Recommendations based on "Conversations with Anaïs Nin (Literary Conversations)"

This searing and intimate novel in verse follows a sixteen-year-old girl coping with sexual abuse as she grapples with how to reclaim her story, her anger, and her body in a world that seems determined to punish her for the sin of surviving."This is more than a story about sexual violence—this book is about race, sexuality, love, and how anger can be a catalyst for healing."—Gabrielle Union, bestselling author, actress, and producerSixteen-year-old Alicia Rivers has a reputation that precedes her. But there’s more to her story than the whispers that follow her throughout the hallways at school—whispers that splinter into a million different insults that really mean: a girl who has had sex. But what her classmates don't know is that Alicia was sexually abused by a popular teacher, and that trauma has rewritten every cell in her body into someone she doesn't recognize. To the world around her, she’s been cast, like the mythical Medusa, as not the victim but the monster of her own story: the slut who asked for it.Alicia was abandoned by her best friend, quit the track team, and now spends her days in detention feeling isolated and invisible. When mysterious letters left in her locker hint at another victim, Alicia struggles to keep up the walls she's built around her trauma. At the same time, her growing attraction to a new girl in school makes her question what those walls are really keeping out."[This] fierce and brightly burning feminist roar…paints a devastating and haunting portrait of a vulnerable young woman discovering the power of her voice, her courage, and her rage." —Samira Ahmed, New York Times bestselling author of Internment and Hollow Fires

Inspired by the #1 New York Times Bestselling Trilogy, the official FIFTY SHADES OF GREY: Inner Goddess Journal is a beautiful blank book designed for keeping a journal or writing notes. It features a foreword by E L James, brief excerpts from the novels, tips for writers, a writing playlist, elegant color artwork, and fully lined pages throughout. Aspiring writers are encouraged to express their own Inner Goddess, as E L James writes in her foreword: “The best person to write for is yourself—and what better place to start than in a journal.” Produced with eye-catching design and details, the journal has a bonded leather cover with foil stamping, rounded corners, endpapers, and a red-ribbon marker. Perfect for gift-giving and portability.

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. One of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2023. One of The New York Times' 10 Best California Books of 2023. Longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.“Open Throat is what fiction should be.” ―The New York Times Book ReviewA lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience.When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.” As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.

Here, from the incomparable John Waters, is a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich―and happily horrify readers everywhere.Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities―some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis―these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness.Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse, and hilarious artistic minds of our time.

From the author of Fun Home—the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and othersFor twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends—academics, social workers, bookstore clerks—fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.Bechdel fuses high and low culture—from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory—in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”

"Girls Girls Girls floored me. . . . It's completely extraordinary." —Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of SandwichA vibrant queer Jewish debut "teeming with heart, angst, love, and self discovery" (Emily Austin) about a young woman who, caught between the expectations of others and her own evolving desires, is forced to make a series of fraught life-altering decisions.It’s the summer of ’96 and best friends (and secret girlfriends) Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the fabled queer paradise of San Francisco, free from the harsh gazes of their neighbors and the stifling demands of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they will finally be together as a real couple, out in the open, around other queer people. Even if the move means leaving behind Hannah’s beloved Bubbe.When the financial strains of West Coast living push the girls to start stripping at The Chez Paree—yet another secret Hannah must keep from her family—Hannah feels trapped. Sam wants her at the club, but Hannah hates stripping nearly as much as she hates disappointing Sam. Then Hannah meets Chris, an older butch lesbian, who is immediately taken with her. Desperate to stay in San Francisco, but away from the leering men at the club, Hannah proposes an escort arrangement.But as Hannah falls deeper into Chris’ world and Sam starts to meet new queer friends, a rift forms between them. Without Sam, who is Hannah? And what becomes of San Francisco to Hannah alone—a space rich with queer possibility, or an intimidating, unfamiliar place, just as lonely as the one she’d left behind? An achingly tender and resonant story of survival, first love, and growing up queer in the ’90s, Girls Girls Girls is a piercing exploration of the choices we make in the thrilling and often confounding search for ourselves and home.

Brings together a wealth of research and an expansive selection of photographs to create an enduring account of America's first-known trans network, Casa Susanna.

"The prose is textured, viscous almost, an ooze of sweet honey shot through with golden light . . . A Language of Limbs is a novel of (impeccable) vibes and mood, a gay hymnal written from inside the guts of the two protagonists." —Yves Rees, Australian Book Review A breathtaking, sliding-doors, will-they-won’t-they love story and a tender epic that explores the weight of a choice, the love of community and how joy is found in even the darkest corners.   Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we trace the two versions of a life that follow.   In one, a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor and is kicked out from her home. She lands at a queer communal home in Sydney called Uranian House, where she meets the people who will forever become her family. Meanwhile, in the second, a teenage girl pushes down her lustful dreams of her best friend and eventually makes her way to a university in Sydney to study English literature.   During pivotal moments, the physical space between these two women closes—like when they each meet the first great loves of their lives in 1977 at a protest, or when, almost a decade later, they are both rushed to the hospital with only a curtain between them. Through the AIDS crisis—and from classrooms to art galleries, beds to bars and hospitals to homes—we witness these two lives shadow each other until, finally and poignantly, they collide.

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir about the author’s journey from a god-fearing Muslim boy to a proud, queer drag queenMy name is Amrou Al-Kadhi – by day. By night, I am Glamrou, an empowered, confident and acerbic drag queen who wears seven-inch heels and says the things that nobody else dares to.Growing up in a strict Iraqi-British Muslim household, it didn’t take long for me to realise I was different. When I was ten years old, I announced to my family that I was in love with Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. The resultant fallout might best be described as something like the Iraqi version of Jeremy Kyle. And that was just the beginning.This is the story of how I got from there to here. You’ll read about my teenage obsession with marine biology, and how fluid aquatic life helped me understand my non-binary gender identity. You’ll read about my scholarship at Eton college, during which I wondered if I could forge a new identity as a British aristocrat (spoiler alert: it didn’t work). You’ll read about how I discovered the transformative powers of drag while at Cambridge university; about how I suffered a massive breakdown after I left, and very nearly lost my mind; and about how, after years of rage towards it, I finally began to understand Islam in a new, queer way.Most of all, this is a book about my mother, my first love, the most beautiful and glamorous woman I’ve ever known, the unknowing inspiration for my career as a drag queen – and a fierce, vociferous critic of anything that transgresses normal gender boundaries. It’s about how we lost and found each other, about forgiveness, understanding, hope – and the life-long search for belonging.

The much-anticipated follow up to the groundbreaking anthology Disability Visibility: another revolutionary collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience, and intimacy in all its myriad forms.What is intimacy? More than sex, more than romantic love, the pieces in this stunning and illuminating new anthology offer broader and more inclusive definitions of what it can mean to be intimate with another person. Explorations of caregiving, community, access, and friendship offer us alternative ways of thinking about the connections we form with others—a vital reimagining in an era when forced physical distance is at times a necessary norm.But don't worry: there's still sex to consider—and the numerous ways sexual liberation intersects with disability justice. Plunge between these pages and you'll also find disabled sexual discovery, disabled love stories, and disabled joy. These twenty-five stunning original pieces—plus other modern classics on the subject, all carefully curated by acclaimed activist Alice Wong—include essays, photo essays, poetry, drama, and erotica: a full spectrum of the dreams, fantasies, and deeply personal realities of a wide range of beautiful bodies and minds. Disability Intimacy will free your thinking, invigorate your spirit, and delight your desires.