Recommendations based on "The Hours Complete & Unabridged"

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.Hey girlfriend I got a proposition goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you wantKathleen Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on 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 to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk “girl band” in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her, including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman. And her friendships with musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, Kim Gordon, and Joan Jett reminded her that, despite the odds, the punk world could still nurture and care 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 musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its exclusivity.In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how they continue to fuel her revolutionary art and music.

'The book everyone will be talking about' Louise O'Neill 'A package of dynamite' Stephen King An era-defining novel about the relationship between a fifteen-year-old girl and her teacher Vanessa Wye was fifteen-years-old when she first had sex with her English teacher. She is now thirty-two and the teacher, Jacob Strane, has just been accused of sexual abuse by another former student of his. Vanessa is horrified by this news, because she is quite certain that the relationship she had with Strane wasn't abuse. It was love. She's sure of that. But now, in 2017, in the midst of allegations against powerful men, she is being asked to redefine the great love story of her life - her great sexual awakening - as rape. Nuanced, uncomfortable, bold and powerful, and as riveting as it is disturbing, My Dark Vanessa goes straight to the heart of some of the most complex issues our age is grappling with.

Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain, to black womanhood, to the ever-changing heart of LondonGirl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.'A daring evocation of black British history... Sexy, punchy [and] fresh' Independent on Sunday on The Emperor's Babe

The groundbreaking work on being homosexual in America—available again only from Penguin Classics and with a new foreword by Dan SavageOriginally published in 1971, Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the United States. Just two years after the Stonewall riots, Miller wrote a poignant essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means To Be a Homosexual” in response to a homophobic article published in Harper’s Magazine. Described as “the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade,” it carried the seed that would blossom into On Being Different—one of the earliest memoirs to affirm the importance of coming out.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Joya Goffney, author of the acclaimed Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry, delivers a powerful second novel about a preacher’s daughter in small-town Texas and her journey toward loving herself and her body, filled with heart, humor, family drama, and a dynamic love triangle. Perfect for fans of Not So Pure and Simple by Lamar Giles and Calling My Name by Liara Tamani!“Powerful, boundary pushing, and charmingly funny.” —Camryn Garrett, author of Full Disclosure and Off the Record"Deeply empowering, sweet yet candid. A fearless story about the path to self acceptance.” —Jenni Hendriks and Ted Caplan, authors of Unpregnant and Save Steve“A heartfelt, funny, and irresistible read…smart, sex-positive, and positively terrific.” —Kirkus (starred review)“A compassionate novel that encourages teens to prioritize the control, safety, and comfort of their own bodies.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)Monique is a preacher’s daughter who detests the impossible rules of her religion. Everyone expects her to wait until marriage, so she has no one to turn to when she discovers that she physically can’t have sex.After two years of trying and failing, her boyfriend breaks up with her. To win him back, Monique teams up with straight-laced church girl Sasha—who is surprisingly knowledgeable about Monique’s condition—as well as Reggie, the misunderstood bad boy who always makes a ruckus at church, and together they embark upon a top-secret search for the cure.While on their quest, Monique discovers the value of a true friend and the wonders of a love that accepts her for who she is. Despite everyone’s opinions about her virtue, she learns to live for herself, inspiring us all to reclaim our bodies and unapologetically love ourselves.YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults 2022 List Nominee“A triumph in not just dynamite contemporary fiction but also in critiquing purity culture and the harm it can do.” —Buzzfeed“[Monique's] journey toward recognizing her own value is hard-won, and her awareness of her own worth, when it comes, feels like a true victory. An empowering read.” —Booklist

A brand-new collection from the award-winning poet, the companion piece to the Sunday Times bestselling Slug 'Funny, so smart and refreshingly honest' SARAH MILLICAN 'Hollie McNish's words always sweep me away' GIOVANNA FLETCHER 'Bold, hilarious and tender' SALENA GODDEN This book is written out of both hate and love for the world As people, we are capable of both love and hate; amazement and disgust; fun and misery. So why do we live in a world that is constantly telling us to hate, both ourselves and others? We are told to be repulsed by our own bodies, bodies that let us laugh and sweat and eat toast; to be ashamed of pleasure; to be embarrassed by fun. In this collection, Hollie McNish brings her inimitable style to the question of what have been taught to hate, and if we might learn to love again. 'Never have we needed her more' STYLIST 'I've loved her work for years' JO BRAND 'She writes with honesty, conviction, humour and love' KAE TEMPEST

“A fresh ode to sisterhood and sexual agency that crackles with verve and wit. I couldn't put it down.”—Gabriela Garcia, author of the New York Times bestseller and Good Morning America Pick Of Women and Salt "Clarke refuses to turn this story into a morality play. . . [and her] newly rich and famous [protagonist] doesn’t turn away from sex work. Instead, she uses her new freedom to imagine what sex work might look like if its practitioners were truly empowered and autonomous. Like Clarke’s debut, this is technically adventurous, politically relevant, and emotionally engaging." —Kirkus, Starred Review A page-turning feminist novel that tells the story of a poor scrappy girl from rural New Zealand who grows reluctantly into a sex icon, the face of a movement, and a mother, all at the same time. Kate Burns grows up wanting attention from her Ma, but her Ma wants only money and Kate learns how to get both. She and her childhood friend, Lacey, run kissing lessons for cash in the janitor’s closet of Fenbrook High, and just like that, they find themselves in the sex work industry. From there, they go on to work at The Purple Panther, a strip club in Auckland. When Ma dies of cancer, Kate discovers that the men her Ma was always inviting over to their home were, in fact, clients. Ma was no stranger to sex work either.  Following in Ma’s footsteps, Kate heads to Nevada where she picks up a job at America’s most prestigious brothel: The Hop. In her new life as a Bunny, Kate searches for an identity she can perform—the other Bunnies include a goth, a housewife, a cheerleader, a rebel, not to mention Betty, a trans beauty queen, Mia, a Japanese cosplayer, and Rain, a dominatrix. Kate becomes Lady Lane. The girls at The Hop are more fantasy than fact, and performance is always more perfect than the real. Kate is a natural and quickly rises through the ranks to become the bestselling Bunny and the owner, Daddy’s favorite. But when ten street hookers are killed in a nearby city, just bodies with no names, Lady joins her sister Bunnies in mourning and begins to see things in a new light. Lady’s success breeds scandal and unwanted fame, deeply affecting her, transforming her life and The Hop forever. Diana Clarke’s provocative second novel is subversive in the very best way, an unforgettable work of fiction with a radical message about women that couldn’t be more important.

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.

In the three decades since New York City's Stonewall rebellion, gay literature has exploded as a distinctive form of cultural expression. In a variety of styles and genres, gay men have increasingly begun to articulate their sexual identities. At the same time, gay writers and scholars have begun in earnest the search for a literary history long denied by the refusal to recognize homosexual love as an integral part of Western literature. Yet to date, no single volume has brought together the full range of poetry, fiction, essays, and autobiography that portray love between men. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the poems of Allen Ginsberg and gay literature of the 1980s and '90s, The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature draws together hundreds of texts from Western literary history that describe experiences of love, friendship, intimacy, desire, and sex among men. While other anthologies have focused primarily on poetry, drama, or fiction, this volume is the first to include a full range of genres. Spanning more than two millennia, from ancient Mesopotamia to the late twentieth century, this anthology brings together the best-known texts of gay male writing such as the poetry of Martial and Walt Whitman, and excerpts from E. M. Forster's Maurice, as well as from lesser known works such as nineteenth-century English homoerotic poetry and selections from two early American novels of homosexual love--Joseph and His Friend and Imre. In The Columbia Anthology readers become acquainted with the early bonds of male companionship found in Homer's writings on Zeus and Ganymede, and with the homoerotic poetry of Catullus and Juvenal. From Shakespeare's Sonnets to the philosophy of de Sade, to the political writings of Edmund White, this masterful anthology traces a multifaceted tradition. Arranged chronologically, sections are supplemented by illuminating introductory essays; many individual pieces include background commentary on the writer and the work. As a landmark to the enduring spirit of gay writers, this collection is an essential addition to the library of anyone searching for the historical foundations of gay identities. With its excellent annotations and suggestions for further reading, The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature will also serve as an invaluable resource to students and scholars in need of a guide to a massive body of literature that has long been hidden, ignored, or misrepresented.

The men of Renaissance Florence were so renowned for sodomy that "Florenzer" in German meant "sodomite." Indeed, in the late fifteenth century, as many as one in two Florentine men had come to the attention of the authorities for sodomy by the time they were thirty. In the seventy years from 1432 to 1502, some 17,000 men--in a city of only 40,000--were investigated for sodomy; 3,000 were convicted and thousands more confessed to gain amnesty. Michael Rocke vividly depicts this vibrant sexual culture in a world where these same-sex acts were not the deviant transgressions of a small minority, but an integral part of a normal masculine identity. In 1432 The Office of the Night was created specifically to police sodomy in Florence. Seventy years of denunciations, interrogations, and sentencings left an extraordinarily detailed record, which Rocke uses to its fullest in this richly documented portrait. He describes a wide range of sexual experiences between males, ranging from boys such as fourteen-year-old Morello di Taddeo, who prostituted himself to fifty-seven men, to the notorious Jacopo di Andrea, a young bachelor implicated with forty adolescents over a seventeen-year period and convicted thirteen times; same-sex "marriages" like that of Michele di Bruno and Carlo di Berardo, who were involved for several years and swore a binding oath to each other over an altar; and Bernardo Lorini, a former Night Officer himself with a wife and seven children, accused of sodomy at the age of sixty-five. (Mortified, he sent his son Taddeo to confess for him and plead for a discreet resolution of his case.) Indeed, nearly all Florentine males probably had some kind of same-sex experience as a part of their "normal" sexual life. Rocke uncovers a culture in which sexual roles were strictly defined by age, with boys under eighteen the "passive" participants in sodomy, youths in their twenties and older men the "active" participants, and most men at the age of thirty marrying women, their days of sexual frivolity with boys largely over. Such same sex activities were a normal phase in the transition to adulthood, and only a few pursued them much further. Rather than precluding heterosexual experiences, they were considered an extension of youthful and masculine lust and desire. As Niccolo Machiavelli quipped about a handsome man, "When young he lured husbands away from their wives, and now he lures wives away from their husbands." Florentines generally accepted sodomy as a common misdemeanor, to be punished with a fine, rather than as a deadly sin and a transgression against nature. There was no word, in the otherwise rich Florentine sexual lexicon, for "homosexual," nor was there a distinctive and well-developed homosexual "subculture." Rather, sexual acts between men and boys were an integral feature of the dominant culture. Rocke roots this sexual activity in the broader context of Renaissance Florence, with its social networks of families, juvenile gangs, neighbors, patronage, workshops, and confraternities, and its busy political life from the early years of the Republic through the period of Lorenzo de' Medici, Savonarola, and the beginning of Medici princely rule. His richly detailed book paints a fascinating picture of a vibrant time and place and calls into question our modern conceptions of gender and sexual identity.