Hijab Butch Blues
Hijab Butch Blues

Author: Lamya H

Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback

Published: 2024-02-06

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0593448782

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A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this “raw and relatable memoir that challenges societal norms and expectations” (Linah Mohammad, NPR). “A masterful, must-read contribution to conversations on power, justice, healing, and devotion from a singular voice I now trust with my whole heart.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed AN AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK • WINNER: The Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, the Stonewall Book Award, the Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Autostraddle, Book Riot, BookPage, Harper’s Bazaar, Electric Lit, She Reads When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don’t matter, and it’s easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: When Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya? From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own—ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant. This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya’s childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one’s own life.

Summary of Lamya H's Hijab Butch Blues
Summary of Lamya H's Hijab Butch Blues

Author: Milkyway Media

Publisher: Milkyway Media

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13:

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Get the Summary of Lamya H's Hijab Butch Blues in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "Hijab Butch Blues" is a memoir by Lamya H. that explores her journey of self-discovery, spirituality, and identity as a queer Muslim woman. The narrative intertwines personal experiences with reflections on Quranic stories, particularly focusing on the figures of Maryam (Mary) and Hajar (Hagar). Lamya H. grapples with her sexuality, the desire to vanish, and the complexities of living in a society with rigid expectations...

Stone Butch Blues
Stone Butch Blues

Author: Leslie Feinberg

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 582

ISBN-13: 1459608453

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Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? Thats the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950s, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist 60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early 70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence.

We Have Always Been Here
We Have Always Been Here

Author: Samra Habib

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0735235015

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CANADA READS 2020 WINNER NATIONAL BESTSELLER 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER How do you find yourself when the world tells you that you don't exist? Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. As an Ahmadi Muslim growing up in Pakistan, she faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From her parents, she internalized the lesson that revealing her identity could put her in grave danger. When her family came to Canada as refugees, Samra encountered a whole new host of challenges: bullies, racism, the threat of poverty, and an arranged marriage. Backed into a corner, her need for a safe space--in which to grow and nurture her creative, feminist spirit--became dire. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women in her life had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved. So begins an exploration of faith, art, love, and queer sexuality, a journey that takes her to the far reaches of the globe to uncover a truth that was within her all along. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.

Unicorn
Unicorn

Author: Amrou Al-Kadhi

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 9780008306069

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From a god-fearing Muslim boy enraptured with their mother, to a vocal, queer drag queen estranged from their family, this is a heart-breaking and hilarious memoir about the author's fight to be true to themself.

Bangkok Wakes to Rain
Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Author: Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0525534768

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"A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself"--Provided by publisher.

Fairyland
Fairyland

Author: Alysia Abbott

Publisher: WW Norton

Published: 2013-06-04

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0393082520

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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to raucous parties, pushes her in front of the microphone at poetry readings, and introduces her to a world of artists, thinkers, and writers. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure. As a child Alysia views her father as a loving playmate who can transform the ordinary into magic, but as she gets older Alysia wants more than anything to fit in. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference. In Alysia’s teens, Steve’s friends—several of whom she has befriended—fall ill as AIDS starts its rampage through their community. While Alysia is studying in New York and then in France, her father tells her it’s time to come home; he’s sick with AIDS. Alysia must choose whether to take on the responsibility of caring for her father or continue the independent life she has worked so hard to create. Reconstructing their life together from a remarkable cache of her father’s journals, letters, and writings, Alysia Abbott gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic time in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father’s legacy and a daughter’s love.

You Exist Too Much
You Exist Too Much

Author: Zaina Arafat

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1646220595

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A “provocative and seductive debut” of desire and doubleness that follows the life of a young Palestinian American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities as she endeavors to lead an authentic life (O, The Oprah Magazine). On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12–year–old Palestinian–American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought–after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her. Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings—for love, and a place to call home.

City of Incurable Women
City of Incurable Women

Author: Maud Casey

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 1942658907

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In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.

The Promised Land
The Promised Land

Author: Mary Antin

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2018-08-31

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1528781554

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This compelling autobiography narrates the story of immigration rights activist Mary Antin, and her enlightening journey from early life in Russia to her migration and Americanisation in late nineteenth-century USA. The Promised Land is an introspective first-hand account of life as a Jewish American immigrant. Mary Antin was just 12-years-old when she arrived in Boston with her family and she underwent a great deal of change and development before she could call the USA her home. Antin’s autobiography details how the young Jewish girl escaped Czarist Russia and adapted to an entirely new culture and lifestyle. Antin explores her memories of public school and accompanies powerful historical context with hard-hitting political commentary. The Promised Land is one person’s story, but speaks for the millions who have had all too similar experiences. This gripping volume includes fascinating chapters such as: - Children of the Law - Daily Bread - The Exodus - The Initiation - ‘My Country’ - A Child’s Paradise Now in a new edition, Read & Co. Books have republished this illuminating autobiography for a new generation of readers. The Promised Land is a great read for those interested in the history of immigration rights and for fans of Mary Antin’s work.