Recommendations based on "More"

A first collection of stories features the tale of a girl who flees her domineering mother and ends up in an obsessive love affair with an older woman; a teenager who must avoid the attentions of her middle-aged uncle; and others. A first collection.

In this unusual, engaging, and intimate collection of personal essays, Lambda Literary Award finalist Tania De Rozario recalls growing up as a queer, brown, fat girl in Singapore, blending memoir with elements of history, pop culture, horror films, and current events to explore the nature of monsters and what it means to be different. Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to “banish the evil” from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren’t just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere—including your own family and community—and look just like you.  Dinner on Monster Island is Tania’s memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore—where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic. As she pulls back the veil on life on the small island, she reveals the sometimes kind, sometimes monstrous side of all of us. Intertwined with her experiences is an analysis of the role of women in horror. Tania looks at films and popular culture such as Carrie, The Witch, and The Ring to illuminate the ways in which women are often portrayed as monsters, and how in real life, monsters are not what we think.  Moving and lyrical, written with earnest candor, and leavened with moments of humor and optimism, Dinner on Monster Island is a deeply personal examination of one woman’s experience grappling with her identity and a fantastic analysis of monsters, monstrous women and the worlds in which they live.

Thirteen-year-old Byron needs to get away, and doesn't care how. Sick of being beaten up by lads for "talkin' like a poof" after school. Sick of dad - the weightlifting, womanising Gaz - and Mam, who pissed off to Turkey like Shirley Valentine. Sick of all the people in Hucknall who shuffle about like the living dead, going on about kitchens they're too skint to do up and marriages they're too scared to leave.It's a new millennium, Madonna's 'Music' is top of the charts and there's a whole world to explore - and Byron's happy to beg, steal and skank onto a rollercoaster ride of hedonism. Life explodes like a rush of ecstasy when Byron escapes into Nottingham's kinetic underworld and discovers the East Midlands' premier podium-dancer-cum-hellraiser, the mesmerising Lady Die. But when the comedown finally kicks in, Byron arrives at a shocking encounter that will change life forever.Bold, poignant and riotously funny, What It Feels Like For a Girl is the unique, hotly-anticipated and addictively-readable debut from one of Britain's most exciting young writers.

“Consent” is a Molotov cocktail, flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury...By every conceivable metric, her book is a triumph.” -- The New York TimesAlready an international literary sensation, an intimate and powerful memoir of a young French teenage girl’s relationship with a famous, much older male writer—a universal #MeToo story of power, manipulation, trauma, recovery, and resiliency that exposes the hypocrisy of a culture that has allowed the sexual abuse of minors to occur unchecked.Sometimes, all it takes is a single voice to shatter the silence of complicity.Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of the country’s most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of a very influential man in the French literary world.At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Vanessa, now in her forties and the director of one of France’s leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story, offering her perspective of those events sharply known.Consent is the story of one precocious young girl’s stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Vanessa’s painstakingly memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a thirteen-year-old girl to become involved with a fifty-year-old man who happened to be a notable writer. As she recalls the events of her childhood and her seduction by one of her country’s most notable writers, Vanessa reflects on the ways in which this disturbing relationship changed and affected her as she grew older.Drawing parallels between children’s fairy tales and French history and her personal life, Vanessa offers an intimate and absorbing look at the meaning of love and consent and the toll of trauma and the power of healing in women’s lives. Ultimately, she offers a forceful indictment of a chauvinistic literary world that has for too long accepted and helped perpetuate gender inequality and the exploitation and sexual abuse of children.Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer"...One of the belated truths that emerges from [Consent] is that Springora is a writer. [...]Her sentences gleam like metal; each chapter snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch." -- The New Yorker"Consent [is] rapier-sharp, written with restraint, elegance and brevity." -- The Times (London)"[Consent] has something steely in its heart, and it departs from the typical American memoir of childhood abuse in exhilarating ways." -- Slate"Lucid and nuanced...[Consent] will speak to trauma survivors everywhere." -- Los Angeles Review of Books”A piercing memoir about the sexually abusive relationship she endured at age 14 with a 50-year-old writer...This chilling account will linger with readers long after the last page is turned.” -- Publishers Weekly"Springora's lucid account is a commanding discussion of sexual abuse and victimization, and a powerful act of reclamation." -- Booklist"A chilling story of child abuse and the sophisticated Parisians who looked the other way...[Springora] is an elegant and perceptive writer." -- Kirkus

Edited and with an introduction by Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling and deeply beloved author of Bad Feminist and Hunger, this anthology of first-person essays tackles rape, assault, and harassment head-on. Vogue, “10 of the Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2018” * Harper’s Bazaar, “10 New Books to Add to Your Reading List in 2018” * Elle, “21 Books We’re Most Excited to Read in 2018” * Boston Globe, “25 books we can’t wait to read in 2018” * Huffington Post, “60 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018” * Hello Giggles, “19 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018” * Buzzfeed, “33 Most Exciting New Books of 2018"In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are “routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied” for speaking out. Contributions include essays from established and up-and-coming writers, performers, and critics, including actors Ally Sheedy and Gabrielle Union and writers Amy Jo Burns, Lyz Lenz, and Claire Schwartz. Covering a wide range of topics and experiences, from an exploration of the rape epidemic embedded in the refugee crisis to first-person accounts of child molestation, this collection is often deeply personal and is always unflinchingly honest. Like Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, Not That Bad will resonate with every reader, saying “something in totality that we cannot say alone.”Searing and heartbreakingly candid, this provocative collection both reflects the world we live in and offers a call to arms insisting that “not that bad” must no longer be good enough.

An exploration of the role of pretending and truth-telling in women's lives discusses the difference between privacy and secrecy, how women are encouraged to pretend, and how pretending prevents a deeper intimacy. 150,000 first printing. $125,000 ad/promo. Tour.

Focusing on a variety of representations, from the boundary-shattering work of queer performances to the daring conjunction of childhood sexual abuse and desire in the work of Dorothy Allison, Between the Body and the Flesh stimulates discussions of s/m through the exploration of censorship in the arts, the fetishization of sexual paraphernalia, recombinations of class, race and sexuality, and the politics of psychoanalysis.

Sappho of Lesbos lived and wrote poetry some twenty-six centuries ago, but hers remains a persistent and effective voice for the expression of a woman's desire for a woman. Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho is the first book to examine Sappho's poetry through the lens of lesbian desire, focusing on the active female gaze in the texts and the narrative voice - one that describes female experience and desires as primary, not secondary to the dominant (male) culture. Snyder reads Sappho's songs against a woman-centered framework in which emotional and/or erotic bonds between and among women take center stage. Her close readings demonstrate the ways in which Sappho's lyrics focus on women's emotional lives with one another and on female erotic desire for other females. In Sappho's poetic world, male figures, when they do appear, stand on the periphery. In order to make Sappho accessible to everyone, Snyder presents detailed readings of the one complete existing song and of each of the major fragments of her poetry. She provides a clear English translation and a transliteration into our alphabet; the original Greek text is included in an appendix. Rather than making claims about the specific social contexts out of which the poems may have arisen, Snyder offers a close analysis of the words themselves, with comparative material drawn from other archaic Greek poets where there appear to be appropriate parallels. The book concludes with a chapter addressing Sappho's influence on a number of modern American woman poets, particularly Amy Lowell, H.D., and Olga Broumas. Snyder sees in these three poets qualities similar to Sappho's: a strong sense of self-definition; a display of independencewithin a poetic tradition; a relishing of the erotic and the sensual; and an emphasis on the mutuality of desire; and a blurring of the gaze that disrupts the hierarchy of subject versus object.

Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart from the chaste, silent woman prescribed by Renaissance gender ideology. As an "honored courtesan", Franco made her living by arranging to have sexual relations, for a high fee, with the elite of Venice and the many travelers—merchants, ambassadors, even kings—who passed through the city. Courtesans needed to be beautiful, sophisticated in their dress and manners, and elegant, cultivated conversationalists. Exempt from many of the social and educational restrictions placed on women of the Venetian patrician class, Franco used her position to recast "virtue" as "intellectual integrity," offering wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life. Franco became a writer by allying herself with distinguished men at the center of her city's culture, particularly in the informal meetings of a literary salon at the home of Domenico Venier, the oldest member of a noble family and a former Venetian senator. Through Venier's protection and her own determination, Franco published work in which she defended her fellow courtesans, speaking out against their mistreatment by men and criticizing the subordination of women in general. Venier also provided literary counsel when she responded to insulting attacks written by the male Venetian poet Maffio Venier. Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries make her life and work pertinent today.

From a #1 Apple podcast host, Lambda Literary fellow, and dominatrix comes a sex-positive, judgment-free cultural deep-dive into the world of kink.   When celebrated BDSM educator Tina Horn first launched Why Are People Into That?!, publications from Vice to Buzzfeed heralded it as one of the best sex podcasts around. Each episode centered around a different fetish or fantasy, thoughtfully examining why, exactly, different strokes work for different folks. From sex workers and scientists to artists and activists, Tina’s wide range of guests helped educate fascinated listeners across the world on the wide spectrum of humanity’s appetites. With her listeners growing more and more insatiable, she soon realized that the only way to address the titular question with all the depth and nuance it deserved was to turn that idea into a book. From spanking, strap-ons, and sluts, to taboos involving cake, chains, and cannibalism, WHY ARE PEOPLE INTO THAT? explores the universal drives that shape even the most specific erotic tastes, and the cultural context that molds and is molded by the way we conceptualize pleasure, gender, fantasy, and power. With buoyant prose, Tina invites us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about sexuality. How, for example, should we think about "consensual nonconsent" in a post-#MeToo era? How does cross-dressing fit in with our evolving cultural understanding of gender performance and identity? And what do foot fetishists, fisters, and FinDoms have in common? Blending insightful cultural criticism, investigative journalism, and spicy anecdotes from Tina’s 15+ years of hard-earned expertise in the sex industry and beyond, WHY ARE PEOPLE INTO THAT? is a philosophical-but-fun exploration of the prismatic spectrum of human desire and the expansive possibilities of pleasure. For fans of adrienne maree brown and Emily Nagoski, this raunchy and rousing book is perfect for anyone who is interested not only in the intricacies of what we desire, but in how desire itself really works.