Book picks similar to
Somewhere Running by Nathalie Stephens
poetry
lgbt
dead-tree
watching-as-art
Spent
Antonia Crane - 2014
She gets drugged, does enema shows, and unionizes the club. When she tries to quit and go to graduate school, her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Broke and broken, she returns to sex work, which leads to her arrest and a new resilience. Spent is a memoir about a woman’s journey through the sex industry, but it’s also a story of family, community, and our constant struggle against loneliness.
Proud
Juno DawsonJess Vallance - 2019
Each story has an illustration by an artist identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community. Compiled by Juno Dawson, author of THIS BOOK IS GAY and CLEAN.A celebration of LGBTQ+ talent, PROUD is a thought-provoking, funny, emotional read.Contributors: Steve Antony, Dean Atta, Kate Alizadeh, Fox Benwell, Alex Bertie, Caroline Bird, Fatti Burke, Tanya Byrne, Moïra Fowley-Doyle, Frank Duffy, Simon James Green, Leo Greenfield, Saffa Khan, Karen Lawler, David Levithan, Priyanka Meenakshi, Alice Oseman, Michael Lee Richardson, David Roberts, Cynthia So, Kay Staples, Jessica Vallance, Kristen Van Dam and Kameron White.Following A CHANGE IS GONNA COME, winner of the YA BOOK PRIZE SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 2018
State of Grace
Everly James - 2017
When the opportunity arises for her to be the campaign manager of a man running for the United States Senate, she can hardly believe her luck. What she doesn’t expect is for the woman of her dreams to be her political rival. When Rachel Callum meets Andie McIntyre, she has only one goal: to get this woman on a date. But Andie has other plans that don’t involve self-assured Rachel. When it turns out that Rachel’s new job is to take Andie down, Rachel is left with a choice: her ambition or romance? Can Andie and Rachel put aside their political views and find love? STATE OF GRACE is a full-length, standalone romance novel with steamy sex scenes, no cheating, and a happily ever after. It’s light on politics and heavy on love.
Bad Kid
David Crabb - 2015
They had no idea that a deeply confused fourteen-year-old boy was watching. Their dyed hair, fishnets, and eyeliner were his first evidence of another world—a place he desperately wanted to go. He just had no idea how to get there.Somehow David Crabb had convinced himself that every guy preferred French-braiding his girlfriend’s hair to making out, and that the funny feelings he got watching Silver Spoons and Growing Pains had nothing to do with Ricky Schroeder or Kirk Cameron. But discovering George Michael’s Faith confirmed for David what every bully already knew: he was gay. Surviving high school, with its gym classes, locker rooms, and naked, glistening senior guys, would require impossible feats of denial. What saved him was finding a group of outlandish friends who reveled in being outsiders. David found himself enmeshed with misfits: wearing black, cutting class, staying out all night, drinking, tripping, chain-smoking, idolizing The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, and Joy Division—and learning lessons about life and love along the way.Richly detailed with 80s pop-culture, and including black and white photos throughout, Bad Kid is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is poignant. Crabb’s journey through adolescence captures the essence of every person’s struggle to understand his or her true self.
Touch: Poems
Henri Cole - 2011
In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.
Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.
Ladies Almanack
Djuna Barnes - 1928
this Almanack, which all ladies should carry about with them, as the Priest his Breviary, as the Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her Fears, and as the Lion his Roar!'Djuna Barnes wrote her Ladies Almanack for fun, a 'slight satiric wigging', as she called it in her Foreword, to amuse her circle of expatriate friends with the tale of Evangeline Musset who took her whip in hand and 'set out upon the Road of Destiny'. It has since become a cult classic, a unique work that combines visual artistry with literary parody, bawdy humour and an unconstrained zest for the sensual pleasures of love and friendship between strong-minded women.
Please Come Off-Book (Button Poetry)
Kevin Kantor - 2021
Kantor critiques the treatment of queer figures and imagines a braver and bolder future that allows queer voices the agency over their own stories.Drawing upon elements of the Aristotelian dramatic structure and the Hero's Journey, Please Come Off-Book is both a love letter to and a scathing critique of American culture and the lenses we choose to see ourselves through.
Sindustry
Anne ReganSasha Skye - 2009
This is Sindustry, where a quick fuck is more likely than a romantic kiss. But while they face the harsh light of reality every day, unexpected love finds them in all sorts of crazy ways. Take a look at Sindustry from the outside in, because for these guys, happily ever after is just around the corner. Reluctant by Rhianne Aile & Madeleine Urban Stripped Bare by S. Blaise Boomerang by Rachelle Cochran Fun and Games by Lenore Black How Could I Not by Jamie Freeman The Frost Affair by Sasha Skye The Stripper and the Hairdresser by Bethany Brown A Muse by Zahra Owens Fin de Siecle by S. Reesa Herberth Chat Line by Clare London As Beauty Does by JL Merrow The Four Seasons by Diana Copland
A Young Man's Passage
Julian Clary - 2005
He had just one true friend and ally, Nick - to his other school peers, Julian's aloof demeanour made him an enigma or simply a figure of ridicule. In school he was just another pained adolescent, but inside Julian was a new Jean Genet or Quentin Crisp bursting to get out.Leaving St Benedict's thankfully behind him, Julian went on to college where he found his true vocation as an entertainer with a peculiar comic brand of smut and glamour. At the same time, he was finding as much sex as he could, sometimes with remarkably less-than-glamorous characters.Periods in community theatre and the singing telegram industry followed before Julian hit the big time with cabaret co-star Fanny the Wonder Dog as The Joan Collins Fan Club. Soon, the world was his oyster. But fame came at a price, as Julian struggled not only with the reality of being a high-profile gay man in the 1980s but also the pain of losing his lover to terminal illness.Far more than just another celebrity autobiography or 'funny book', this is a touching, beautifully written and wryly witty account of a unique progression from shy child to comedy icon.
Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet
Philip Freeman - 2016
Yet those meager remains showed such power and genius that they captured the imagination of readers through the ages. But within the last century, dozens of new pieces of her poetry have been found written on crumbling papyrus or carved on broken pottery buried in the sands of Egypt. As recently as 2014, yet another discovery of a missing poem created a media stir around the world.The poems of Sappho reveal a remarkable woman who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos during the vibrant age of the birth of western science, art, and philosophy. Sappho was the daughter of an aristocratic family, a wife, a devoted mother, a lover of women, and one of the greatest writers of her own or any age. Nonetheless, although most people have heard of Sappho, the story of her lost poems and the lives of the ancient women they celebrate has never been told for a general audience.Searching for Sappho is the exciting tale of the rediscovery of Sappho’s poetry and of the woman and world they reveal.
A Hidden Hope
Laura Ambrose - 2018
Falling in love off-page was like the next part of the story. But after a huge falling out, three years have passed in bitter silence.When they both appear at a science fiction convention in London, Natalie, a struggling writer, wants nothing to do with El, the hot debut novelist who sold her book at auction under a male pseudonym. But over the weekend, ignoring each other--and their attraction--proves impossible, not least because they have several panels together. Can El hope to atone for the mistakes of their past, and is Natalie willing to let hope fly?
Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners
John Wieners - 2015
The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise LevertovSupplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.
Run, Clarissa, Run
Rachel Eliason - 2011
Clark is harassed daily at school for his effeminate behavior and appearance. He has no friends and a brother that is as likely to be on the teasing as to prevent it. When Clark is offered a job babysitting for the Pirella family, it seems like a godsend. The money is good. He bonds with the girls almost instantly. The father, Tony, works in computer security. Tony and Clark strike up a friendship based on a mutual love of computers and hacking. As Tony becomes aware of Clark's transsexuality and his growing feminine alter ego, Clarissa, things become incredibly complicated. Will Tony be Clarissa's salvation, or her undoing?
Silver Wings
H.P. Munro - 2013
Her love of flying leads her to join the Womens Airforce Service Pilots, determined to regain her passion and spread her wings, not suspecting that she would experience more than just flying.Helen Richmond, a Hollywood stunt pilot, has never experienced a love that lifted her as high as the aircraft she flew…until she meets Lily.Both women join the W.A.S.P. program to serve their country and instead find that they are on a collision course towards each other, but can it last?
Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language
Paul Baker - 2019
It offered its speakers a degree of public camouflage and a means of identification. Its colorful roots are varied—from Cant to Lingua Franca to dancers’ slang—and in the mid-1960s it was thrust into the limelight by the characters Julian and Sandy, voiced by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, on the BBC radio show Round the Horne (“Oh hello Mr Horne, how bona to vada your dolly old eek!”). Paul Baker recounts the story of Polari with skill, humor, and tenderness. He traces its historical origins and describes its linguistic nuts and bolts, explores the ways and the environments in which it was spoken, explains the reasons for its decline, and tells of its unlikely reemergence in the twenty-first century.