet Damage is profound, brilliantly researched, and beautifully written.

Obsessed by what they are certain is the impending apocalypse, a mismatched trio set off on a globetrotting road-trip in the latest feel-good adventure from the internationally bestselling author of The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.

In the fading days of late summer, 2011, self-taught astrophysicist Petra has calculated that the atmosphere will collapse in a few weeks' time--on September 21, at approximately 9:20 pm--ending the world as we know it.

But the distraught Petra will not have to carry the burden of this terrible news alone for long. Fate intervenes, bringing her into the orbit of a pair of unlikely companions: Johan, a man whose intellectual prowess is remarkably overshadowed by his culinary skills, and Agnes, a seventy-five-year-old widow who has made a fortune posing as a young influencer on social media. Convincing them of the impending doom, Petra, Johan, and Agnes embark on a wild adventure in a camper van that will take them from their homes in Sweden, through Europe, to their destination: Rome.

Johan plans to make the most of the time he has left. He has decided at last to stand up to his heinous big brother, promising to deliver a swift yet brutal blow in more ways than one. But, of course, nothing ever goes as planned. Not even the end of the world. . . .

In this, his sixth novel, Jonas Jonasson takes us on a dazzling odyssey across the globe-from Sweden, through Europe, across Africa, and all the way to the US. The Prophet and the Idiot is an immensely funny, socially conscious, and life-affirming yarn about what happens when three odd yet fully reasonable characters come together and find cause to make mutual plans, all relayed in Jonasson's classically hilarious style.

Translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles

In this dark, immersive tale steeped in atmosphere and drama, the author of Theatre of Marvels returns to Victorian London to tell the story of a young Black female doctor's dangerous quest to find the truth that unearth the secrets of the past.

London, 1833.

Doctress Hester Reeves has been offered a life-changing commission.

But it comes at a price. She must leave behind her husband and their canal-side home in Kings Cross and move to Tall Trees--a dark and foreboding house in Fitzrovia.

If Hester can cure the ailing health of its owner, Gervaise Cherville, she will receive payment that will bring her everything she could dream of.

But on arriving at Tall Trees, Hester quickly discovers that an even bigger task awaits her. Now she must unearth secrets that have lain hidden for decades - including one that will leave Hester's own life forever changed. . . .

This tour de force of investigative journalism--in the vein of The Next Civil War and Why We're Polarized--depicts the United States of America as a country at a crossroads with the battle between the right and left spilling out from the darkest corners of the internet into the real world with often tragic consequences.

Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and probing interviews under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups.

At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right. This ongoing battle, long fought mainly on the internet, has spilled out into the real world with greater and greater frequency, culminating in the attempted coup on January 6th.

Combining her years of on-the-ground reporting, Reeve clearly illustrates this shocking sweep of violence, where this cultural shift came from, and where it is going. She also introduces us to a shocking but powerful cast of characters, such as the creator of 8chan--an online hub for conspiracies and misogynistic rhetoric--and the white power leader who is still pulling the strings from a prison cell. Uncovering the hidden links between these events and how we can prevent further upheavals of this nature, Black Pill is a necessary read for any supporter of democracy.

The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. It was built by a smalltime hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can't leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

In this lush translation by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, Layla Martinez's eerie debut novel is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as "a house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge, " this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.

In 2022, it was reported that plus-sizes accounted for nearly twenty percent of all women's apparel sales in the United States and was one of the industry's few growth sectors. For many, this news seemed to herald a remarkably inclusive turn for an industry that long bartered in exclusivity. Yet the recent success of plus-size fashion obscures a rather complicated history-one that can be traced back over a century, and which illuminates the fraught relationship between fashion, fat, and weight bias in American culture.

Although many regard fat as a malady of the present, in the early twentieth century it was estimated that more than one-third of American women classified as "overweight." While modern weight bias had yet to fully cement itself in the American imaginary, the limitations of mass garment manufacturing coupled with the ascendent slender beauty ideal had already relegated larger women to fashion's peripheries. By 1915, however, fashion forecasters predicted that so-called "stoutwear" was well positioned to become one of the most lucrative subsectors of the burgeoning ready-to-wear trade. In the years that followed, stoutwear manufacturers set out to create more space for the fat woman in fashion but, in doing so, revealed an ancillary motivation: that of how to design fat out of existence altogether.

Fashion Before Plus-Size considers what came "before" plus-size fashion while also shedding new light on the ways that the fashion industry not only perpetuates but produces weight bias. By situating stoutwear at the confluence of mass manufacturing, beauty ideals, standardized sizing, health discourse, and consumer culture, this book exposes the flawed foundations upon which the contemporary plus-size fashion industry has been built.

Sparks fly when a young woman finds herself cast on a Love Island-inspired reality show and has to choose between her heart and her strategy in this sizzling new queer romantic comedy from the beloved author of Wanderlust.

This summer, things are about to heat up.

Cas Morgan has spent years of her life watching Hot Summer, the hit reality dating show that pairs together a bunch of sexy singles in an exotic island location. Like the rest of the TV-watching UK public, she's captivated by the hot contestants, outrageous fights, and hilarious banter. But she never quite thought she'd be a part of it, until her company secures a partnership with the production team behind the show, and Cas is handpicked as a contestant. She won't get any extra help making it through the eight weeks in the hot Cypriot sun, but if she does well and makes it to the finals, her long-awaited promotion will be secured.

Cas is ready to spend the summer trying to make herself more likeable to win over the voting public--and, if not likeable, then at least iconic. But just as she steps into the villa, her entire plan goes off course. She's instantly smitten with fellow contestant, Ada, who shockingly appears to be on the show to find a genuine relationship, one Cas can't give. Ada is gorgeous and charming, and seems to like Cas exactly as she is, sharp-edges and all. Cas isn't used to the side of herself Ada brings out, and when their connection becomes undeniable--and Cas's own standing in the villa precarious--she's torn between listening to her heart or sticking to her strategy.

The greatest love is one that surmounts even the greatest obstacles in this romance featuring Naru from the Love Nest series.

When a young chef confesses his love to a mysterious and attractive older stranger, he's drawn into a deep web of intrigue and buried family history that could threaten his attraction to the only man he's ever loved.

Mei has decided to put a lid on his infatuation with Naru and build a new relationship as nephew and uncle. However, every time Naru speaks fondly of his memories of his older brother--Mei's late father--he feels a disturbance in his heart. Meanwhile, Hayashida, the freelance writer who's been snooping around Mei, finally reveals his true nature!