Castle Faggot
Castle Faggot

Author: Derek Mccormack

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-11-24

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1635901375

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A dark satire about an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney could imagine: a playland for gay men called Faggotland. Castle Faggot is Derek McCormack's darkest and most delicious book yet, a satire of sugary cereals and Saturday morning cartoons set in an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney dreamed up. At the heart of the park is Faggotland, a playland for gay men, and Castle Faggot, the darkest dark ride in the world. Home to a cartoon Dracula called Count Choc-o-log, the castle is decorated with the corpses of gays—some were killed, some killed themselves, all ended up as décor. The book includes a map of Faggotland, a photobook of the castle, the instructions for a castle-shaped dollhouse, and the novelization of a TV puppet show about Count Choc-o-log and his friends—reminiscent of the classic stop-motion special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but even gayer and more grotesque. As scatological as Sade but with a Hanna-Barbera vibe, Castle Faggot transmutes McCormack's love of the lurid and the childlike, of funhouses and sickhouses, into something furiously funny: as Edmund White says, “the mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe.”

Headless
Headless

Author: Benjamin Weissman

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2004-02-01

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 1617750905

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A collection of short fiction that’s “fearless, fun, and sometimes filthy” (Alice Sebold, bestselling author of The Lovely Bones). Called “wildly inventive, profane, and hilarious” by Bret Easton Ellis, these short stories from the author of the cult classic Dear Dead Person head in countess surprising directions—from a skiing Hitler on the bunny slope, to a man dealing with dubbing porn tapes and cleaning up an overflowing toilet, to the sex lives of bears. “Surprising, rollicking and clever, but not for the faint of heart . . . Truly original stories.” —Publishers Weekly “[A] playful mélange of erotic black comedy and domestic pathos, dysfunctional families and all-too-functional men, dictators and lumberjacks. Weissman is an expert juggler of tone.” —Los Angeles Times

My Dead Book
My Dead Book

Author: Nate Lippens

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-10-22

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1635902150

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A rumination on survival, queer aging, and estrangement that was a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. My dead friends are back. I lie in bed at night and see them. Haunted by insomnia and the past as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, the narrator of My Dead Book flips through scenes of his youth and memories of dozens of friends who are no longer with him. Living alone and working odd jobs in Wisconsin, he ruminates on survival, queer aging, his years as a teenage throwaway, and estrangement, wondering whether he has outlived his place in the world. First published in 2021, Lippens’s debut novel was hailed as “a brutally acerbic novel of queer pessimism” (Donna Marcus, AnOther Magazine). As Lindsay Lerman observed in Southwest Review, “My Dead Book is not transgressive because it follows a gay man as he struggles to survive on the fringes of multiple worlds. … It is continually transgressing. It’s a living book (a living dead book), moving around in time, making tangential connections.” This new edition includes an introduction by LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer, Eileen Myles.

Redeployment
Redeployment

Author: Phil Klay

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-03-04

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 069815164X

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Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction "Redeployment is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. It’s the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.” —Dexter Filkins, The New York Times Book Review Selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post Book World, Amazon, and more Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn't commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains—of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier's daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier's homecoming. Redeployment has become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.

Autonomous
Autonomous

Author: Annalee Newitz

Publisher: Tor Books

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0765392070

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"When anything can be owned, how can we be free? Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, a pharmaceutical Robin Hood traversing the world in a submarine, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can't otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack leaves a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, repeating job tasks until they become insane. Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his partner, Paladin, a young indentured robot. As they race to stop information about the hacked drugs at their source, they form an uncommonly close relationship that neither of them fully understands, and Paladin begins to question their connection - and a society that profits from indentured robots" --

An Arab Melancholia
An Arab Melancholia

Author: Abdellah Taïa

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-03-09

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 158435111X

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An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... —An Arab Melancholia Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.

Inside Killjoy’s Kastle
Inside Killjoy’s Kastle

Author: Allyson Mitchell

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2019-09-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0774861592

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Hundreds of years of ridicule, persecution, erasure, misunderstanding, and institutionalization could put anyone in a bad mood. Killjoy invites you into her kastle for a queer exorcism and celebration of the past. Lesbian feminist histories can have a haunting effect on the present. This book explores the making and experience of Killjoy’s Kastle, an immersive walk-through installation and performance artwork (by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue) that materializes the frightfully acrimonious past for today. Inspired by Evangelical Christian hell houses, the exhibition has been staged in four cities so far – Toronto, London, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia – inviting visitors to interact with humorous and frightening manifestations of the spirits that haunt feminist and queer history. Whereas traditional hell houses set out to scare and convert, Killjoy’s Kastle cheekily aims to provoke and pervert, giving expression to old and new anxieties and creating a space for critique, affect, and discussion. Inside Killjoy’s Kastle fills this space by exploring the kastle’s theoretical and political legacies in chapters by queer and feminist scholars and in vignettes by artists who participated in the project. The many colourful photos in the book also bring Killjoy’s Kastle to life, offering an important visual context. By taking the kastle as a starting point, the contributors consider the role of lesbian feminist histories and direct-action aesthetics in contemporary communities, particularly the ways in which political artwork can produce new ways of knowing about the past.

How We Fight for Our Lives
How We Fight for Our Lives

Author: Saeed Jones

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1501132741

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From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives—winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award—is a “moving, bracingly honest memoir” (The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power. One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times; The Washington Post; NPR; Time; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Elle; BuzzFeed; Goodreads; and many more. “People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’” Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. An award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful—a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one-of-a-kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.

The Spider King's Daughter
The Spider King's Daughter

Author: Chibundu Onuzo

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-03-13

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0571268900

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Winner of a Betty Trask Award Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize Longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize The Spider King's Daughter is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet set against the backdrop of a changing Lagos, a city torn between tradition and modernity, corruption and truth, love and family loyalty. Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards and ferried everywhere in a huge black jeep. But being her father's favourite comes with uncomfortable duties, and she is often lonely behind the high walls of her house. A world away from Abike's mansion, in the city's slums, lives a seventeen-year-old hawker struggling to make sense of the world. His family lost everything after his father's death and now he runs after cars on the roadside selling ice cream to support his mother and sister. When Abike buys ice cream from the hawker one day, they strike up an unlikely and tentative romance, defying the prejudices of Nigerian society. But as they grow closer, revelations from the past threaten their relationship and both Abike and the hawker must decide where their loyalties lie.