Recommendations based on "The color purple, Alice Walker"

ONE OF BILLBOARD'S "100 GREATEST MUSIC BOOKS OF ALL TIME": The provocative transgender advocate and lead singer of the punk rock band Against Me! provides a searing account of her search for identity and her true self.It began in a bedroom in Naples, Florida, when a misbehaving punk teenager named Tom Gabel, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a headful of anarchist politics, landed on a riff. Gabel formed Against Me! and rocketed the band from its scrappy beginnings-banging on a drum kit made of pickle buckets-to a major-label powerhouse that critics have called this generation's The Clash. Since its inception in 1997, Against Me! has been one of punk's most influential modern bands, but also one of its most divisive. With every notch the four-piece climbed in their career, they gained new fans while infuriating their old ones. They suffered legal woes, a revolving door of drummers, and a horde of angry, militant punks who called them "sellouts" and tried to sabotage their shows at every turn.But underneath the public turmoil, something much greater occupied Gabel-a secret kept for 30 years, only acknowledged in the scrawled-out pages of personal journals and hidden in lyrics. Through a troubled childhood, delinquency, and struggles with drugs, Gabel was on a punishing search for identity. Not until May of 2012 did a Rolling Stone profile finally reveal it: Gabel is a transsexual, and would from then on be living as a woman under the name Laura Jane Grace.Tranny is the intimate story of Against Me!'s enigmatic founder, weaving the narrative of the band's history, as well as Grace's, with dozens of never-before-seen entries from the piles of journals Grace kept. More than a typical music memoir about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll-although it certainly has plenty of that-Tranny is an inside look at one of the most remarkable stories in the history of rock.

'A roadmap for a new generation' VOGUE 'Radical, funny and fearless' VANITY FAIR 'Gripping' NYLON An electric, searing memoir by the original Riot Grrrl and legendary frontwoman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre Kathleen Hanna's rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 1980s, '90s, and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today their gutsy, radical lyrics of anthems like 'Rebel Girl' and 'Double Dare Ya' are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from? In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home, to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes blindingly clear, being in a 'girl band', especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or a safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a band took limitless amounts of grit and bravery. But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her - including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Billy Karren; her friendship with Kurt Cobain; and her introduction to Joan Jett - and they were a testament to how the true punk world nurtured and cared for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her later bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement and its decline, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the darkest, hardest times along with the most joyful - and how it all fuelled her revolutionary art, from the 1980s to today.

I still thought breasts might be more trouble than they were worth. Growing up reminded me a little bit of Hide and Go Seek. When it was your time to grow up, Natrue said, "Here I come, ready or not." And Nature could always find you.

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.

Fug You is Ed Sanders's unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of "total assault on the culture," to quote his novelist friend William S. Burroughs. Fug You traces the flowering years of New York's downtown bohemia in the sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground's scrutiny, and leading to Sanders's arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs -- formed in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called "the world's oldest living hippie" by Allen Ginsberg) -- as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.

In the early 1990s three young people attracted to the ambitious global peacekeeping work of the UN cross paths in Cambodia. Andrew strives for a better world through his life-saving work as a doctor. Heidi, a social worker, is in need of a challenge and a paycheck, and Ken is fresh from Harvard and brimful of idealism. As their stories interweave through the years, from Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia to Haiti, the trio reveal a world of witnessed atrocities, primal fear, desperate loneliness and base desires. They fend off terror and futility with revelry, humour and sex; ask hard questions about the world order America has created, the true power of the UN, and whether there is any possibility for change. This is a startling celebration of the power of humour and friendship, of the limits of human compassion, and the need for a warm body and a cold beer during a Condition Echo lockdown. A book that shows the human cost of global politics and the tragic truth that wars are much more avoidable than our governments would ever admit. A brilliant, provocatively funny and fast moving book.

One of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. Longlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize."[Mark] Gevisser is clear-eyed and wise enough to have a sharp sense of how tough the struggle has been, and how hard it will be now for those who have not succeeded in finding shelter from prejudice." --Colm Tóibín, The GuardianA groundbreaking look at how the issues of sexuality and gender identity divide and unite the world todayMore than seven years in the making, Mark Gevisser’s The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers is an exploration of how the conversation around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide―and describe―the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results. While same-sex marriage and gender transition are celebrated in some parts of the world, laws are being strengthened to criminalize homosexuality and gender nonconformity in others. As new globalized queer identities are adopted by people across the world―thanks to the digital revolution―fresh culture wars have emerged. A new Pink Line, Gevisser argues, has been drawn across the globe, and he takes readers to its frontiers.Between sensitive and sometimes startling profiles of the queer folk he’s encountered along the Pink Line, Gevisser offers sharp analytical chapters exploring identity politics, religion, gender ideology, capitalism, human rights, moral panics, geopolitics, and what he calls “the new transgender culture wars.” His subjects include a Ugandan refugee in flight to Canada, a trans woman fighting for custody of her child in Moscow, a lesbian couple campaigning for marriage equality in Mexico, genderqueer high schoolers coming of age in Michigan, a gay Israeli-Palestinian couple searching for common ground, and a community of kothis―“women’s hearts in men’s bodies”―who run a temple in an Indian fishing village. What results is a moving and multifaceted picture of the world today, and the queer people defining it.Eye-opening, heartfelt, expertly researched, and compellingly narrated, The Pink Line is a monumental―and urgent―journey of unprecedented scope into twenty-first-century identity, seen through the border posts along the world’s new LGBTQ+ frontiers.

'Feverish, devouring and provocative' LUCY ROSE, author of The Lamb 'Dark, sexy, addictive and beautifully written' KATE DAVIES, author of In at the Deep End ‘Hot, hungry and aching with desire, this book will bite down into you and it won't let go’ TOBI COVENTRY, author of He’s the Devil Love can really eat you up Avni is done with the meaningless carousel of tame sex. Tender women repel her. Clumsy men disgust her. She wants to make her flesh electric; to fill the chasm inside her created by her mundane job, her ex who died in a bizarre tragedy, and her sick aunt, whose diseased brain is swallowing memories. Then there’s the sour fruit, the bad meat that she craves. She longs for something to make her feel full. Something beyond all the pointless sex and depravity. When she is sucked into the orbit of a couple who seem as unstitched as she is, Avni thinks she may have found what she is looking for. But each time she fulfils her darkest needs her appetite grows, and she begins to spiral into obsession. There's that bone-deep ache again. Is it love? Or a different kind of hunger? Uncompromising, unique and compulsively readable, SOUR FRUIT is the fearless debut of a major new talent.

'Persona set in the 80s porn world' Lili Anolik, author of Didion & Babitz'Impossible to put down' Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs'Smart, sad, sexy' Philippa Snow, author of It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do To Be Me'Tackles the sticky subjects of female sexuality, objectification and desire with a smoothness that appears effortless' Coco Mellors, author of Blue SistersLos Angeles, 1982: best friends Jude and Winnie are eighteen and working at a strip club. Soon they progress to modelling for Penthouse and Hustler, then to shooting hardcore porn. Dazzled by the drugs, sex and parties their new life offers, they are also beset by sexism, bitter competition and the precarity of life on the margins. When their friendship ends in recrimination and a dramatic act of betrayal, Jude goes missing and Winnie can find no trace of her.Thirty years later, newly divorced and down on her luck, Winnie is ready to face her past. Determined to solve the mystery of what happened to Jude, she sets out to brave the dark underbelly of the adult industry. What follows is a gutsy, propulsive look at sex and power that builds to an unforgettable revelation about love.

Secretly gay school bullies. Punks with make-up tips. Heroic hairdressers. Queer parents. Suburban pride marches. Police hassle. With nods of recognition and unexpected flirtations, chosen families and desperate escapes, this is a new way of seeing suburbia: a place where things aren't always as straightforward - or straight - as they seem. 'Breaks new ground' - David Kynaston 'Grindrod is one of the best chroniclers of British life' - Jude Rogers Throughout LGBTQ+ history, suburbia has been seen as somewhere to escape from: a place where heterosexuality rules; where difference will not be tolerated; where you'll never find a soulmate. But for many, those streets of twitching curtains and pebble-dashed semis were - or still are - a place to call home. From Addlestone to Wilmslow, Tales of the Suburbs explores the relatively untold twentieth century tale of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people in small towns and suburbia. Through remarkable archive material and original interviews, social historian John Grindrod reveals stories that are messy and moving, dark and funny, uplifting and extraordinary. Together, they reclaim suburbia as a space for all - or those that want it - where counter-cultural expression thrives despite the Neighbourhood Watch, and queer love and friendship bloom against the odds.