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Rupaul's Drag Race Mad Libs: World's Greatest Word Game
An Adult Mad Libs based on the Emmy-winning reality show RuPaul's Drag Race! You'll want to run--in heels--to pick up your copy of RuPaul's Drag Race Mad Libs. Fans can relive their favorite moments from this fierce reality show by playing the 21 stories included in this book. Work!Sold out -
Rough Trade
Washington Territory, 1888. With contacts on the docks and in the railroad, and with a buyers' market funneling product their way, Alma Rosales and her opium-smuggling crew are making a fortune. They spend their days moving product and their nights at the Monte Carlo, the center of Tacoma's queer scene, where skirts and trousers don't signify and everyone's free to suit themselves.
Then two local men end up dead, with all signs pointing to the opium trade, and a botched effort to disappear the bodies draws lawmen to town. Alma scrambles to keep them away from her operation but is distracted by the surprise appearance of Bess Spencer--an ex-Pinkerton's agent and Alma's first love--after years of silence. A handsome young stranger comes to town, too, and falls into an affair with one of Alma's crewmen. When he starts asking questions about opium, Alma begins to suspect she's welcomed a spy into her inner circle, and is forced to consider how far she'll go to protect her trade. Katrina Carrasco plunges readers into the vivid, rough-and-tumble world of the late-1800s Pacific Northwest in this genre- and gender-blurring novel. Rough Trade follows Carrasco's critically acclaimed debut The Best Bad Things and reimagines queer communities, the turbulent early days of modern media and medicine, and the pleasures--and price--of satisfying desire. -
Long Island Compromise
An exhilarating novel about one American family, the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, and the wild legacy of trauma and inheritance, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble "Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?" In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in a cloistered town on the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family begins the hard work of moving on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety, too. But nearly forty years later, when Carl's mother dies and the family comes home to mourn her, it becomes clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband's emotional health. And their three grown children are each a mess, as well: Nathan's chronic fear won't allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything--substance, foodstuff, women--in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she's not a product of her family's pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of another kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their successes and their failures. Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family's history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives' tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, orgies, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever. -
Camp!: The Story of the Attitude That Conquered the World
By the bestselling author of Fabulosa! and Outrageous!, this reappraisal of camp across time and in all its glorious forms shows how this inescapable part of popular culture has also played an important role in equality movements as a form of protest or resistance. The following things have seemed impossibly camp to me at one point or another: a doll whose body acts as a cover for a toilet roll, a peacock chair, a wig being pulled off and flushed down the toilet, a tantrum over wire coat hangers, a toppled-over Christmas tree, a 1950s muscle magazine featuring a photo of a young man dressed as a gladiator, a rat underneath a silver serving platter, and an estate agent wearing tiger face paint. Fabulously unrestrained and ever-evolving, camp has captured the cultural imagination for at least 150 years. The term possibly derives from the French se camper, meaning to pose in a bold, provocative or exaggerated fashion. Frequently used to define or deride young heterosexual men, the upper classes, Black people, older women and gay men, camp has also played a key role in equality movements. Paul Baker's highly anticipated reappraisal of camp surveys its touchstones across history and the changing ways that it has been understood. He traces the history of camp from the courts of Louis XIV and trials of Oscar Wilde to the archetypical dandy Beau Brummell and the celebrated playwright Noel Coward; from The Valley of the Dolls, Harlem's drag balls and Brazilian telenovelas through to the modern day divas of Donna Summer, Madonna and Britney Spears. Celebrating camp as an aesthetic, a sensibility and a way of life, this essential dive into an often-derided phenomenon, shows how camp has been a place of refuge and renewal, of heroism and hedonism, and how it is more powerful than ever. 'Glittering cultural armour for dark times. Paul Baker captures the essentially uncapturable phenomenon making it just knowable for all. My dear, she's on fire!' - Damian Barr, writer and broadcaster 'A snappy guide to an all-conquering aesthetic' Financial Times -
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
Newly revised and updated, this classic manifesto is "a foundational text for anyone hoping to understand transgender politics and culture in the U.S. today" (NPR) *Named as one of 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time by Ms. Magazine* A landmark of trans and feminist nonfiction, Whipping Girl is Julia Serano's indispensable account of what it means to be a transgender woman in a world that consistently derides and belittles anything feminine. In a series of incisive essays, Serano draws on gender theory, her training as a biologist, her career in queer activism, and her own experiences before and after her gender transition to examine the deep connections between sexism and transphobia. She coins the term transmisogyny to describe the specific discrimination trans women face--and she shows how, in a world where masculinity is seen as unquestionably superior to femininity, transgender women's very existence becomes a threat to the established gender hierarchy. Now updated with a new afterword on the contemporary anti-trans backlash, Whipping Girl makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activists must work to embrace and empower femininity--in all of its wondrous forms--and to make the world safe and just for people of all genders and sexualities. -
The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers and the Last Days of Greek Freedom
From classicist James Romm comes a "striking...fascinating" (Booklist) deep dive into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great's destruction of Thebes--and the saga of the greatest military corps of the time, the Theban Sacred Band, a unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.The story of the Sacred Band, an elite 300-man corps recruited from pairs of lovers, highlights a chaotic era of ancient Greek history, four decades marked by battles, ideological disputes, and the rise of vicious strongmen. At stake was freedom, democracy, and the fate of Thebes, at this time the leading power of the Greek world. The tale begins in 379 BC, with a group of Theban patriots sneaking into occupied Thebes. Disguised in women's clothing, they cut down the agents of Sparta, the state that had cowed much of Greece with its military might. To counter the Spartans, this group of patriots would form the Sacred Band, a corps whose history plays out against a backdrop of Theban democracy, of desperate power struggles between leading city-states, and the new prominence of eros, sexual love, in Greek public life. After four decades without a defeat, the Sacred Band was annihilated by the forces of Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander in the Battle of Chaeronea--extinguishing Greek liberty for two thousand years. Buried on the battlefield where they fell, they were rediscovered in 1880--some skeletons still in pairs, with arms linked together. From violent combat in city streets to massive clashes on open ground, from ruthless tyrants to bold women who held their era in thrall, The Sacred Band recounts "in fluent, accessible prose" (The Wall Street Journal) the twists and turns of a crucial historical moment: the end of the treasured freedom of ancient Greece. -
Feel It All: A Therapist's Guide to Reimagining Your Relationship with Sex
A groundbreaking guide to sexuality that dispels the stale cultural attitudes about sex that leave too many feeling inadequate, and offers an expansive, attachment-based framework to free us and develop bolder, more satisfying relationships with our sexual selves.
When it comes to sex, most people feel insecure. But it's not because we're deficient; it's because we've been under-resourced and miseducated.
Certified sex therapist Casey Tanner argues that our sex lives are a microcosm of every untruth we've internalized about gender, sex, relationships, our bodies, and ourselves. Most of us were taught that healthy sexuality is only for a certain kind of person, in a certain kind of relationship, with a certain kind of body. As a result, the way we've learned how to define "good sex" is reflective of how good, worthy, and loveable we see ourselves.
Feel It All is a comprehensive guide to help everyone uncover their personal misconceptions about sexuality and relationships. Tanner helps you recognize and assess your core beliefs surrounding relationships, sexuality, gender, and more; identify past trauma; find pathways to healing that work for you; and redefine sex based on knowledge and possibilities, rather than potential consequences.
Comprehensive yet accessible, informative, warm, and nonjudgmental, Feel It All provides a pathway for personal healing, creating stronger relationships, and achieving deeper intimacy.
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Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It
Big, burly, lascivious, and soft around the edges: welcome to the hypermasculine world of Japanese gay manga. Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It is the first English-language anthology of its kind: an in-depth introduction to nine of the most exciting comic artists making work for a gay male audience in Japan. Jiraiya, Seizoh Ebisubashi, and Kazuhide Ichikawa are three of the irresistibly seductive, internationally renowned artists featured in Massive, as well as Gengoroh Tagame, the subject of The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame: Master of Gay Erotic Manga. Get to know each of these artists intimately, through candid interviews, photography, context-providing essays, illustrations, and manga. Massive also includes the groundbreaking, titillating work of gay manga luminaries Takeshi Matsu, Fumi Miyabi, Inu Yoshi, Gai Mizuki, and comic essayist Kumada Poohsuke. -
All the Colors of the Dark
From the New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End comes a soaring thriller and an epic love story that spans decades. "Impeccably crafted, deeply emotional, entirely shattering. I was captivated from page one." ―Bonnie Garmus, New York Times bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry 1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Mohammed Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges--Patch, a local boy with one eye, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake. Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another. A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession, and the blinding light of hope. -
A Veil of Gods and Kings: Apollo Ascending Book 1
A god fighting his fate. A prince burdened with secrets. And a romance that could end in flames.
Apollo is a deity... almost. Half mortal and refusing to take his position as god of the sun, he spends his nights drowning out haunting memories and his days avoiding responsibilities.
Until his father forces him into an ultimatum:
Ascend immediately.
Or spend the year mentoring under the obnoxious Prince Hyacinth.
Forced together, Apollo and Hyacinth grapple with their mutual disdain for each other.
But what starts as a kindling of irritation begins to burn into something new. A spark that, if it turns to flame, could incinerate everything they've always protected.
A reimagining of the Greek myth of Apollo and Prince Hyacinth, this NA, enemies-to-lovers fantasy series is a whirlwind journey full of romance, intrigue, and enthralling characters.
NOTE: This book is the first in a NA Fantasy series that features mature situations, adult language, and romances that lead to moderate steam as the series progresses.
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A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up
An artful and contemplative tribute to the late actor famed for his role as Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills, 90210. Best known for playing loner rebel Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills 90210, Luke Perry was fifty-two years old when he died of a stroke in 2019. There have been other deaths of 90's stars, but this one hit different. Gen X was reminded of their own inescapable mortality, and robbed of an exciting career resurgence for one of their most cherished icons--with recent roles in the hit series Riverdale and Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time In Hollywood bringing him renewed attention and acclaim. Only upon his death, as stories poured out online about his authenticity and kindness, did it become clear how little was known about the exceedingly humble actor and how deeply he impacted popular culture. In A Good Bad Boy, Margaret Wappler attempts to understand who Perry was and why he was unique among his Hollywood peers. To do so, she uses an inventive hybrid narrative. She speaks with dozens who knew Perry personally and professionally. They share insightful anecdotes: how he kept connected to his Ohio upbringing; nearly blew his 90210 audition; tried to shed his heartthrob image by joining the HBO prison drama Oz; and in the last year of his life, sought to set up two of his newly divorced friends. (After his death, the pair bonded in their grief and eventually married.) Amid these original interviews and exhaustive archival research, Wappler weaves poignant vignettes of memoir in which she serves as an avatar to show how Perry shaped a generation's views on masculinity, privilege and the ideal of "cool." Timed to the fifth anniversary of Perry's death, A Good Bad Boy is a profound and entertaining examination of what it means to be an artist and an adult.Sold out -
Santiago's Road Home
Three starred reviews!
"Harrowing but deeply illuminating." --School Library Journal A young boy gets detained by ICE while crossing the border from Mexico to the United States in this timely and unflinching novel by award-winning author Alexandra Diaz. The bed creaks under Santiago's shivering body. They say a person's life flashes by before dying. But it's not his whole life. Just the events that led to this. The important ones, and the ones Santiago would rather forget. The coins in Santiago's hand are meant for the bus fare back to his abusive abuela's house. Except he refuses to return; he won't be missed. His future is uncertain until he meets the kind, maternal María Dolores and her young daughter, Alegría, who help Santiago decide what comes next: He will accompany them to el otro lado, the United States of America. They embark with little, just backpacks with water and a bit of food. To travel together will require trust from all parties, and Santiago is used to going it alone. None of the three travelers realizes that the journey through Mexico to the border is just the beginning of their story. -
What Belongs to You
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction - A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction - A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction - A Finalist for the James Taite Black Prize for Fiction - A Finalist the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize - A Finalist for the Green Carnation Prize - A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he's forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko's own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by More Than Fifty Publications, Including: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times (selected by Dwight Garner), GQ, The Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Slate, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (London), The Telegraph (London), The Evening Standard (London), The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Millions, BuzzFeed, The New Republic (Best Debuts of the Year), Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly (One of the Ten Best Books of the Year)
"Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You appeared in early 2016, and is a short first novel by a young writer; still, it was not easily surpassed by anything that appeared later in the year....It is not just first novelists who will be envious of Greenwell's achievement."--James Wood, The New Yorker
What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love. -
Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path
An intimate look at one of culture's most enduring taboos: public sex.
Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers. Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann's ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police indifference to violence to examine cruising as a type of world-building.
The result is a series of insightful and poetic walks through history, law, literature, and popular representations of cruising in search of the social value of sex. What McCann ultimately reveals is a world of connection, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of pleasure.
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The Deep Dark: A Graphic Novel
From Molly Knox Ostertag, writer-illustrator of the New York Times and ABA Indie bestselling The Witch Boy trilogy and The Girl from the Sea, comes a darkly beautiful story of identity, family, love, loss, and magic.Everyone has secrets. Mags's has teeth.
Magdalena Herrera is about to graduate high school, but she already feels like an adult with serious responsibilities: caring for her ailing grandmother; working a part-time job; clandestine makeouts with a girl who has a boyfriend. And then there's her secret, which pulls her into the basement each night, drains her of energy, and leaves her bleeding. A secret that could hurt and even kill if it ever got out -- like it did once before.
So Mags keeps her head down, isolated in her small desert community. That is, until her childhood friend Nessa comes back to town, bringing vivid memories of the past, an intoxicating glimpse of the future, and a secret of her own. Mags won't get attached, of course. She's always been strong enough to survive without anyone's help.
But when the darkness starts to close in on them both, Mags will have to drag her secret into the daylight, and choose between risking everything... or having nothing left to lose.
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My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story
A moving, beautifully illustrated true story for children ages 6 to 9 about growing up in Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II--from the iconic Star Trek actor, activist, and author of the New York Times bestselling graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy.
February 19, 1942. George Takei is four years old when his world changes forever. Two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declares anyone of Japanese descent an enemy of the United States.
George and his family were American in every way. They had done nothing wrong. But because of their Japanese ancestry, they were removed from their home in California and forced into camps with thousands of other families who looked like theirs.
Over the next three years, George had three different "homes" the Santa Anita racetrack, swampy Camp Rohwer, and infamous Tule Lake. But even though they were now living behind barbed wire fences and surrounded by armed soldiers, his mother and father did everything they could to keep the family safe.
In My Lost Freedom, George Takei looks back at his own memories to help children today understand what it feels like to be treated as an enemy by your own country. Featuring powerful meticulously researched watercolor paintings, this is a story of a family's courage, a young boy's resilience, and the importance of staying true to yourself in the face of injustice.