Roots Untangled
BLACK BOY Out of Time is a thought-provoking memoir on what it means to be Black and gay. Journalist Hari Ziyad connects the political and intellectual to the personal in recounting their family’s story.
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Could There Be… a Curse?
Plain Bad Heroines is a Gothic horror novel, but it’s also concerned with the power of stories and who gets to tell them. The Story of Mary MacLane really was an early 20th-century sensation, and its frank discussion of traditionally unspoken desires disrupts Libbie and Alex’ discreet life at Brookhants.
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How ACT UP Did It
[Sarah] Schulman states at the outset that her primary purpose in writing Let the Record Show “is not nostalgia, but rather to help contemporary and future activists learn from the past to assist organizing in the present” and to show “that people from all walks of life, working together, can change the world.”
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Refashioning an Industry
JUST STANDING IN LINE at a grocery store will tell you nearly everything you need to know about the beauty industry in America: the models on the magazines are exquisitely beautiful, their makeup flawless, their weight well below that of the average American woman. And until recently, all of the models you would see were heterosexual, cisgender women—that is, until Gabrielle Korn, director of fashion and culture at Refinery29 and former editor of Nylon, began working in the industry.
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Worst. Mom. Ever.
WINNER of the U.K.’s Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award in America, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain is perhaps the bleakest great novel to appear in a long time. It is the bleakest, most shocking, and most harrowing account of a childhood I’ve ever read, …
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Moods Flowing on Canvas
PUBLISHED last year on the occasion of a major retrospective of Frida Kahlo’s work in the Martin- Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and Bank Austria Kunstforum, in Vienna, the Frida Kahlo Retrospective is accompanied by a coffee table-sized catalog. It is a stunningly beautiful book with glorious color and black-and-white illustrations.
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Mayor Pete’s Biggest Fan
One of the funniest passages in I Have Something To Tell You is when Chasten recalls critics charging that he and Pete simply weren’t “gay” enough.
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Street-Sauntering Women
Francesca Wade wants us to rediscover the five subjects of the book within “a sense of place”—Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London. The author offers mini-profiles of five writers: All five who resided at Mecklenburgh Square at some point between 1916 and 1940.
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Wilde the Thinker
RESIST EVERYTHING Except Temptation is a careful consideration of Oscar Wilde’s philosophical underpinnings. Through a close examination of his writings and political affiliations, Kristian Williams discovers a deep affinity for anarchism.
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Love in a Bad Time
In his powerful debut novel The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr., depicts in exquisite, often excruciating, detail the social ruination that slavery brought to the antebellum South.
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