An uninhibited portrait of growing up gay in 1980s Alabama: exploring art and sex with “more layered insight than the page count should allow” (Hanif Abdurraqib, MTV News). DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love? A modern American classic, Since I Laid My Burden Down is a raw and searing look into the intersections of memory, Blackness, and queerness. “Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel . . . a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire.” —Publishers Weekly “It’s a true novel, chaptered, and bound, that not only holds its own as queer literature, with its unapologetically misanthropic narrative, but also expands upon it.” —San Francisco Chronicle “An antidote to the rigamarole of gay lit.” —Mask Magazine “Slim yet potently realized, with a lot to ponder.” —The Bay Area Reporter “Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told.” —Michelle Tea, author of Castle on the River Vistula
People of color are eager for white people to deal with their racial ignorance. White people are desperate for an affirmative role in racial justice. Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness helps with conversations the nation is, just now, finally starting to have.
Public places are places where all citizens, irrespective of their race, age, religion, or class level (social or economic), cannot be excluded. It serves to improve the lifestyle experience of its inhabitants, as well as promote social connections. All citizens are responsible for it and are interested in it, and the intervention for change must be the responsibility of all without exception. As such, bottom-up urban planning is essential for urban environments and for transforming nightlife in public places in order to create more meaningful experiences and instill a greater sense of identity and community. Transforming Urban Nightlife and the Development of Smart Public Spaces analyzes the patterns of transformations of nightlife in public life. The book investigates urban nightlife transformations and the challenge of enhancing the sense of belonging in sensitive areas such as local communities and historical sites. The chapters present new insights to control the chaotic intervention related to the elements of traditional or digital technology, whether from citizens themselves or local authorities. The objective also is to document urban nightlife transformations that enhance the sense of belonging in historical sites. Important topics covered include urban-gamification, digital urban art, urban socio-ecosystems, and reimagining space in the urban nightlife. This book is ideal for urban planners, developers, social scientists, technologists, civil engineers, architects, policymakers, government officials, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in urban nightlife and nightscape and the smart technologies used for transformation.
Nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, Aftershocks is a haunting novel-in-translation about Saga, a woman who comes to after an epileptic seizure on a sidewalk along busy Miklabraut Street. Her three-year-old son is gone. The last thing she remembers is a double-decker bus that no one else can confirm seeing. Over the following days, Saga's mind is beset by memories and doubts. What happened before her seizure? Who can she trust? And how can she make any sense of her emotions when her memory is so fragmented? Hailed as Audur Jonsdottir's "best-written novel so far," Aftershocks is a shocking and revelatory exploration of the blurred lines between fact and fiction, reality and imagination, and where mother ends and child begins.
A whimsical, silly children's book in which the narrator imagines what life would be like for his dog if his dog suddenly had thumbs, accompanied by funky fluorescent drawings.
Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who GOT him. So he started asking himself questions: What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer? A Queer graphic designer? Someone from the South? Could his identity be communicated through a poster or a book? How could identity be archived in a design canon that has consistently erased contributions by designers who were not white, straight, and male? In Black, Queer, & Untold, acclaimed designer and artist Jon Key answers these questions and manifests the book he and so many others wish they had when they were coming up. He pays tribute to the incredible designers, artists, and people who came before and provides them an enduring, reverential stage – and in doing so, gifts us a book that immediately takes its place among the creative arts canon.
Gloriously illustrated, this journal guides readers to explore the darkness, unknown, and miraculousness of a cancer diagnosis to discover an awakening.Nicole Skibola was 32 and a lawyer working in the New York start-up world when she received a diagnosis for a rare endometrial cancer. That surreal moment marked the beginning of a race to save eggs, to operate, and to mourn the loss of her reproductive organs. Echoing the urgency of diagnosis and treatment were the messages from everyone to move on, be grateful, resettle into the person she was "before." Loss begat losses: her boyfriend left her, her start-up failed, and Nicole found herself in her childhood home, alone, and for the first time was allowed to explore her grief. She joined a group of writers and artists, many of whom were making art that dealt explicitly with grief and loss. It was a revelation.After documenting her own story-and with some inspiration from The Artist's Way'-Nicole developed a framework that supports people, especially those with cancer, to face, feel, and express their own reality by connecting to their inner artist.