Tabitha and Magoo love to play dress up in their room. Tabitha uses her brother’s shirts to make superhero capes, and Magoo uses his sister’s frilly skirts to fashion a gown. They’re disappointed they can’t go outside in their new outfits, but then the drag queen Morgana magically appears! With the help of their new friend, they learn to defy restrictive gender roles and celebrate being themselves. The trio, dressed in colorful costumes and riding in a flying car, then heads to a local library for a diverse and fun-filled story time.
In the spring of 2020, a rapidly spreading global pandemic changed the contemporary world. For industrialized countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, which had long enjoyed the illusion that they were capable of handling large-scale crises, COVID-19 exposed dangerous fault lines. It brought to the fore institutional failures concerning public health, unemployment, and government stability, and exacerbated conditions for vulnerable and marginalized groups. Racial disparity, domestic abuse, food insecurity, and social welfare had to be reconsidered in the wake of a startling new reality: lockdown and severe economic precarity. In essays, short fiction, poetry, and more, writers respond to the personal and the political in the time of pandemic. This Is How We Come Back Stronger provides an essential feminist perspective on how we might move forward—and reminds us that, despite it all, we are not alone. Featuring brand new contributions from: Akasha Hull, Amelia Abraham, Catherine Cho, Dorothy Koomson, Fatima Bhutto, Fox Fisher, Francesca Martinez, Gina Miller, Helen Lederer, Jenny Sealey, Jess Phillips MP, Jessica Moor, Jude Kelly, Juli Delgado Lopera, Juliet Jacques, Kate Mosse, Kerry Hudson, Kuchenga, Laura Bates, Lauren Bravo, Layla Saad, Lindsey Dryden, Lisa Taddeo, Melissa Cummings-Quarry and Natalie Carter, Michelle Tea, Mireille Harper, Molly Case, Radhika Sanghani, Rosanna Amaka, Sara Collins, Sarah Eagle Heart, Shaz Awan, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sophie Williams, Stella Duffy, Virgie Tovar, Yomi Adegoke 10% of every book sold will be donated to the Third Wave Foundation to support youth-led gender justice activism.
The first volume in this beautifully illustrated anthology features traditional tales of heroic women from Japan to Scotland and beyond. Long before Suzanne Collins created Katniss Everdeen and Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower, there were many traditional folktales full of adventure, intrigue, and intrepid female characters. Feminist Folktales from Around the World collects these forgotten classics and presents them with original artwork by designer and illustrator Suki Boynton. Volume one in the series, Tatterhood features an introduction by Gayle Forman, the New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay. These twelves tales from Japan, Norway, Scotland, Sudan, and more, celebrate the cunning, hard work, and physical strength of their heroines. In these pages, a family of three women teaches a burly man how to wrestle, a girl battles a fearsome bear, and a young mother rescues her village from an elephant's stomach.
Playing off "The Wheels on the Bus," this nursery rhyme book from a founder of Drag Queen Story Hour is a fun, freewheeling celebration of being your most fabulous self. The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish encourages readers to boldly be exactly who they are. Written by a founding member of the nationally recognized Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), this playful picture book offers a quirky twist on a classic nursery rhyme by illustrating all of the ways to "work it". The story plays off "The Wheels on the Bus" as it follows a drag queen who performs her routine in front of an awestruck audience. A fun frenzy of fierceness, this book will appeal to readers of all ages.
In The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books, Jennifer Miller identifies an archive of over 150 English-language children’s picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ identities, expressions, and issues. This archive is then analyzed to explore the evolution of LGBTQ+ characters and content from the 1970s to the present. Miller describes dominant tropes that emerge in the field to analyze historical shifts in representational practices, which she suggests parallel larger sociocultural shifts in the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities. Additionally, Miller considers material constraints and possibilities affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books from the 1970s to the present. This foundational work defines the field of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books thoroughly, yet accessibly. In addition to laying the groundwork for further research, The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books presents a reading lens, critical optimism, used to analyze the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books. Many texts remain attached to heteronormative family forms and raced and classed models of success. However, by considering what these books put into the world, as well as problematic aspects of the world reproduced within them, Miller argues that LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are an essential world-making project and seek to usher in a transformed world as well as a significant historical archive that reflects material and representational shifts in dominant and subcultural understandings of gender and sexuality.
During the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman bikes through a locked-down NYC for the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart. Orpheus manages to buy a bicycle just before they sell out across the city. She takes to the streets looking for Eurydice, the first woman she fell in love with, who also broke her heart. The city is largely closed and on lockdown, devoid of touch, connection, and community. But Orpheus hears of a mysterious underground bar Le Monocle, fashioned after the lesbian club of the same name in 1930s Paris. Will Orpheus be able to find it? Will she ever be allowed to love again? Panpocalypse—first published as an online serial in spring of 2020—follows a lonely, disabled, poly hero in this novel about disease, decay, love, and revolution.
Capturing an ever-changing San Francisco, 25 acclaimed writers tell their stories of living in one of the most mesmerizing cities in the world. Over the last few decades, San Francisco has experienced radical changes with the influence of Silicon Valley, tech companies, and more. Countless articles, blogs, and even movies have tried to capture the complex nature of what San Francisco has become, a place millions of people have loved to call home, and yet are compelled to consider leaving. In this beautifully written collection, writers take on this Bay Area-dweller's eternal conflict: Should I stay or should I go? Including an introduction written by Gary Kamiya and essays from Margaret Cho, W. Kamau Bell, Michelle Tea, Beth Lisick, Daniel Handler, Bonnie Tsui, Stuart Schuffman, Alysia Abbott, Peter Coyote, Alia Volz, Duffy Jennings, John Law, and many more, The End of the Golden Gate is a penetrating journey that illuminates both what makes San Francisco so magnetizing and how it has changed vastly over time, shapeshifting to become something new for each generation of city dwellers. With essays chronicling the impact of the tech-industry invasion and the evolution, gentrification, and radical cost of living that has transformed San Francisco's most beloved neighborhoods, these prescient essayists capture the lasting imprint of the 1960s counterculture movement, as well as the fight to preserve the art, music, and other creative movements that make this forever the city of love. For anyone considering moving to San Francisco, wishing to relive the magic of the city, or anyone experiencing the sadness of leaving the bay—and ultimately, for anyone that needs a reminder of why we stay. Bound to be a long-time staple of San Francisco literature, anyone who has lived in or is currently living in San Francisco will enjoy the rich history of the city within these pages and relive intimate memories of their own. • GIVING BACK TO THE COMMUNITY: A percentage of the proceeds will be given to charities that help those in the bay experiencing homelessness. Every copy purchased offers a small way to help those in need.
An Occupy-era New York City novel following three women. “A provocative and well-told story about chosen community, friendship, and human frailty.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The Not Wives traces the lives of three women as they navigate the Occupy Wall Street movement and each other. Stevie is a nontenured professor and recently divorced single mom; her best friend Mel is a bartender, torn between her long-term girlfriend and her desire to explore polyamory; and Johanna is a homeless teenager trying to find her way in the world, who bears shared witness to a tragedy that interlaces her life with Stevie’s. In the midst of economic collapse and class conflict, late-night hookups and long-suffering exes, the three characters piece together a new American identity founded on resistance—against the looming shadow of financial precarity, the gentrification of New York, and the traditional role of wife. “Audacious and exhilarating in its candor, The Not Wives captures the heady mix of pleasures and agonies necessary to turn one’s life in a new, truer direction. Carley Moore attends to the complexities of urban living and activism with riveting clarity.” —Idra Novey, award-winning author of Those Who Knew “The Not Wives is gritty, sexy, very queer, literary social realism that’s up-all-night compelling—just what I want from a novel set in NYC in the time of Occupy, with its sprawling cast of adjuncts, bartenders, poets, single parents, little kids, homeless teenagers, and serious organizers embroiled in various romantic and economic complications. When we say report back, this is what we mean!” —Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Twentysomething and restless, Skye flits between cities and stagnant relationships until she meets Scottie, a disarming and disheveled British traveler, and Pieces, an enigmatic artist living in New York. The three recognize each other as kindred spirits—Black, punk, whimsical, revolutionary—and fall in together, leading Skye on an unlikely adventure across the Atlantic. They live a glorious, subterranean existence in 1990s London: making multimedia art, throwing drug-fueled parties, and eking out a living by busking in Tube stations, until their existence is jeopardized by the rise of CCTV and policing. In fluid and unrelenting prose, Jamika Ajalon's debut novel explores youth, poetry, and what it means to come terms with queerness. Skye Papers is an imaginative, episodic group portrait of a transatlantic art scene spearheaded by people of color—and of the fraught, dystopian reality of increasing state surveillance.
