Collection: Adult

A fearless collection of stories that celebrate the humor, darkness, and depth of emotion of the queer and trans experience that's not typically represented: liminal or uncertain identities, queer conception, and queer joy

In this exuberant, prize-winning collection, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters seek love and connection in hilarious and heartrending stories that reflect the complexity of our current moment.

A nonbinary writer on the eve of top surgery enters into a risky affair during the height of COVID. A lesbian couple enlists a close friend as a sperm donor, plying him with a potent rainbow-colored cocktail. A lonely office worker struggling with their gender identity chaperones their nephew to a trans YouTube convention. And in the depths of a Midwestern winter, a sex-addicted librarian relies on her pet ferrets to help resist a relapse at a wild college fair.

Capturing both the dark and lovable sides of the human experience, Rainbow Rainbow establishes debut author Lydia Conklin as a fearless new voice for their generation.

Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today.

"A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell." -- New York Times

After working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn't be this way -- and in some places it isn't. Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later, the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over. It's just one of the many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is possible today.

Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, and beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he champions ideas whose time have come.

Every progressive milestone of civilization -- from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy -- was once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman's book, both challenging and bracing, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek, can become a reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can in fact make the impossible inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world.

How the "bad feelings" of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing

Some days--or weeks, or months, or even years--being trans feels bad. Yet as Hil Malatino points out, there is little space for trans people to think through, let alone speak of, these bad feelings. Negative emotions are suspect because they unsettle narratives of acceptance or reinforce virulently phobic framings of trans as inauthentic and threatening.

In Side Affects, Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival. Trans structures of feeling are frequently coded as negative on both sides of transition. Before transition, narratives are framed in terms of childhood trauma and being in the "wrong body." Posttransition, trans individuals--especially trans people of color--are subject to unrelenting transantagonism. Yet trans individuals are discouraged from displaying or admitting to despondency or despair.

By moving these unloved feelings to the center of trans experience, Side Affects proposes an affective trans commons that exists outside political debates about inclusion. Acknowledging such powerful and elided feelings as anger and exhaustion, Malatino contends, is critical to motivating justice-oriented advocacy and organizing--and recalibrating new possibilities for survival and well-being.

The rhythm is gonna get you.

It's been five whole months since the last murder in Cedar River, Texas, and Juni Jessup and her sisters Tansy and Maggie have been humming along when disaster strikes again.

Their struggling vinyl records shop/coffee nook, Sip & Spin Records, is under pressure from predatory investors, though the Jessup sisters aren't ready to face the music and admit defeat. But the night after their
meeting, the sketchy financier is killed outside their shop during a torrential Texas thunderstorm that washes out all the roads in and out of town. Now the sisters find themselves trapped in Cedar River with a killer, and Juni is determined to solve the case.

When the river spits out an unexpected surprise, Detective Beau Russell asks for Juni's help, never predicting her investigation will spin her into danger. Up until now, the Jessup sisters have been playing it by ear, but with
the whole town watching, can they catch a killer before he strikes again?

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives-to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Jack Halberstam proposes "low theory" as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one's way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children's films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

In this warmhearted romantic comedy, a mistaken identity leads to a blossoming romance between two boys.

Aoki has a crush on Hashimoto, the girl in the seat next to him in class. But he despairs when he borrows her eraser and sees she's written the name of another boy--Ida--on it. To make matters more confusing, Ida sees Aoki holding that very eraser and thinks Aoki has a crush on him!

Aoki confesses his feelings to Ida and prepares for rejection, but in an unexpected turn of events, Ida asks him if they should try dating. Aoki wants to keep their new relationship under wraps, but Ida has already told all their friends!

An indispensable survival manual for men entering the trenches of fatherhood, Be Prepared is loaded with one-of-a-kind insights, MacGyver-esque tips and tricks, and no-nonsense advice for mastering the first year as a dad.

Finally, a book that teaches men all the things they really need to know about fatherhood...including how to:

-Change a baby at a packed sports stadium
-Create a decoy drawer full of old wallets, remote controls, and cell phones to throw baby off the scent of your real gear
-Stay awake (or at least upright) at work
-Babyproof a hotel room in four minutes flat
-Construct an emergency diaper out of a towel, a sock, and duct tape

Packed with helpful diagrams and detailed instructions, and delivered with a wry sense of humor, Be Prepared is the ultimate guide for sleep-deprived, applesauce-covered fathers everywhere.

The best-selling bible of the movement to defund the police in an updated edition

"Urgent, provocative, and timely, The End of Policing will make you question most of what you have been taught to believe about crime and how to solve it."
--James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own

The massive uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020-- by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. That case had been put persuasively a few years earlier in The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, now a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over policing and racial justice.
The central problem, Vitale demonstrates, is the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on firsthand research from across the globe, he shows how the implementation of alternatives to policing--such as drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs--has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice.

This updated edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.

PRESELECCIONADA PARA EL NATIONAL BOOKS AWARDS EN LA CATEORIA DE NO FICCIÓN 2023

Incluido en los libros de ficción notables del New York Times de 2023

Este libro es para celebrar el paso de Liliana Rivera Garza por la tierra y para decirle que, claro que sí, lo vamos a tirar. Al patriarcado lo vamos a tirar.

«El 16 de julio de 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, mi hermana, fue víctima de un feminicidio. Era una muchacha de 20 años, estudiante de arquitectura. Tenía años tratando de terminar su relación con un novio de la preparatoria que insistía en no dejarla ir. Unas cuantas semanas antes de la tragedia, Liliana por fin tomó una decisión definitiva: en lo más crudo del invierno había descubierto que en ella, como bien lo había dicho Albert Camus, había un invencible verano. Lo dejaría atrás. Empezaría una nueva vida. Haría una maestría y después un doctorado; viajaría a Londres.

La decisión de él fue que ella no tendría una vida sin él. Hace apenas un año decidí abrir las cajas donde depositamos las pertenencias de mi hermana. Su voz atravesó el tiempo y, como la de tantas mujeres desaparecidas y ultrajadas en México, demandó justicia.

El invencible verano de Liliana es una excavación en la vida de una mujer brillante y audaz que careció, como nosotros mismos, como todos los demás, del lenguaje necesario para identificar, denunciar y combatir la violencia sexista y el terrorismo de pareja que caracteriza a tantas relaciones patriarcales .

" Enorme! Ojalá millones lo lean!" -- Francisco Goldman, autor de Monkey Boy, finalista del Premio Pulitzer de Ficción 2022

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NONFICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS

Listed as one of The New York Times' Notable Fiction Books of 2023

A haunting, unforgettable memoir about a beloved younger sister and the painful memory of her murder, from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem).

Can you enjoy yourself while you are in pain? The question, which is not new, arises over and over again during that eternity that is mourning.

In the early hours of July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana's story instead became subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice.

In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome-but possessive and short-tempered-man, through the exhilarating weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.

Using her remarkable talents as a scholar, novelist, and poet, Cristina Rivera Garza returns to Mexico after decades of living in the United States to collect and curate evidence --handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, architectural blueprints-- in order to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Tracing the full arc of their childhood and adolescence in central Mexico, through the painful and confusing years after Liliana's death, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister, and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.

In the extraordinary new Cork O'Connor thriller from New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author William Kent Krueger, the lives of hundreds of innocent people are at stake when Cork vanishes just days before his daughter's wedding.

Since the violent deaths of his wife, father, and best friend all occurred in previous Novembers, Cork O'Connor has always considered it to be the cruelest of months. Yet, his daughter has chosen this dismal time of year in which to marry, and Cork is understandably uneasy.

His concern comes to a head when a man camping in Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness goes missing. As the official search ends with no recovery in sight, Cork is asked by the man's family to stay on the case. Although the wedding is fast approaching and the weather looks threatening, he accepts and returns to that vast wilderness.

As the sky darkens and the days pass, Cork's family anxiously awaits his return. Finally certain that something has gone terribly wrong, they fly by floatplane to the lake where the missing man was last seen. Locating Cork's campsite, they find no sign of him. They do find blood, however. A lot of it.

With an early winter storm on the horizon, it's a race against time as Cork's family struggles to uncover the mystery behind these disappearances. Little do they know, not only is Cork's life on the line, but so are the lives of hundreds of others.

A daringly observant memoir about intergenerational trauma, fine art, and compartmentalization from a returning Soft Skull author and Lambda Literary Award winner

A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do.

Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young artist, then disparaged Mattilda's work as "vulgar" and a "waste of talent" once it became unapologetically queer.

As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys's paintings and handmade paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys's place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving.

Sycamore writes, "Art is never just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations, a safety valve, an escape hatch, a sudden shift in the body, a clipboard full of flowers, a welcome mat flipped over and back, over and back, welcome."

Refusing easy answers in search of an embodied truth, Sycamore upends propriety to touch the art and feel everything that comes through.

It is too often accepted that during the 19th and early 20th centuries it was the male writers who developed and pushed the boundaries of the weird tale, with women writers following in their wake--but this is far from the truth. This new anthology follows the instrumental contributions made by women writers to the weird tale, and revives the lost authors of the early pulp magazines along with the often overlooked work of more familiar authors. See the darker side of The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett and the sensitively-drawn nightmares of Marie Corelli and Violet Quirk. Hear the captivating voices of Weird Tales magazine contributors Sophie Wenzel Ellis, Greye La Spina, and Margaret St Clair, and bow down to the sensational, surreal, and challenging writers who broke down the barriers of the day. Featuring material never before republished, from the abyssal depths of the British Library vaults.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A Time #1 Nonfiction Book* An Entertainment Weekly #1 Nonfiction Book *A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Salon Book Awards* A Kansas City Star's Top 100 Book of the Year *A Mother Jones' Favorite Book*

The 15th Anniversary edition of the worldwide bestseller that answers the ultimate question: what happens to the Earth when human beings disappear? Now with a new afterword from the author.

The World Without Us is a penetrating, page-turning tour of a post-human Earth. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists, Alan Weisman deftly illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.

In this revelatory account, Alan Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, and radio waves may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.

As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman draws on every field of science to present an environmental assessment like no other. This is narrative nonfiction at its finest--one of the most affecting portraits yet of humankind's place on this planet.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author, and creator of the Bridgerton series, Julia Quinn presents the third, stunning installment in the Bridgerton adjacent Regency era-set world featuring the romantic adventures of the well-meaning but less-than-accomplished Smythe-Smith musicians. Following a disastrous duel, a dashing mathematician and a headstrong young lady are at odds--until fate throws them together.

Hugh Prentice has never liked Lady Sarah Pleinsworth, and his opinion is confirmed when he overhears her yammering on about how she must get married this season or she will simply die. He's never had patience for dramatic females, and the words shy and retiring have never been in Sarah's vocabulary. Besides, even if he did grow to enjoy her company, it wouldn't matter. A reckless duel has left this brilliant mathematician with a ruined leg, and now, unable to run, ride, or even waltz, he could never court a woman like Sarah, much less dream of marrying her.

Sarah has never forgiven Hugh for the duel he fought three years earlier, the one that forced her cousin into exile, nearly destroying her family. But even if she could find a way to forgive him, it wouldn't matter. She doesn't care that his leg is less than perfect, it's his personality she can't stand. But when the pair is forced to spend a week in close company they discover that opinions--even those firmest held--can, in fact, be altered. And when a kiss leads to two, three and four the mathematician may lose count and the miss may, for the first time, find herself speechless.

Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party's seemingly omniscient leader, Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people's history and language. Now, the Party is forcing the use of an invented language called Newspeak which will prevent political insurgency by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes. But a seed of dissent grows in Winston - one that will bring him into direct conflict with the Party, and with devastating consequences. Rarely has one book ever been so rich in political and social criticism as 1984. Originally published in 1949, this new graphic novel edition of the dystopian classic, powerfully illustrated by Matyás Namai, reveals Winston's fight against the Party in all its horror and futility. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE*
*ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021*

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award

"Astonishingly good." --Lily Meyer, NPR
"So incantatory and visceral I don't think I'll ever forget it." --Ali Smith, The Guardian Best Books of 2020

One of The Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 A Sunday Times best book of the year

Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop's English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a "powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel" (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.

Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called "Chocolat" soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man's Land.

Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa's mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German's severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa's deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn't a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?

Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man's descent into madness.