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To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Herve GuibertA novel that describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS.First published by Gallimard in 1990, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. Guibert chronicles three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life as, in the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, describing the progression of the disease and recording the reactions of his many friends. The novel scandalized the French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. To the Friend became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. Guibert continued to document the daily experiences of his body in a series of novels and diaries, mostly published posthumously. To the Friend has since attained a cult following for its intimate and candid tone, its fragmented and slippery form. As Edmund White observed, “[Guibert's] very taste for the grotesque, this compulsion to offend, finally affords him the necessary rhetorical panache to convey the full, exhilarating horror of his predicament.” In his struggle to piece together a language suited to his suffering, Hervé Guibert catapulted himself into notoriety and sealed his reputation for uncompromising, transgressive prose.
The Freezer Door (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Mattilda Bernstein SycamoreA meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity. <P><P>When you turn the music off, and suddenly you feel an unbearable sadness, that means turn the music back on, right? When you still feel the sadness, even with the music, that means there's something wrong with this music. Sometimes I feel like sex without context isn't sex at all. And sometimes I feel like sex without context is what sex should always be. <P><P>The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life. Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.
The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Wayne KoestenbaumWayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables.In his first book of short fiction--a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables--Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in The Cheerful Scapegoat are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue--but in the fable-world of The Cheerful Scapegoat, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture--codes and signifiers--get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable soufflé. Koestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables--emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes--alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.
Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series #32)
by Paul B. PreciadoPaul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time.In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a "mentally ill person" suffering from "gender dysphoria," Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's "Report to an Academy," in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. Speaking from his own "mutant" cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era--an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence. Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, new edition: Collected Stories (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Cookie MuellerThe first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller's stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller's first calling was to the written word: "I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely," she once confessed. Muellerís 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller's prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller's stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller's art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still "new" stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing's new introduction situates Mueller's writing within the context of her life—and our times. Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley's A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin's oral biography Edgewise, Mueller's life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller's writing itself. Mueller's many mise en scènes—the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS—patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to "a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails . . . a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty."
Hervelino (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Mathieu LindonOn Hervé Guibert and the difficulty of writing and speaking about someone beloved and revered.&“Soon that was my nickname for Hervé, what with my habit of italianizing the names of my nearest and dearest … Hervelino: that didn&’t make me think so much of Hervé as of us both. The word might not seem like much but it was him and it was me, he took it for himself.&” Mathieu Lindon met the writer and photographer Hervé Guibert in 1978. The nickname Hervelino marked the start of their friendship, which was cemented a decade later by the years they both spent in Rome. Guibert was a pensionnaire at the Villa Médicis starting in 1987; Lindon became a fellow pensionnaire the next year, and the two would stay in Italy until 1990. These Roman years are at the heart of this autobiographie à deux that alternates between humor and melancholy. Guibert had just learned that he was HIV-positive and would die not long after returning to France and rising to fame with his searing masterpiece To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life—in which Lindon himself was a character. Hervelino is a book about the difficulty of writing and speaking about someone beloved and revered. In recounting their time in Italy, Lindon contends with the impossibility of writing about Guibert: &“To write about Rome is to skip over everything I don&’t dare to write because it&’s so hard to make sense of Hervé.&” Hervelino is a story of a singular friendship, and of the books read and shared by the friend who was loved and lost. As it closes with each inscription Guibert wrote for his friend Mathieu and with Lindon&’s present-day commentary below it, what remains are shards and fragments of a friendship sealed by illness and death, enshrined by literature and love.
Letters to Eugène: Correspondence 1977–1987 (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Herve Guibert Eugene SavitzkayaHervé Guibert's incandescent correspondence with Belgian poet Eugène Savitzkaya.In 1977, Hervé Guibert discovered the first novel written by Eugène Savitzkaya, Mentir, and sent him his La mort propagande, which had just been published. In the following years, they exchanged the books they had written, read each other, appreciated each other. They saw each other rarely, however: one lived in Liège, the other Paris. A turning point occurred in 1982, when Hervé published "Lettre à un frère d&’écriture," in which he declared to Eugène, "I love you through your writing." The tone had changed; Hervé, obsessed with his correspondent, wrote him increasingly incandescent letters. 1984 would, however, see the sudden extinguishing of that passion. A deep friendship replaced it, which found itself with new areas to explore: the adventure of publishing L&’Autre Journal and at the Villa Medicis, where they were both fellows. These nearly eighty letters, exchanged between 1977 and 1987, form a correspondence that is all the more unique for being the only one whose publication was authorized by Guibert. An intersection of life and writing, self and other, reality and fiction, their release is a renewal of Guibert&’s oeuvre.
Love Me Tender (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Constance DebreA novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition.The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once &“flippant and consumed by anxiety.&”In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks &“as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel.&” Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debré&’s work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: &“I love him because he says I and he&’s a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you don&’t say anything.&” But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.
I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear
by Sean DeLearA remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA&’s most influential artists of subsequent decades.When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered—among other treasures—an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn. DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis. DeLear&’s forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, &“It wasn&’t cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren&’t even in the vocabulary.&” I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, &“is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid&’s journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It&’s not cognizant of being literature. It&’s as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn&’t written with the desire to be published so Sean didn&’t hold back. Sean&’s goal was to be true to himself.&”
If You're a Girl, revised and expanded edition (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Ann RowerThe trailblazing book that influenced a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn&’t be lacking in attitude.In the beginning when everything was very sexual we talked about our fantasies. She thought about having a guy for some of it. She thought about having a gun. I had gone through a lot to get away from guys so I admit that the thought of going back to them, even for a little adventure, was surprising and disconcerting …Ann Rower&’s first book, If You&’re a Girl, published by Semiotext(e)&’s Native Agents series in 1991 in tandem with Cookie Mueller&’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, cemented her reputation as the Eve Babitz of lower Manhattan.Rower was fifty-three years old at the time. Her stories—urtexts of female autofiction—had long been circulating within the poetry and postpunk music scenes. They were unlike anyone else&’s: disarming, embarrassing, psuedoconfessional tales of everyday life dizzily told and laced with dry humor. In If You&’re a Girl, she recounts her adventures as Timothy Leary&’s babysitter, her artistic romance with actor Ron Vawter, and her attempts to evade a schizophrenic stalker.Rower went on to publish two novels: Armed Response (1995) and Lee & Elaine (2002). After the 2002 suicide of her partner, the writer Heather Lewis, Rower stopped writing for almost two decades. And then she picked up where If You&’re a Girl left off. No longer a girl, she produced dozens of stories from her life in New York as an octogenarian.This new, expanded edition includes most of the original book, together with selections from both her novels and her recent writings. If You&’re a Girl is a trailblazing book that manifests Rower&’s influence on a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn&’t be lacking in attitude.
Ripcord (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Nate LippensA novel about escape and connection, class, sex, and queer intimacy in the American Midwest.The oldest story: an insider pretends to be an outsider and receives praise for his empathy and imagination and intelligence. Maybe some asshole even says bravery. An outsider pretends to be an insider, is exposed as a fraud, a liar, and burned to the ground.In Ripcord, Nate Lippens continues his meditations on escape and connection, class, sex, and intimacy. Stuck in Milwaukee, the narrator cobbles together a living by bartending and catering weddings, enmeshed in a semiaffair with a younger, married man. Cruising apps while tallying his youthful romantic failures, he fantasizes about disappearance but finds both solace and frustration in his friendships with Charlie, an aging punk who was prominent in the 1990s Chicago queercore scene, and Greer, a painter who never broke through but continues making work.
Selected Amazon Reviews (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Kevin KillianA book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com.An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Killian holds forth on these household essentials and many, many, many others.The beloved author of more than a dozen volumes of innovative poetry, fiction, drama, and scholarship, Killian was for decades a charismatic participant in San Francisco’s New Narrative writing circle. From 2003–2019, he was also one of Amazon’s most prolific reviewers, rising to rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, Killian’s commentaries consider an incredible variety of items, each review a literary escapade hidden in plain sight amongst the retailer’s endless pages of user-generated content. Selected Amazon Reviews at last gathers an appropriately wide swath of this material between two covers, revealing the project to be a unified whole and always more than a lark. Some for “verified purchases,” others for products enjoyed in theory, Killian’s reviews draw on the influential strategies of New Narrative, his unrivaled fandom for both elevated and popular culture, and the fine art of fabulation. Many of them are ingeniously funny—flash-fictional riffs on the commodity as talismanic object, written by a cast of personas worthy of Pessoa. And many others are serious, even scholarly—earnest tributes to contemporaries, and to small-press books that may not have received attention elsewhere, offered with exemplary attention. All of Killian’s reviews subvert the Amazon platform, queering it to his own play with language, identity, genre, critique. Killian’s prose is a consistent pleasure throughout Selected Amazon Reviews, brimming with wit, lyricism, and true affection. As the Hall of Famer himself reflected on this form-of-his-own-invention shortly before his untimely passing in 2019: “They’re reviews of a sort, but they also seem like novels. They’re poems. They’re essays about life. I get a lot of my kinks out there, on Amazon.”
In Thrall (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
by Jane DelynnA touchstone novel of lesbian adolescence, set years before gay liberation.&“Dear Miss Maxfield … what I&’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don&’t think it&’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you?—probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me …&”First published in 1982 and set prior to Stonewall, Jane DeLynn&’s In Thrall is a touchstone narrative of lesbian adolescence. Publishing Triangle called it one of the &“best gay and lesbian novels of all time.&” After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter, they embark on one of the funniest—and saddest—love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Years before gay liberation, all Lynn knows about &“lezbos&” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father&’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass as &“normal,&” Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make homophobic jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, she checks the mirror for telltale signs of &“perversion&” each night. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall has been compared to The Catcher in the Rye and to Edmund White&’s A Boy&’s Own Story. &“The single most wonderful quality of this novel,&” the Los Angeles Times Book Review writes, &“is its absolute credibility.&”This new edition includes a foreword by Irish author Colm Tóibín.
New Mistakes
by Clement GoldbergClassic human follies of desire and ambition foreground a revelatory awakening the planet needs.UFOs in formation in the sky. Vegetation—from cranky houseplants to wise old conifers—telepathically transmit their complaints. A cat gone viral rebels against her influencer caretaker. In California, interconnected strangers find one another, drawn by messy threads of sex and art, their lives falling apart as an extraordinary new reality arises.In this debut novel by Clement Goldberg, classic human follies of desire and ambition foreground a revelatory awakening the planet needs. By turns tender and hilarious, visionary and perceptive, New Mistakes wittily shows us how we live today, and how we might, astonishingly, live tomorrow.
How to Fuck Like a Girl: Essays
by Vera BlossomA cheeky how-to guide, as raunchy as it is heartfelt, from a bright new literary voice.A bold and vulnerable collection from a new, young voice, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a daring mash-up of pillow book, grimoire, and manifesto by writer Vera Blossom. From hooking up to trans witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, friendships, divorce, and survival, Blossom brings wit and melancholy, grandeur and smarts, debuting a bright literary voice as raunchy as it is heartfelt. A cheeky how-to guide that earnestly asks if it is possible to fuck oneself into girlhood, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a cult classic in the making.
WITCH: Anthology
by Michelle TeaAn exploration of the Witch, as radical archetype, in ancient and contemporary life.An adult woman haunted by her childhood muses on the foster system, institutions, and the medieval tale of a girl given to a witch. A genderqueer Brooklynite learns of their past life as a murdered sorceress. An uptight participant at a Northern California witch camp finds community in the kitchen. A professor uses magic to help students under attack by right-wing politicians.In this collection of manifesto, poetry, playscripts, and prose, the archetype of the Witch is honored and unpacked, poked and prodded, owned and othered. From work centered in antiquity to writing which illustrates how primordial occult energies continue to enliven our world today, WITCH: Anthology lays bare a wilderness of myth, magic, trickery, and power swarming beneath the surface of contemporary life. With work from CAConrad, Edgar Fabián Frías, Amanda Yates Garcia, Ashley Ray, Brooke Palmieri, Yumi Sakugawa, Kai Cheng Thom, Ariel Gore, Myriam Gurba, Fariha Róisín, and many others.
The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester
by Maya MacGregor&“Look no further for your next favorite read, because The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester has it all: a gripping murder mystery that will keep you turning pages, ghosts, romance, and a treasure trove of queer characters with depth and heart. Here&’s something rare—a suspenseful story that also feels like a hug.&” —Sarah Glenn Marsh, author of the Reign of the Fallen seriesIn this queer contemporary YA mystery, a nonbinary autistic teen realizes they must not only solve a 30-year-old mystery but also face the demons lurking in their past in order to live a satisfying life. Sam Sylvester has long collected stories of half-lived lives—of kids who died before they turned nineteen. Sam was almost one of those kids. Now, as Sam&’s own nineteenth birthday approaches, their recent near-death experience haunts them. They&’re certain they don&’t have much time left. . . .But Sam's life seems to be on the upswing after meeting several new friends and a potential love interest in Shep, their next-door neighbor. Yet the past keeps roaring back—in Sam&’s memories and in the form of a thirty-year-old suspicious death that took place in Sam&’s new home. Sam can&’t resist trying to find out more about the kid who died and who now seems to guide their investigation. When Sam starts receiving threatening notes, they know they&’re on the path to uncovering a murderer. But are they digging through the past or digging their own future grave?The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester explores healing in the aftermath of trauma and the fullness of queery joy.
Tell the Rest: A Novel
by Lucy Jane BledsoeTwo estranged childhood friends find themselves on parallel paths to return to the site of the conversion therapy camp that tore them apart.“Two conversion therapy survivors go back to the site of their trauma, hoping the truth will set them free . . . This satisfyingly nuanced story tackles sexuality and spiritual abuse, offering connection and redemption.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review“Award-winning author Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s latest novel is focused on the life-saving friendship—and escape—of queer teens who meet at a Christian conversion camp. It’s enraging, heartbreaking, satisfying and an important read for our times.” —Ms.Delia Barnes and Ernest Wrangham met as teens at Celebration Camp, a church-supported conversion therapy program—the dubious, unscientific, Christian practice meant to change a person’s sexuality. After witnessing a devastating tragedy, they escaped in the night, only to take separate roads to their distant homes. They have no idea how each has fared through the years. Delia is a college basketball coach who prides herself on being an empowering and self-possessed role model for her players. But when she gets fired from her elite East Coast college, she’s forced to return to her hometown of Rockside, Oregon, to coach at her high school alma mater. Ernest, meanwhile, is a renowned poet with a temporary teaching job in Portland, Oregon. His work has always been boundary-pushing, fearless. But the poem he’s most wanted to write—about his dangerous escape from Celebration Camp—remains stubbornly out of reach. Both persist in the mission to overcome the consequences and inhumane costs of conversion therapy. As events find them hurtling toward each other once again, they both grapple with the necessity of remaining steadfast in one’s truth, no matter how slippery that can be. Tell the Rest is a powerful novel about coming to terms, with family, history, violence, loss, sexuality, and ultimately, with love.
Perfect Revenge: Volume 1 (Volume 1 #1)
by NeverOne day, the latest news on the forum: According to people familiar with the matter, this forum infatuated with Brother Yi from bending to straightening overnight, the beautiful photo of the host of the foreign language version of the beauty forum was exposed!Upon seeing the news, all his friends immediately sent Xu Meng their most sincere concern: If you don't do it, you don't die.Disgusted mouth straight scrape tantalizing dog attack true repentance sometimes can not control oneself to fly self to suffer during the period of being a human again
King Of Peak: Volume 1 (Volume 1 #1)
by Shen LanZhuThe Second Young Master of the Zhong Family from the Gu Wu Family who was engrossed in the game had died, inadvertently seizing the body of a weak man because he had a one-night stand with someone.A few years later, when he returned home, he found out that the world's first hologram game's new server had opened, so he entered the game.While he was engrossed in the game, his teacher introduced him to a large company in the country. He didn't expect that the CEO of the company would be …
Two Winters
by Lauren Emily WhalenThe winter of 1997 is a tragedy waiting to happen. Small-town life isn't easy for seventeen-year-old, bisexual and closeted Paulina, especially when her best friend Mia becomes pregnant and doesn't want to tell the baby's father, Paulina's other best friend, Tesla. Meanwhile, Paulina's secret relationship with volleyball star Ani is about to go public. One fateful night, everything changes forever. <p><p>In the winter of 2014, Perdita, bi and proud in Chicago, is weeks away from turning seventeen. She loves her two moms, but why won't they talk about her adoption? When Perdita meets improv performer Fenton, she discovers both a kindred soul and a willing accomplice in her search for the truth. Will Perdita find what she's looking for? <p><p>Two Winters is a contemporary YA retelling of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale about birth, death, Catholic school, improv comedy and the healing nature of time.
Gender Queer: A Memoir Deluxe Edition (Gender Queer)
by Maia KobabeIn 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Then e created Gender Queer. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fan fiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere. This special deluxe hardcover edition of Gender Queer features a brand-new cover, exclusive art and sketches, a foreword from ND Stevenson, Lumberjanes writer and creator of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and an afterword from Maia Kobabe.
Red Clay Suzie
by Jeffrey Dale LoftonA novel inspired by true events The coming-of-age story of Philbet, a gay, physically-misshapen boy in rural Georgia, who battles bullying, ignorance, and disdain as he makes his way in life as an outsider—before finding acceptance in unlikely places.Fueled by tomato sandwiches and green milkshakes, and obsessed with cars, Philbet struggles with life and love as a gay boy in rural Georgia. He&’s happiest when helping Grandaddy dig potatoes from the vegetable garden that connects their houses. But Philbet&’s world is shattered and his resilience shaken by events that crush his innocence and sense of security; expose his misshapen chest skillfully hidden behind shirts Mama makes at home; and convince him that he&’s not fit to be loved by Knox, the older boy he idolizes to distraction. Over time, Philbet finds refuge in unexpected places and inner strength in unexpected ways, leading to a resolution in the form of a letter from beyond the grave.
Hi Honey, I'm Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture
by Matt BaumeLambda Literary Award Winner for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction 2024 Stonewall Book Honor Award Winner—Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award Featured on NPR's Books We Love 2023 One of Vulture's Best Comedy Books of 2023 "This book is a triumph and everyone should read it." —Dan Savage, journalist and author, on the "Savage Lovecast" "Hi Honey, I&’m Homo is a heartbreaking historical document, but ultimately one that will leave the reader feeling proud of how something as maligned and disposable as the network sitcom used comedy to bring about such profound and important social progress." —Vulture "[A] well-curated compendium of prime time broadcasting . . . Baume is a companionable guide." —Shelf Awareness Behind the scenes of the most popular sitcoms of the 20th century, a revolution was brewing. For decades, amidst the bright lights, studio-audience laughs, and absurdly large apartment sets, the real-life story of American LGBTQ+ liberation unfolded in plain sight in front of millions of viewers, most of whom were laughing too hard to mind. From flamboyant relatives on Bewitched to closely-guarded secrets on All in the Family, from network-censor fights over Soap to behind-the-scenes activism on the set of The Golden Girls, from Ellen&’s culture clash and Will & Grace&’s mixed reception to Modern Family&’s primetime power-couple, Hi Honey, I&’m Homo! is the story not only of how subversive queer comedy transformed the American sitcom, from its inception through today, but how our favorite sitcoms transformed, and continue to transform, America. Accessible, entertaining, and informative, Hi Honey, I&’m Homo! features commentary and interviews from celebrities, behind-the-scenes creators, and more.
Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy
by Charles BuschA poignant, deliciously anecdotal account of a talented artist's Oz-like journey in the worlds of Off-Broadway, Broadway, and Hollywood The Tony Award-nominated writer of The Tale of the Allergist&’s Wife and the long-running hit Off-Broadway play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, and a Sundance Festival award winner, Charles Busch has created a unique place in the entertainment world as a playwright, LGBT icon, drag actor, director, and cabaret performer, with his extraordinary gift for both connecting with and channeling the leading ladies of show business. In wonderfully readable chapters, by turns comic and moving, Charles writes how ever since his mother's death when he was seven, he has sought out surrogate mothers in his life. In his teens, Charles moved to Park Avenue in Manhattan to live with his Auntie Mame-like Aunt Lil, who encouraged and nourished Charles&’ talents and dreams, and eventually he discovered his gifts for writing plays and performing as a male actress. Busch also shares his colorful and sometimes outlandish interactions with film and theatrical luminaries including the hilarious comedian Joan Rivers (who became a mother figure to Charles after Aunt Lil&’s death), Angela Lansbury (who attended her first Passover seder with Charles), Rosie O&’Donnell, Claudette Colbert, Valerie Harper, Kim Novak, and many others. Full of both humor and heart and featuring rare photos, Leading Lady is for readers of entertainment books as well as anyone who enjoys real-life stories of artists who break the mold, ditch the boundaries, and find their own unique way to sparkle.