An ancient title of respect for women, the word “cunt” long ago veered off this noble path. Inga Muscio traces the road from honor to expletive, giving women the motivation and tools to claim “cunt” as a positive and powerful force in their lives. In this fully revised edition, she explores, with candidness and humor, such traditional feminist issues as birth control, sexuality, jealousy between women, and prostitution with a fresh attitude for a new generation of women. Sending out a call for every woman to be the Cuntlovin' Ruler of Her Sexual Universe, Muscio stands convention on its head by embracing all things cunt-related. This edition is fully revised with updated resources, a new foreword from sexual pioneer Betty Dodson, and a new afterword by the author. “Bright, sharp, empowering, long-lasting, useful, sexy....”—San Francisco Chronicle “... Cunt provides fertile ground for psychological growth.”—San Francisco Bay Guardian “Cunt does for feminism what smoothies did for high-fiber diets—it reinvents the oft-indigestible into something sweet and delicious.”—Bust Magazine
Taking on the thorny ethics of owning and selling property as a white woman in a majority Black city and a majority Bangladeshi neighborhood with both intelligence and humor, this memoir brings a new perspective to a Detroit that finds itself perpetually on the brink of revitalization. In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house—a room of her own, à la Virginia Woolf—in Detroit’s majority-Bangladeshi “Banglatown.” Accompanied by her cats, Moore moves to the bungalow in her new city where she gardens, befriends the neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption. This is also a memoir of art, gender, work, and survival. Moore writes into the gaps of Woolf’s declaration that “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write”; what if this woman were queer and living with chronic illness, as Moore is, or a South Asian immigrant, like Moore’s neighbors? And what if her primary coping mechanism was jokes? Part investigation, part comedy of a vexing city, and part love letter to girlhood, Gentrifier examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness, asking if we can ever really win when violence and profit are inextricably linked with victory.
These poems take a closer look at violence against women, both physical and psychological. Follow the intersection of fear, identity, and the malleability of the speaker’s own experiences of violence enacted on her by men, particularly a past partner. Imagistic and evocative, the poems ask how are we conditioned into living with violence, and how do we move forward?
Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow. Praise for Woman on the Edge of Time “This is one of those rare novels that leave us different people at the end than we were at the beginning. Whether you are reading Marge Piercy’s great work again or for the first time, it will remind you that we are creating the future with every choice we make.”—Gloria Steinem “An ambitious, unusual novel about the possibilities for moral courage in contemporary society.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “A stunning, even astonishing novel . . . marvelous and compelling.”—Publishers Weekly “Connie Ramos’s world is cuttingly real.”—Newsweek “Absorbing and exciting.”—The New York Times Book Review
Fiction. You can almost make just enough money to buy heroin every day by jacking off for people on the Internet. This is America. That makes you an entrepreneur. But how do you stop being human? Is it possible? What if you can't? What then? In this relentless, heart-shattering first novel, Jonathan Reiss gently takes your hand and leads you on a grand insider's tour of the nicest parts of hell, where giving up on everything is extremely hard work. "GETTING OFF is raunchy, sad, weird, smart, and riotously fun to read. Gross sex, drug shakes, LA, scary cults--what more can you ask for? Reiss has written a refreshingly dark book, with pretty much zero redemption for his characters but plenty of attention and love."--Paula Bomer "As soon as I read the first paragraph I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep till I'd finished. Because it was too real. Novels have endings, thank God."--Stoya "Jonathan Reiss is a real rocket ship of a writer. Wild and sad, GETTING OFF pops with complicated worlds of internet sex, dreams, and loss. This is a book full of web cam hook-ups and people wanting to be fucked by the ocean. It's a book asking you to show your chest and prove you're not a cop, even though we all are."--Scott McClanahan "Beautifully written, terribly sad, and frightfully funny. It's an experience almost so painful that you can't turn away from it, and it doesn't let up until it's finished. I loved it."--Sean Bonnette, cofounder of AJJ "A surprisingly affectionate novel...Reiss's sympathy for Simon--not to mention his sense of humor--carries his readers along on a trip that could have been tedious in the hands of a lesser storyteller. Neither Reiss nor Simon wallows in Simon's misery. Simon treats his sex work matter-of-factly; Reiss refuses to make jerking off for other men a straight guy's vision of absolute hell...Reiss sees the harm where it belongs--not in sexwork, but in the more overarching despair and primal self-loathing that causes and sustains most junkies' despair and self-destruction."--Ed Sikov "Much like its predecessors, such as Donald Goines's Dopefiend and Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Reiss doesn't shy away from showing the complete squalor a broke heroin addict lives in. . . . both disgusting and engaging, entertaining, and full of excellent writing...An excellent debut."--Ben Arzate
“One of today’s leading lights in romantic fiction.” —Seattle Times USA Today and New York Times bestselling author Lisa Kleypas is one of America’s most acclaimed and popular authors of historical romance fiction—and Stranger in My Arms is one of her most beloved novels! A classic tale of a noble lady whose life is upended when her despised husband—believed lost at sea—returns, a remarkably altered, more passionate and loving man…if he is, indeed, who he claims to be. A two-time RITA Award-winner—and a nine-time nominee—Lisa Kleypas is at her sensuous best with Stranger in My Arms.
Poetry. LGBT Studies. Women's Studies. In CUNT NORTON, the sequel to her unforgettable CUNT UPS, Dodie Bellamy "cunts" The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1975 edition), setting her text-ravenous cut-ups loose to devour the canonical voices of English literature. The texts that emerge from this sexual-linguistic encounter are monstrous, beautiful, unashamed: 33 erotic love poems ("the greatest fuck poem in the English language," according to Ariana Reines) that lust after the very aesthetic they resist. "These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me of course I love them as well," Bellamy writes. Even as CUNT NORTON dismembers the history of English poetry, "cunting" Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emerson and Lowell, it simultaneously allows new sexual members to arise and fill in the gaps, transforming the secret into the explicit, the classically beautiful into the wonderfully grotesque. Bellamy's cunted texts breathe life into literary "masters" with joy, honesty, hilarity, and insatiable passion. "I think this could be the most joyful book on Earth." Ariana Reines"