Collection: Shop Woman

Beth thought she'd never go back. She buried her memories of summers on her family's island in Canada deep inside, and created a new life in urban Chicago-far from the natural world. When her grandfather asks Beth to return to the island, will she preserve who she's become or risk everything to discover if what was lost, still remains?

Lambda Literary Award finalist

American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book

In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors; they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."

Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today's ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.

Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.

Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.

Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.

Whoopi Goldberg brings new meaning to what it means to be a superhero in a new graphic novel!

Isabel Frost is a woman who has spent her life as wife, mother, grandmother--a life she feels isn't all she had hoped for, with a husband who has grown in another direction. A college graduate with a degree in science, Isabel is an amazing gamer, who plays with people all over the country. With the help of her comic-loving grandson and irreverent best friend, she must learn to control her abilities and embrace her new identity as The Change--both the change of life AND her surprising and extraordinary superpowers.

Two generations of a folk-rock dynasty collide over art, love, longing, and family secrets in this captivating and poignant debut

It's 1996, and alt-rocker Emma Cantor is on tour, with her sights trained on a record deal. Emma's got no lack of inspiration for her music -- chiefly her mother Judie, a 1960s folk legend whose confessional songs made her an icon before her mysterious withdrawal from the public eye. Emma is baffled by Judie's coldness, and is deeply shaken when she learns a long-kept secret about their family. When Emma uncovers more about her mother's past, she is vaulted to new heights as a performer. But the knowledge she gains also propels her toward a musical betrayal that further fractures her relationship with Judie. Increasingly famous, but fragile and isolated, Emma grapples with her mother's legacy and what it means for her own future.

With the richness of a beloved folk song, The Singer Sisters moves between '60s folk clubs and '90s music festivals, chronicling the ups and downs of stardom while asking what women artists must sacrifice for success.

Lana Lee and friends return for a fiery Chinese New Year celebration that rattles their quaint community. After all, an Asia Village party wouldn't be complete without an explosive finale.

Chinese New Year is supposed to be a time of fresh beginnings and celebrations of good fortune to come. Naturally, the shop owners of Asia Village jump at the chance to participate in creating a memorable holiday event that will bring positive light to the plaza, and prosperity for all those involved.

With Lana Lee as his right-hand woman and head event planner, Ian Sung orchestrates an extravagant evening filled with music, live entertainment, and generous giveaways. But at the end of the night, during an elaborate firework show in the parking lot, a member of the lion dance performance team is found dead backstage with a single bullet hole through the heart and a red envelope in their pocket containing four one-dollar bills--an omen of death.

When news of a curse on Asia Village make its way around the plaza, Lana readily agrees to find who killed the talented dancer before anyone else is marked for death.

Her life is up in the air--literally...

Lanie Turner lives a little life. Between her job as an anonymous administrative assistant and her small circle of friends, Lanie only truly feels like herself when she travels to England on her annual vacation to reunite with her exuberant extended family--and her longtime boy-next-door crush, Jonah. But after a two-year gap, things have drastically changed: Lanie's beloved cousin, Gemma, has a big announcement--she's engaged to Jonah...and the couple wants Lanie to be both their maid of honor and best "mate" at the wedding. For two of her favorite people, how can Lanie say no?

This turns Lanie into a frequent flier, commuting from NYC to London on a semi-regular basis to help with wedding prep. Luckily Lanie often has a handsome seatmate: Dr. Ridley Aronsen, who travels regularly for work. The two quickly realize their chemistry and plan their commutes so they can travel together. But Ridley hasn't told Lanie that he's a widower and a single father now--opening up to love again is harder than he realizes. A steamy layover in Iceland may convince him otherwise, especially once he agrees to be Lanie's plus-one for the wedding.

Feeling the first blush of a new love, Lanie is emboldened: she promises herself she'll move on from Jonah and get herself together. After all, life's problems seem tiny from thirty-five thousand feet in the air...

"Noué Kirwan is a welcome, smart new voice in romantic women's fiction." --Jamie Beck, Wall Street Journal and USA TODAY bestselling author

It took only one summer to save a beach house and turn Carrie's perfectly planned life upside down.

It took Jen and her best friends Carrie and Faith all summer to save the beach house. And none of them could have realized how much it would change their lives.

Jen's making a new life for herself in Newport, facing new challenges and new relationships. The beginning of the school year calls Faith back to her kindergarten classroom while she tries to juggle that and her job at the boutique.

But Carrie-Carrie's life is about to be turned completely upside down when the stepdaughter she thought she'd lost forever turns up on her doorstep. And as she navigates life with a teenager and her own mother is no help at all, she counts her blessings that she has Faith and Jen to help her through in this heart-warming story about mothers, daughters and all the joys and challenges that go with them.

Stop by the Newport Harbor House in sunny southern California, have one of Nana's muffins and catch up on what's happening.

This book can be read as a standalone story, but you can find out more about how they all got in these predicaments by reading Book 1, Newport Harbor House.

"An atmospheric chiller with shocking twists." --Shari Lapena, New York Times bestselling author of The Couple Next Door

Detective Elin Warner unravels the mystery behind the disappearance of a young woman in a propulsive new thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Sanatorium

Since the dark events that scarred her childhood, Kier Templer escaped her hometown and her twin to live her life on the road. The siblings have never lost contact until, on a trip to a Portuguese national park, Kier vanishes without a trace.

Detective Elin Warner arrives in the same park ready to immerse herself in its vast wilderness - only to hear about Kier's disappearance, and discover a disturbing map she left behind. The few strangers at an isolated campsite close ranks against Elin's questions, and the park's wild beauty starts to turn sinister.

Elin must untangle the clues to find out what really happened to Kier. But when you follow a trail, you have to be careful to watch your back...

Sarah Pearse brilliantly introduced readers to Elin Warner in The Sanatorium, with her exploits continuing in The Retreat; here, the series concludes with The Wilds, where the unanswered questions plaguing Elin are finally resolved.

Offered a dream job in Hollywood with a famous director and his actress wife, an insecure woman becomes their personal assistant where their secrets and lies place her in the crosshairs of a murder investigation.

Cassidy Foster is heartbroken, stuck in life, and getting a little too obsessed with plants. Then when a well-connected friend becomes sick of Cassidy's moping and gets her a gig with famous Hollywood couple, Marisol and Nate Sterling, Cassidy jumps at the chance to move to sunny L.A.

The Sterlings are warm and welcoming. A perfect couple. All Cassidy has to do is be available a few hours a week for errands. In return, she has access to luxury. Designer clothes. A sparkling pool. Great pay.

When Nate takes interest in her, asking her to read scripts he's written, Cassidy thinks this could be the key to kickstarting her writing dreams. As their business relationship grows, so does their attraction. Nate is sexy, talented, and Cassidy can't believe her luck. Clearly, Marisol doesn't know what she has. Maybe that's why the two are always fighting when they think Cassidy isn't around.

But Cassidy learns she was hired for a different purpose. The Sterlings aren't the perfect couple. Marisol isn't the perfect wife. And when one of them is found dead, Cassidy becomes the perfect suspect.

"The books in Macomber's contemporary Cedar Cove series are irresistibly delicious and addictive." --Publishers Weekly

In the charming seaside town of Cedar Cove, life is full of drama, love and second chances...

There's drama at the beauty salon in Cedar Cove. Teri Miller has noticed that something seems to be worrying her international chess-champion husband, Bobby Polgar. He told her he's "protecting his queen," and she has the oddest feeling that he isn't talking about chess but about her.

Rachel Pendergast has two men seriously interested in her, and she's going to have to make a choice. On the other hand, Linnette McAfee recently left town because her love life fell apart. Still, Cedar Cove has a way of helping everybody out. That's just how it is in this warmhearted small town.

Cedar Cove

Book 1: 16 LIGHTHOUSE ROAD
Book 2: 204 Rosewood Lane
Book 3: 311 PELICAN COURT
Book 4: 44 Cranberry Point
Book 5: 50 Harbor Street
Book 6: 6 Rainier Drive
Book 7: 74 Seaside Avenue
Book 8: 8 Sandpiper Way
Book 9: 92 Pacific Boulevard
Book 10: 1022 Evergreen Place
Book 11: 1105 Yakima Street
Book 12: 1225 Christmas Tree Lane

For fans of HBO's The Gilded Age, explore the dark side of the alluring world of America's 19th century elite in this gripping series of riveting mysteries... For Newport, Rhode Island's high society, the summer of 1896 brings lawn parties, sailboat races...and murder. Having turned down the proposal of Derrick Andrews, Emma Cross has no imminent plans for matrimony-let alone motherhood. But when she discovers an infant left on her doorstep, she naturally takes the child into her care. Using her influence as a cousin to the Vanderbilts and a society page reporter for the Newport Observer, Emma launches a discreet search for the baby's mother. One of her first stops is a lawn party at Mrs. Caroline Astor's Beechwood estate. But an idyllic summer's day is soon clouded by tragedy. During a sailboat race, textile magnate Virgil Monroe falls overboard. There are prompt accusations of foul play-and even Derrick Andrews falls under suspicion. Deepening the intrigue, a telltale slip of lace may link the abandoned child to the drowned man. But as Emma navigates dark undercurrents of scandalous indiscretions and violent passions, she'll need to watch her step to ensure that no one lowers the boom on her...

With themes of family, love, kindness, empathy, grief, growing up, and resilience, these one hundred never-before-published poems by the beloved poet, speaker, and teacher Naomi Shihab Nye will resonate with a wide audience.

National Book Award Finalist and former Young People's Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye's Grace Notes: Poems about Families celebrates family and community. This rich collection of one hundred never-before-published poems is also the poet's most personal work to date. With poems about her own childhood and school years, her parents and grandparents, and the people who have touched and shaped her life in so many ways, this is an emotional and sparkling collection to savor, share, and read again and again.

"It raises the standard of nature writing. This is both radical manifesto and activism in book form." --Sally Huband, author of Sea Bean

"Defiant and dazzling." --Freya Bromley, author of The Tidal Year

"Essential reading." --Jessica J. Lee, author of Turning

"Long before I knew I was sick, I knew I was breakable..."

After years of unexplained health problems, Polly Atkin's perception of her body was rendered fluid and disjointed. When she was finally diagnosed with two chronic conditions in her thirties, she began to piece together what had been happening to her- all the misdiagnoses, the fractures, the dislocations, the bone-crushing exhaustion, and on top of it all, not being believed by the very people who were meant to listen.

Some of Us Just Fall combines memoir, pathography and nature writing to trace a journey through illness- a journey which led Atkins to her cottage in England's Lake District, where every day she turns to the lakes and land that inspire poets old and new to help manage, and purportedly cure, her chronic illness.

Join her as she delves into shimmering waters, selkie dreams, and the history of her two genetic conditions to uncover and learn from how they were managed (or not) in times gone by. Beautiful and deeply personal, Some of Us Just Fall is essential reading on the cost of medical misogyny and gaslighting, the illusion of 'the nature cure', and the dangers of ableism both systematic and internalized.

This is not a book about getting better. This is a book about living better with illness.

Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi's DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a "magnetic field of memory," proving that history doesn't merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.

Portraits of women throughout history who have defied society's expectations of feminine behavior and appearance in order to live a more authentic life. These short vignettes combine biographical sketches with evocative illustrations for an impact that is as bold, powerful, and inspirational as the brilliant artists, writers, and musicians they represent. The notable people profiled in this book include Audre Lorde (activist and poet), JD Sampson (artist, and musician known for Le Tigre and MAN), Jenny Shimizu (model and actress), Claude Cahun (photographer, performer, and writer who defied all gender expectations and wasn't any gender), Esther Eng (director), Gladys Bentley (singer and performer), Gertrude Stein (author and poet), Martina Navratilova (tennis champion), and Gloria Anzaldúa (scholar). Author and artist Eloisa Aquino presents these icons against heteronormativity in a good-humored homage, showing how the courage to be true to yourself can spark the sort of work that changes the world.