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Trans Anthology Project: Reflections of Self-Discovery and Acceptance
A must-read book for gender diverse teens and their parents, this expertly curated collection will open hearts and minds to the myriad ways people explore, identify, disclose, and express gender identity.
Providing access to the lived experience of over 200 gender-diverse teens, young adults, and their parents, Trans Anthology Project highlights the complexities of navigating gender identity within oneself, one's family, and one's community. This powerful collection contains 30+ stories and poems from people all around the country, as well as the voices of an additional 150 people who participated via anonymous surveys.
Part guidebook, part anthology, stories are supplemented by education insights from a therapist without a decade of experience working with trans youth and their families. Topics include:
- Gender vs. Gender Identity vs. Gender Expression
- Gender Dysphoria
- The History and Biology of Gender Diversity
- The various nuances and dynamics involved in "Coming Out"
- The Spectrum of Transitioning-Social, Legal, and Medical
The Trans Anthology Project is a vital resource for gender-diverse youth and parents looking for direction, understanding, friends and family committed to supporting their loved ones by educating themselves, and anyone seeking to deepen their of gender diversity.
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Blessings
Moonlight meets Purple Hibiscus in this gay coming-of-age novel from an astonishing young talent, set in post-military Nigeria and culminating in the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2014. Obiefuna has always been the black sheep of his family--sensitive where his father, Anozie, is pragmatic, a dancer where his brother, Ekene, is a natural athlete. But when an intimate connection blossoms between Obiefuna and a boy from a nearby village, happiness is fleeting once his father catches them together and banishes him to boarding school. Obiefuna finds and hides who he truly is as he navigates his new school's strict hierarchy and unpredictable violence. Back home, his mother Uzoamaka must contend with the absence of her beloved son, her husband's cryptic reasons for sending him away, and the hard truths that they've all been hiding from. As Nigeria teeters on the brink of criminalizing same-sex relationships, Obiefuna's life, or the life he wants to live, becomes even further out of a reach and more dangerous than ever before. Told from the alternating perspectives of Obiefuna and Uzoamaka, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story that asks how to live freely in a country that forbids one's truest self, and the love that can flourish in spite of it all. -
Haunted to Death
It's Hart to Hart via HGTV on All Hallows' Eve, as partners and home renovation hosts Peter Penwell and JP Broadway try not to flip when their newest fixer-upper is rumored to be a haunted house . . .
Kicking off season three of their hit reality TV show Domestic Partners is a home renovation project with an irresistible hook. Woods Hall is a lavish 1913 manor home in the Detroit suburb of Pleasant Woods, once belonging to the town's founding family. It also comes with its own ghost. Twenty-five years ago during a Halloween night party, automotive heiress and beauty queen Emma Wheeler-Woods, wearing a white Princess Diana wedding gown as a costume, fell from a third-floor balcony to her death. Or was she pushed? Fiona Forrest recently inherited the home after learning she was Emma's daughter, and she and her fiancé have hired the Domestic Partners to restore the family property to its original splendor. But ghostly sightings, injured crew, secret passageways, locked rooms, and sabotage beg the question: Is the place actually haunted? And perhaps more practically, was Fiona's mother murdered? Hustling to have work finished in time to shoot the finale on Halloween--the anniversary of Emma's mysterious death--do Peter and JP have a ghost of a chance of also solving a cold case from a quarter of a century ago before someone else takes a fall? -
Please Stop Trying to Leave Me
A debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world marks the arrival of a truly original, haunting voice in fiction who will make you laugh, cry, and scream, all in the same breath. In the midst of god sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify telling her to break up with her girlfriend, twenty-seven-year-old Norma meets a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one story left to finish her collection, Norma is desperate for an answer: should she leave her girlfriend in order to finish her manuscript? When her new therapist diagnoses her with depersonalization/derealization disorder, Norma insists she doesn't have it: it's just Oblivion, the thing that started happening to her when she was two and a half. Haunted by SSRI side effects, her girlfriend's kindness, her father's incessant calls, and a world that becomes less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. And whenever she attempts to write The Last Story, Norma is faced with the reality and unrealities of her past, the society she lives in, and everything that she's ever believed about life, writing, and love. Against the backdrop of climate change, racial injustice, Google ads, and the metaverse, Norma begins sharing other stories, hoping that they'll help her connect the dissociative dots once and for all. Maybe it's crazy not to be crazy in a place like this. And in the midst of it all is Norma's girlfriend, who may well be an answer in Norma's search for meaning. Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and through her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today's world, challenging all we've been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing. -
Experienced
A sexy sapphic romantic comedy about newly-out Bette, who is in love for the first time in her life. Finally, everything makes sense. Until it doesn't. As Bette approached thirty, she realized something big: she's into women. And then she fell for Mei, who's entirely perfect. Until, out of the blue, Mei suggests they take a break. She wants Bette to have the opportunity she missed out on in her twenties: to explore the queer dating scene, and then return certain about their future, her desires, and herself. Reluctantly, Bette sets out on a mission: date hot women and have hot casual sex, before returning to her loving girlfriend. Maybe, put that way, it doesn't sound so bad... Often heady and thrilling, occasionally cringe, Bette's odyssey will take her to some unexpected places. But with her new friend, the gorgeous and self-assured Ruth, as her queer dating guide, Bette can't possibly fail. Right? -
Saints of Storm and Sorrow
In this fiercely imaginative Filipino-inspired fantasy debut, a bisexual nun hiding a goddess-given gift is unwillingly transformed into a lightning rod for her people's struggle against colonization. Perfect for fans of lush fantasy full of morally ambiguous characters, including The Poppy War and The Jasmine Throne. Maria Lunurin has been living a double life for as long as she can remember. To the world, she is Sister Maria, dutiful nun and devoted servant of Aynila's Codicían colonizers. But behind closed doors, she is a stormcaller, chosen daughter of the Aynilan goddess Anitun Tabu. In hiding not only from the Codicíans and their witch hunts, but also from the vengeful eye of her slighted goddess, Lunurin does what she can to protect her fellow Aynilans and the small family she has created in the convent: her lover Catalina, and her younger sister Inez. Lunurin is determined to keep her head down - until one day she makes a devastating discovery, which threatens to tear her family apart. In desperation, she turns for help to Alon Dakila, heir to Aynila's most powerful family, who has been ardently in love with Lunurin for years. But this choice sets in motion a chain of events beyond her control, awakening Anitun Tabu's rage and putting everyone Lunurin loves in terrible danger. Torn between the call of Alon's magic and Catalina's jealousy, her duty to her family and to her people, Lunurin can no longer keep Anitun Tabu's fury at bay. For the goddess of storms demands vengeance. And she will sweep aside anyone who stands in her way. -
Breaking the Rainbow Ceiling: How LGBTQ+ People Can Thrive and Succeed at Work
A compelling look at the challenges facing LGBTQ+ professionals as they navigate their careers - with advice from many senior figures who have smashed their own rainbow ceilings.
There are currently only four LGBTQ+ CEOs across all Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies who are out at work, and just 0.8% of Fortune 500 board positions are filled by LGBTQ+ people. This deficit, occurring across sectors and around the world, reveals a diversity gap playing out in today's workplace: LGBTQ+ people are less likely to reach the top jobs. But what is holding LGBTQ+ people back at work - and what can be done? Breaking the Rainbow Ceiling explores the hidden differences that cause LGBTQ+ people to be underrepresented at the most senior levels of professional life. Combining data with personal insights from over 40 prominent LGBTQ+ trailblazers, from CEOs to Ambassadors, Layla McCay reveals the challenges that LGBTQ+ people commonly encounter as they find their way in work environments, and provides the practical strategies that can help empower LGBTQ+ people to reach their full professional potential. The book explores how everyone - from boards, CEOs, managers, HR professionals and colleagues, through to LGBTQ+ people navigating their own career paths - can recognize and address the barriers, achieve their career goals, and build a more inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and succeed.Sold out -
A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women's Culture
A deeply researched and highly readable cultural history of queer women's lives in the second half of the twentieth century, told through six iconic spaces
For as long as queer women have existed, they've created gathering grounds where they can be themselves. From the intimate darkness of the lesbian bar to the sweaty camaraderie of the softball field, these spaces aren't a luxury--they're a necessity for queer women defining their identities. In A Place of Our Own, journalist June Thomas invites readers into six iconic lesbian spaces over the course of the last sixty years, including the rural commune, the sex toy boutique, the vacation spot, and the feminist bookstore.Thomas blends her own experiences with archival research and rare interviews with pioneering figures like Elaine Romagnoli, Susie Bright, and Jacqueline Woodson. She richly illustrates the lives of the business owners, entrepreneurs, activists, and dreamers who shaped the long struggle for queer liberation. Thomas illuminates what is gained and lost in the shift from the exclusive, tight-knit women's spaces of the '70s toward today's more inclusive yet more diffuse LGBTQ+ communities.
At once a love letter, a time capsule, and a bridge between generations of queer women, A Place of Our Own brings the history--and timeless present--of the lesbian community to vivid life.
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An Academy for Liars
A student will find that the hardest lessons sometimes come outside the classroom in this stunning dark academia novel from the acclaimed author of The Year of the Witching and House of Hunger.
Lennon Carter's life is falling apart. Then she gets a mysterious phone call inviting her to take the entrance exam for Drayton College, a school of magic hidden in a secret pocket of Savannah. Lennon has been chosen because--like everyone else at the school--she has the innate gift of persuasion, the ability to wield her will like a weapon, using it to control others and, in rare cases, matter itself. After passing the test, Lennon begins to learn how to master her devastating and unsettling power. But despite persuasion's heavy toll on her body and mind, she is wholly captivated by her studies, by Drayton's lush, moss-draped campus, and by her brilliant classmates. But even more captivating is her charismatic adviser, Dante, who both intimidates and enthralls her. As Lennon continues in her studies her control grows, and she starts to uncover more about the secret world she has entered into, including the disquieting history of Drayton college, and the way her mentor's tragic and violent past intertwines with it. She is increasingly disturbed by what she learns. For it seems that the ultimate test is to embrace absolute power without succumbing to corruption . . . and it's a test she's terrified she is going to fail. -
To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma, and Transformation
"Leading trauma expert Frank Anderson gifts us with an intimate and vulnerable glimpse into his personal journey of self-discovery to overcome his own childhood trauma. To Be Loved is a beautifully written and empowering story of resilience, healing, and forgiveness that offers hope for all survivors of childhood trauma."
-Nicole LePera, PhD, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller How to Be the Love You Seek and How to Do the Work
"To Be Loved captures the precious fragility of a childhood impacted in equal measure by authentic love and deep dysfunction. Filled with humor, empathy, and candid self-reflection, Frank's story demonstrates the power of love to heal trauma, develop resilience, and ultimately find forgiveness and restoration."
-Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author, TED speaker, co-host of the popular Dear Therapists podcast, and Dear Therapist columnist for The Atlantic
Rarely does a trauma therapist disclose their own trauma history . . . yet it's the untold, brutally honest, incredibly heartbreaking story of Dr. Frank Anderson that made him the world-renowned trauma expert he is today.
Known for his magnetic and radiant personality, Frank spends his time training thousands of clinicians around the world on how to help clients with complex trauma make sense of their suffering. But underneath this charismatic exterior are his dark family secrets, including the marks of child abuse from his father and the invisible scars of shame.
His colleagues and fellow therapists would never know this . . . until now.
In To Be Loved, Frank shares his confusing experience of growing up an outsider in a typical midwestern Italian American home that was at one turn fiercely loving but at the same time unaccepting, abusive, and rife with secrets.
After enduring six years of therapy as a child in the 1970s, he was programmed to be something that he wasn't for decades, and became driven to create the perfect life--complete with a family, a successful career and a house with white picket fence in the suburbs--until it all fell apart.
It was only then that he realized resilience, forgiveness and facing his trauma were the keys to living an authentic life--and finally knowing what it feels like to be loved.
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Golden Son
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Red Rising hit the ground running and wasted no time becoming a sensation. Golden Son continues the stunning saga of Darrow, a rebel forged by tragedy, battling to lead his oppressed people to freedom. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, BUZZFEED, AND BOOKLIST - "Gripping . . . On virtually every level, this is a sequel that hates sequels--a perfect fit for a hero who already defies the tropes. [Grade: ] A"--Entertainment Weekly As a Red, Darrow grew up working the mines deep beneath the surface of Mars, enduring backbreaking labor while dreaming of the better future he was building for his descendants. But the Society he faithfully served was built on lies. Darrow's kind have been betrayed and denied by their elitist masters, the Golds--and their only path to liberation is revolution. And so Darrow sacrifices himself in the name of the greater good for which Eo, his true love and inspiration, laid down her own life. He becomes a Gold, infiltrating their privileged realm so that he can destroy it from within. A lamb among wolves in a cruel world, Darrow finds friendship, respect, and even love--but also the wrath of powerful rivals. To wage and win the war that will change humankind's destiny, Darrow must confront the treachery arrayed against him, overcome his all-too-human desire for retribution--and strive not for violent revolt but a hopeful rebirth. Though the road ahead is fraught with danger and deceit, Darrow must choose to follow Eo's principles of love and justice to free his people. He must live for more. Praise for Golden Son
"Stirring . . . Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both."--Kirkus Reviews "Brown writes layered, flawed characters . . . but plot is his most breathtaking strength. . . . Every action seems to flow into the next."--NPR Don't miss any of Pierce Brown's Red Rising Saga:
RED RISING - GOLDEN SON - MORNING STAR - IRON GOLD - DARK AGE - LIGHT BRINGER -
The Idiot
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book - Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction "Easily the funniest book I've read this year." --GQ
"Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman." --Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail. Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 - Mashable One - Elle Magazine - The New York Times - Bookpage - Vogue - NPR - Buzzfeed -The Millions -
Sold outThe September House
"Why run from a haunted house when you can stay and ignore the ghosts? Just when you thought you'd seen everything a haunted house novel could do, The September House comes along and delivers an eerie, darkly funny, and emotionally grounded book about the ghosts that haunt houses and marriages."- Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel. When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street--for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price--they couldn't believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee. Margaret is not most people. Margaret is staying. It's her house. But after four years Hal can't take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he's not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine--who knows nothing about the hauntings--arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.Sold out -
Sea of Tranquility
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads "One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment. -
Station Eleven: A Novel (National Book Award Finalist)
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST - Set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse--the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. - Now an original series on HBO Max. - Over one million copies sold!
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band's existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed. Look for Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility! -
One Day in December
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Get ready to be swept up in a whirlwind romance. It absolutely charmed me."--Reese Witherspoon (A Reese's Book Club Pick) "The perfect book to get lost in . . . Josie Silver's characters sneak their way into your heart and stay."--Jill Santopolo, author of The Light We Lost Two people. Ten chances. One unforgettable love story. Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn't exist anywhere but the movies. But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man who she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there's a moment of pure magic . . . and then her bus drives away. Certain they're fated to find each other again, Laurie spends a year scanning every bus stop and cafe in London for him. But she doesn't find him, not when it matters anyway. Instead they "reunite" at a Christmas party, when her best friend, Sarah, giddily introduces her new boyfriend to Laurie. It's Jack, the man from the bus. It would be. What follows for Laurie, Sarah, and Jack is ten years of friendship, heartbreak, missed opportunities, roads not taken, and destinies reconsidered. One Day in December is a joyous, heartwarming, and immensely moving love story to escape into and a reminder that fate takes inexplicable turns along the route to happiness.