In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.
Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There's only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.
When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend's place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.
A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.
Life's a bitch. That's why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she's foaming at the mouth. In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers.
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses examines how women-led healing was delegitimized to make way for patriarchy, capitalism, and the emerging medical industry.
As we watch another agonizing attempt to shift the future of healthcare in the United States, we are reminded of the longevity of this crisis, and how firmly entrenched we are in a system that doesn't work.
First published by the Feminist Press in 1973, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses is an essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunters. In this new and updated edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English delve into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick history brings us up-to-date, exploring today's changing attitudes toward childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches.
A lost feminist masterwork by feminist and speculative fiction icon Joanna Russ about a lesbian's coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s.
When Esther, an English professor living in 1970s small-town New York, has her first lesbian love affair, the fallout brings her everyday miseries into focus and sends her spiraling. Confronted with the homophobia of straight feminists and the misogyny of gay men, Esther is left to forge a language for her feminism and her burgeoning lesbian desire. A darkly comedic story of feminist love, hope, and reckoning, On Strike Against God's call to readers --Let's be reasonable. Let's demand the impossible--rings urgently true today.
Originally published in 1980, On Strike Against God is the only realist novel by feminist science fiction icon Joanna Russ. This new critical edition includes previously unpublished alternate endings to the novel, letters between Joanna Russ and acclaimed poet Marilyn Hacker, and additional essays by Russ. Contemporary authors Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj discuss Russ's continued impact, and an interview with science fiction luminary Samuel R. Delany reflects on Delany's decades-long friendship with Russ.
Merging memoir, poetry, and criticism, this radical literary revue traces a first-generation Nigerian American's search for home and belonging on her own terms.
In The Gloomy Girl Variety Show, Freda Epum explores the opposing forces of her no-place, no-where identity as a Nigerian American daughter, diasporically displaced, who spent years in and out of institutions seeking treatment for life-threatening mental illness. Epum examines her journey through healthcare and housing systems via a pop cultural lens--our collective obsession with HGTV's home buying and makeover shows--and a patchwork of poetry, art, and autotheory.
With raw honesty and glittering wit, this debut memoir maps the complexity of life under intersecting forms of oppression, revealing what it takes to turn from the brink of despair toward community and self-acceptance, find refuge in love, and reimagine home.
From an outspoken Iranian author comes a charming, powerful novella that is banned in Iran for its depiction of female freedom (Publishers Weekly).
Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer. --Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis This modern literary masterpiece follows the interwoven destinies of five women--including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a prostitute, and a schoolteacher--as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, this unforgettable novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men. Reminiscent of a wry fable, Women Without Men creates an evocative and powerfully drawn allegory of life in contemporary Iran. Shortly after the novel's 1989 publication, Parsipur was arrested and jailed for her frank and defiant portrayal of women's sexuality. Banned in Iran, this national bestseller was eventually translated into several languages, giving new readers access to the witty and subversive work of a brilliant Persian writer.Merging waves of feminist thought from established and emerging Mexican women writers, Tsunami arrives with seismic, groundbreaking force.
Featuring personal essay, manifesto, creative nonfiction, and poetry, Tsunami gathers the multiplicity of voices being raised in Mexico today against patriarchy and its buried structures. Tackling gender violence, community building, #MeToo, Indigenous rights, and more, these writings rock the core of what we know feminism to be, dismantling its Eurocentric roots and directing its critical thrust towards current affairs in Mexico today. Asserting plurality as a political priority, Tsunami includes trans voices, Indigenous voices, Afro-Latinx voices, voices from within and outside academic institutions, and voices spanning generations. Tsunami is the combined force and critique of the three feminist waves, the marea verde (green wave) of protests that have swept through Latin America in recent years, and the tides turned by insurgent feminisms at the margins of public discourse.
Contributors include Marina Azahua, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Dahlia de la Cerda, Alexandra R. DeRuiz, Lia García, Jimena González, Gabriela Jauregui, Fernanda Latani M. Bravo, Valeria Luiselli, Ytzel Maya, Brenda Navarro, Jumko Ogata, Daniela Rea, Cristina Rivera Garza, Diana J. Torres, Sara Uribe, and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation.
Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in LiteratureA TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021This evocative memoir of food and family history is somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking... [and] a potent personal history (Shelf Awareness).
Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details--language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life.
Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter's search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother's schizophrenia. In her mother's final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent's childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother's multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her--but also the things that kept her alive.
An exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation. --Booklist (starred review)
A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience. --Kirkus Reviews
The internationally recognized sexual assault memoir that sparked a feminist movement against rape, stigma, and silence in Japan.
An undocumented woman answers a job posting only to find herself held hostage, a group of outcasts obsess over boys drowned while surfing, and an unhappy couple finds themselves trapped in a terrifying maze. With scalpel-like precision, Ampuero considers the price paid by those on the margins so that the elite might lounge comfortably, considering themselves safe in their homes.
Simultaneously terrifying and exquisite, Human Sacrifices is tropical gothic at its finest--decay and oppression underlie our humid and hostile world, where working-class women and children are consistently the weakest links in a capitalist economy. Against this backdrop of corrosion and rot, these twelve stories contemplate the nature of exploitation and abuse, illuminating the realities of those society consumes for its own pitiless ends.
Tongueless follows two rival teachers at a secondary school in Hong Kong who are instructed to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin--or lose their jobs. Apolitical and focusing on surviving and thriving in their professional environment, Wai and Ling each approach the challenge differently. Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning; Ling, knowing how to please her superiors and colleagues, thinks she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge by deploying her social savviness. Wai eventually crumples under the pressure and dies by suicide, leaving her colleague Ling to face seismic political and cultural change alone as she considers how far she will go to survive such a ruthlessly competitive work environment.
Sharp, darkly humorous, and politically pointed, Tongueless presciently engages with important issues facing Hong Kong today during which so much of the city's uniqueness--especially its language--is at risk of being erased.
Originally published in 1984, this dystopian trilogy--a pioneering feminist experiment--is a testament to the power of language and women's collective action (Literary Hub).
In 2205, the 19th Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who breed women to be perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom for all.
This angry feminist text is also an exemplary experiment in speculative fiction, deftly and implacably pursuing both a scientific hypothesis and an ideological hypothesis through all their social, moral, and emotional implications. --Ursula K. Le Guin
A welcome reminder of the feminist legacies of science fiction. . . . Explores the power of speech, agency, and subversion in a work that is as gripping, troubling, and meaningful today as it has ever been. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Carefully considered, successful instances of experimental fiction disrupt gender, genre, and identity in this deranged, otherworldly collection (Literary Hub).
A woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and hair starts sprouting from the walls. These stories slip and slide between genres--from video games to fan fiction, avant-garde theater to choose-your-own-adventure--as characters cycle through giddying changes in gender, physiology, species, and identity. Collapsing boundaries between bodies and forms, these fictions interrogate the visceral, gross, and absurd.
This book is fucking weird, wrote Brit Mandelo in 2015. It's only gotten weirder since. Slug and Other Stories is a revised and expanded edition of a contemporary cult classic. Finally back in print, this collection is a testament to the messy anti-logic of queer feelings by a revelatory new voice.
A candid guidebook about art-making in the midst of oppression--a slim, necessary revelation (Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts).
Visiting the Andy Warhol Museum as a teenager, Beth Pickens realized that art was imperative for reflecting--and thus remaking--the world. As an adult, she has dedicated her life to arts nonprofits and consulting, helping marginalized artists traverse the world of MFAs, residences, and institutional funding.
Writing in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Pickens reminds emerging artists that their art is more important than ever. She gives advice on fostering creativity and sustaining an innovative practice as conversations about grants, public programming, and arts funding in schools grow ever-more heated. Part political manifesto, part practical manual, this resource reminds us that art has always been a tool of resistance.
Published in 1982, But Some of Us Are Brave was the first-ever Black women's studies reader and a foundational text of contemporary feminism.
Featuring writing from eminent scholars, activists, teachers, and writers, such as the Combahee River Collective and Alice Walker, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Bravechallenges the absence of Black feminist thought in women's studies, confronts racism, and investigates the mythology surrounding Black women in the social sciences.
As the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship, But Some of Us Are Brave was recognized by Audre Lorde as the beginning of a new era, where the 'women' in women's studies will no longer mean 'white.'
Coeditors Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith are authors and former women's studies professors. Brittney C. Cooper is a professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of several books, including Eloquent Rage, named by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf read for November/December 2018.