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Weird Black Girls: Stories
From Philip K. Dick Award finalist Elwin Cotman, an irresistibly unnerving collection of stories that explore the anxieties of living while Black--a high-wire act of literary-fantastical hybrid fiction. A rural town finds itself under the authoritarian sway of a tree that punishes children. A pair of old friends navigate their fraught history as strange happenings escalate in a Mexican restaurant. A pair of narcissistic friends wreak havoc on an activist community. An aloof young man finds himself living through his lover's memories. And a day of LARPing takes a cosmic turn. In each of the seven stories in this collection, characters pursue their obsessions on paths to glory and destruction while around them their worlds twist and warp, oscillating between reality and impossibility. On display throughout is Cotman's ability to reveal truths about the human experience--about friendship, love, betrayal, bitterness--through whimsy, horror, and fantasy. Elegiac in tone, imaginative and humorous in their execution, the character-driven stories in Weird Black Girls challenge, incite, and entertain. -
Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems
All of the published poetry of James Baldwin, including six significant poems previously only available in a limited edition During his lifetime (1924-1987), James Baldwin authored seven novels, as well as several plays and essay collections, which were published to wide-spread praise. These books, among them Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni's Room, and Go Tell It on the Mountain, brought him well-deserved acclaim as a public intellectual and admiration as a writer. However, Baldwin's earliest writing was in poetic form, and Baldwin considered himself a poet throughout his lifetime. Nonetheless, his single book of poetry, Jimmy's Blues, never achieved the popularity of his novels and nonfiction, and is the one and only book to fall out of print. This new collection presents James Baldwin the poet, including all nineteen poems from Jimmy's Blues, as well as all the poems from a limited-edition volume called Gypsy, of which only 325 copies were ever printed and which was in production at the time of his death. Known for his relentless honesty and startlingly prophetic insights on issues of race, gender, class, and poverty, Baldwin is just as enlightening and bold in his poetry as in his famous novels and essays. The poems range from the extended dramatic narratives of "Staggerlee wonders" and "Gypsy" to the lyrical beauty of "Some days," which has been set to music and interpreted by such acclaimed artists as Audra McDonald. Nikky Finney's introductory essay reveals the importance, relevance, and rich rewards of these little-known works. Baldwin's many devotees will find much to celebrate in these pages. -
Melon Head Mayhem
Have you ever wanted to live inside your favorite horror film? Prove you have what it takes to fight Freddy? Destroy Jason? Mangle Michael?
Cousins Carson and Sophia are in town for their grandma's funeral and are, unknowingly, about to live out the nightmare that is every horror fan's dream.
After they find an old unfamiliar VHS tape tucked away in grandma's house, they figure the worst that can happen is a few cringeworthy moments and 90 minutes wasted. Instead, the video summons the movie monsters-local urban legends called melon heads-into their very real lives!
The destruction caused by the blood thirsty melon heads has Carson and Sophia fighting to survive and sets them on a deadly path to the shores of Lake Michigan, home of the devilish beasts. They vow to destroy every last one of the melon heads and make sure these monsters never get a sequel.
Will they survive? Would you fare better?
It's a creature feature. It's a throwback. It's... MELON HEAD MAYHEM!
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Sold outWho Made Me a Princess Vol. 5
BLEAK MALADIES Everything has gone drastically wrong for Princess Athanasia and all she's worked for appears to crumble before her eyes. A magical mishap has wiped Claude's memories of his daughter and Athanasia has had to flee from the palace to avoid a painful death at his hands. Though things are bleak, Athanasia has found an eager helper and trusted confidante in Jeannette, who is happy to meet the princess in secret. Inside the palace, expressions are grim, as unexplained illness has harried the Imperial Emperor. Claude's condition is dire until an unusual solution is found--it seems Jeannette is equally useful to both father and daughter!Sold out -
Sold outTrick 'r Treat Omnibus
TRICK 'R TREAT SAM'S 10Th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION From the deliciously dark imagination of Trick 'r Treat creator Michael Dougherty (writer/director of the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the horror hit Krampus, and the screenwriter of X-Men 2 and Superman Returns), comes the definitive Trick 'r Treat comic book collection in celebration of the 10th anniversary of this beloved horror saga. For the first time, Legendary Comics brings fans the full compendium of twisted Halloween tales, brought to life by a top-notch team of creators including writers Zach Shields (Godzilla: KOTM, Krampus) and Todd Casey (Krampus), Eisner Award-winning writer Marc Andreyko (Batwoman), Eisner Award-winning artist Fiona Staples (SAGA), ZID (Skull Island: Birth of Kong; Lost in Space: Countdown To Danger), Stuart Sayger (Bram Stoker's Death Ship), Stephen Byrne (Green Arrow), Grant Bond (Supernatural), Mike Huddleston (Man Bat), and Christopher Gugliotti (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Trick 'r Treat, the graphic novel adaptation of the film, reveals 4 evocatively illustrated tales of horror interwoven into one unforgettable Halloween night as the unsettling figure known as Sam pays a visit to an unsuspecting community, wreaking havoc during the scariest night of the year. And then in Days of the Dead, franchise icon Sam takes readers on a journey back through Halloween history with 4 chilling new Trick 'r Treat tales. Discover old-world lovers whose romance takes a chilling turn and Western pioneers who discover the dark side of the frontier. Travel to 1950s Los Angeles for a tale of pure horror noir and into the heart of small-town America to see some pranksters taught a lesson they'll never forget. Across centuries of Halloween horror, wherever fear lies, Sam will be waiting... This new deluxe edition features all-new cover art, and brings all of Sam's stories together into one collection for the first time. No tricks, just treat after treat for horror fans!Sold out -
L.A. Interchanges: A Brown & Queer Archival Memoir
"A Powerful Memoir and Documentary History"
By combining the intimacy of a personal memoir with the rigor of documentary history, Lydia Otero weaves together a rich narrative of identity, activism, and personal transformation. With meticulous attention to detail, Otero traverses the homes of family members to dancefloors, bustling work sites, and organizing spaces in search of brown and queer belonging. Through photographs, archival documents, and compelling storytelling, Otero crafts a passionate narrative of personal becoming amid the political and cultural currents of 1980s Los Angeles.
Grounded in the philosophy that the personal is political, Otero portrays fellow organizers as strategists exploring previously unimagined avenues to address the needs of brown queers. The book traces Otero's transformations and blossoming sense of self, which often felt constrained by the binary gender assignments of the time, while it tells a documentary history of Lesbians of Color, Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), Lesbianas Unidas (LU) and Bienestar: A Gay Latino AIDS Project-groups central to the city's burgeoning queer, brown, and activist scene.
Otero's parallel story of becoming an electrician offers a unique vantage point of a city in the midst of restructuring, as Otero's labor contributed to building some of the most iconic structures in Los Angeles, such as the Universal CityWalk, U.S. Bank Tower, and the Metro Rail.
Meticulously researched, L.A. Interchanges invites readers to delve into the intricate interplay between personal experience and historical context. It is a testament to the complexity of intersectional identities, and the unwavering spirit of those who strive for justice and belonging in the face of adversity.
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The Life She Was Given: A Moving and Emotional Saga of Family and Resilient Women
A GREAT GROUP READS Selection of the Women's National Book Association and National Reading Group Month A GOODREADS Best of the Month Selection
"A powerful, poignant novel."
--In Touch, Grade A
From the internationally bestselling author of The Orphan Collector comes a beautifully written and moving tale of family secrets and the importance of a mother's love--and how it can shape a life--even in the most shocking ways. A painful saga of strength and reinvention perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes and Lisa Wingate--set in two different times, as two young women come of age and uncover the mysteries of their families, and find their own ways in the world... On a summer evening in 1931, Lilly Blackwood glimpses circus lights from the grimy window of her attic bedroom. Lilly isn't allowed to explore the meadows around Blackwood Manor. She's never even ventured beyond her narrow room. Momma insists it's for Lilly's own protection, that people would be afraid if they saw her. But on this unforgettable night, Lilly is taken outside for the first time--and sold to the circus sideshow. More than two decades later, nineteen-year-old Julia Blackwood has inherited her parents' estate and horse farm. For Julia, home was an unhappy place full of strict rules and forbidden rooms, and she hopes that returning might erase those painful memories. Instead, she becomes immersed in a mystery involving a hidden attic room and photos of circus scenes featuring a striking young girl. At first, The Barlow Brothers' Circus is just another prison for Lilly. But in this rag-tag, sometimes brutal world, Lilly discovers strength, friendship, and a rare affinity for animals. Soon, thanks to elephants Pepper and JoJo and their handler, Cole, Lilly is no longer a sideshow spectacle but the circus's biggest attraction...until tragedy and cruelty collide. It will fall to Julia to learn the truth about Lilly's fate and her family's shocking betrayal, and find a way to make Blackwood Manor into a place of healing at last. Moving between Julia and Lilly's stories, Ellen Marie Wiseman portrays two extraordinary, very different women in a novel that, while tender and heartbreaking, offers moments of joy and indomitable hope. "Perfect for book clubs and readers who admired Sara Gruen's Like Water for Elephants."
--Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW "A vibrant maze of desires."
--ForeWord Reviews "Seamlessly blends mystery and history with compelling and well-researched details."
--The Historical Novels Review
"Vividly drawn and complex...Fans of Karen White and Sara Gruen will be drawn in by the drama and mystery of Wiseman's novel."
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Sold outViolets
By Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-Sook Shin, "a moving delve into a lonely psyche" that follows a neglected young woman's search for human connection in contemporary Seoul (YZ Chin).San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul's bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life--painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea.Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, quiet farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer.
In Violets, best-selling author Kyung-Sook Shin explores misogyny, erasure, and repressed desire, as San desperately searches for both autonomy and attachment in the unforgiving reality of contemporary Korean society.
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Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family
In this intergenerational graphic memoir, renowned video game designer Jordan Mechner traces his family's journey through war, Nazi occupation, and everyday marital strife.
1914. A teenage romantic heads to the enlistment office when his idyllic life in a Jewish enclave of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is shattered by World War I. 1938. A seven-year-old refugee begins a desperate odyssey through France, struggling to outrun the rapidly expanding Nazi regime and reunite with his family on the other side of the Atlantic. 2015. The creator of a world-famous video game franchise weighs the costs of uprooting his family and moving to France as the cracks in his marriage begin to grow. Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner calls on the voices of his father and grandfather to weave a powerful story about the enduring challenge of holding a family together in the face of an ever-changing world. -
The Art Forger
Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum--still the largest unsolved art theft in history--one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece--the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years--may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing--and not seeing--the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.
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Forgotten Fairy Tales of Brave and Brilliant Girls
Once known, now largely forgotten, these empowering fairy tales have been brought together to inspire a new generation of readers. Discover heroines who outwit giants, fight evil, awaken sleeping princes and, of course, live happily ever after. With a foreword by Kate Pankhurst, author of Fantastically Great Women who Changed the World. -
out takes/ glove box
Eduardo Corral, author of SLOW LIGHTNING and GUILLOTINE, selected this compelling collection by Maya Jewell Zeller to receive the New American Poetry Prize: "In OUT TAKES/ GLOVE BOX, the speaker thinks beautifully through the shifting sands of mothering and tracks the body as it spirals through time," says Corral. "The language is dazzling. We're privy to a 'vermillion funeral' and learn an astonishing thing, '[t]he square root of whiskey is water.' Intimacy, here, includes the natural world. Animals and plants are tended to, torn into, and observed with an enviable capacity to render them mythic, tangible. These poems are spellbinding-read them out loud to experience their full power." Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of FRANK: SONNETS, has offered the following praise: "In Maya Jewell Zeller's enchanting OUT TAKES/ GLOVE BOX, the vehicles that carry us into and out of imaginative spaces abound, from a rusted car with its glove box full of dirt to a horse, 'hinged and winged/ like moths, its wet little eggs / still bobbing in their soft ponds.' Eggs abound, their mothers and their hatchlings. Indeed, the book could be said to be an 'oocyte opera' of ovarian orbits and eddies, each month offering up its 'vermilion funeral.' Zeller's surrealism is embodied and embedded in myth, fairy tale, the realm of the family, and the kingdom of the natural world. She calls her process, in one title, 'Re-Making the Personal Environmental Imagination.' The poems are oceanic, Edenic, their music, as she writes in a poem, 'vowelly, ' but that lyric fluidity is crenelated by the notion and practice of 'out takes, ' and the image of the 'glove box, ' compound words snapped, like bones, in two. Images and ideas are honed and reiterated; they drop their beauty and defer to honesty. It is the kind of deft performance only a mermaid or a mother could pull off."
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Lumberjanes Vol. 3: A Terrible Plan
If you got it, haunt it! Trying to take advantage of the first quiet day at camp in a while, Mal and Molly's date takes a bizarre turn with the appearance of the bear woman! Back at camp, Jo, April, and Ripley must stay on their toes as they try to earn every badge possible which ends up being a lot harder than any of them ever planned. This New York Times bestseller and multiple Eisner Award-winning series is written by ND Stevenson (Nimona) and Shannon Watters, and illustrated by Carolyn Nowak (Rungs). Featuring spooky guest talent Faith Erin Hicks (Friends with Boys), Brittney Williams (Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat), Felicia Choo, and more. -
Grandad's Camper
A Stonewall Honor Book Children's Illustrated Book of the Year--British Book Awards
Best Illustrated Book -- Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2022 Discover a wonderful grandfather-granddaughter relationship, as a little girl hatches the perfect plan to get her Grandad adventuring again. And don't miss the inspiring sequel, Grandad's Pride, available now! "As warm and friendly as a kind grandparent." Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
"For the hope for new adventures, and the glimpse of intergenerational kindness and understanding, this lovely book should be on every shelf." School Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW Best Picture Books of 2021--School Library Journal Future Classic Picture Books of 2021--Bookstagang's Best of 2021 "An effective tool for teaching empathy, and the intergenerational bond at the story's center is a heartstrings puller. This picture book, in which a girl helps her grandfather embrace life again following the death of Gramps, may well aid young readers in understanding others' grief." Shelf Awareness Gramps and Grandad were adventurers. They would surf, climb mountains, and tour the country in their amazing camper. Gramps just made everything extra special. But after Gramps died, granddad hasn't felt like traveling anymore. So, their amazing granddaughter comes up with a clever plan to fix up the old camper and get Grandad excited to explore again. This beautiful picture book honors love and reminds us not only to remember those we have lost, but to celebrate them. -
Super Sad True Love Story
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A deliciously dark tale of America's dysfunctional coming years--and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New York Times - The Washington Post - The Boston Globe - San Francisco Chronicle - The Seattle Times - O: The Oprah Magazine - Maureen Corrigan, NPR - Salon - Slate - Minneapolis Star Tribune - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - The Kansas City Star - Charlotte Observer - The Globe and Mail - Vancouver Sun - Montreal Gazette - Kirkus Reviews
In the near future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Then Lenny Abramov, son of an Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of "printed, bound media artifacts" (aka books), meets Eunice Park, an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart? -
For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education
A New York Times Best Seller "Essential reading for all adults who work with black and brown young people...Filled with exceptional intellectual sophistication and necessary wisdom for the future of education."--Imani Perry, National Book Award Winner author of South To America An award-winning educator offers a much-needed antidote to traditional top-down pedagogy and promises to radically reframe the landscape of urban education for the better Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color, Dr. Christopher Emdin has merged his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America. He takes to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student's culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become the experts in their own learning. Putting forth his theory of Reality Pedagogy, Emdin provides practical tools to unleash the brilliance and eagerness of youth and educators alike--both of whom have been typecast and stymied by outdated modes of thinking about urban education. With this fresh and engaging new pedagogical vision, Emdin demonstrates the importance of creating a family structure and building communities within the classroom, using culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, and connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally. Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, Emdin demonstrates how by implementing the "Seven Cs" of reality pedagogy in their own classrooms, urban youth of color benefit from truly transformative education.