Book picks similar to
The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies
poetry
lgbtq
edelweiss
queer
We Are Satellites
Sarah Pinsker - 2021
Everybody's getting one.
Val and Julie just want what's best for their kids, David and Sophie. So when teenage son David comes home one day asking for a Pilot, a new brain implant to help with school, they reluctantly agree. This is the future, after all.Soon, Julie feels mounting pressure at work to get a Pilot to keep pace with her colleagues, leaving Val and Sophie part of the shrinking minority of people without the device.Before long, the implications are clear, for the family and society: get a Pilot or get left behind. With government subsidies and no downside, why would anyone refuse? And how do you stop a technology once it's everywhere? Those are the questions Sophie and her anti-Pilot movement rise up to answer, even if it puts them up against the Pilot's powerful manufacturer and pits Sophie against the people she loves most.
Embodied: An Intersectional Comics Poetry Anthology
Wendy Chin-TannerCarolina Ebeid - 2021
Beautifully illustrated and bracingly written, EMBODIED is a memorable collaboration between cis female, trans, and non-binary poets and comics artists showcasing the power of both forms in a stunningly unique keepsake volume that will be treasured for ages.Featuring the work of MAGGIE SMITH, ROSEBUD BEN-ONI, DIANE SEUSS, PAUL TRAN, VANESSA ANGÉLICA VILLARREAL, MORGAN BEEM, SOO LEE, HAZEL NEWLEVANT, ASHLEY A. WOODS, and more.
The Politics of Love
Jen Jensen - 2020
Everything's totally fine, except that it really isn't. Shelley manages depression and crippling anxiety because of the secret she can never reveal: she's gay.Rand Thomas is a psychotherapist, transgender rights activist, and political liberal. Widowed and struggling with her wife's toxic parents, Rand isn't going to allow herself to love again.When Shelley and Rand meet in Manhattan, neither one expects to find that the other is exactly who they need.
We Were Promised Spotlights
Lindsay Sproul - 2020
Taylor Garland's good looks have earned her the admiration of everyone in her small town. She's homecoming queen, the life of every party, and she's on every boy's most-wanted list.People think Taylor is living the dream, and assume she'll stay in town and have kids with the homecoming king--maybe even be a dental hygienist if she's super ambitious. But Taylor is actually desperate to leave home, and she hates the smell of dentists' offices. Also? She's completely in love with her best friend, Susan.Senior year is almost over, and everything seems perfect. Now Taylor just has to figure out how to throw it all away. Lindsay Sproul's debut is full of compelling introspection and painfully honest commentary on what it's like to be harnessed to a destiny you never wanted.
Graffiti (and Other Poems)
Savannah Brown - 2016
Written between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, with examinations of anxiety, death, first loves, and first lusts, Graffiti extends a hand to those undergoing the trials and uncertainty of teenagehood, and assures them they're not alone.
Bodymap
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - 2015
The first book of the author to examine disability from a queer femme of color lens, Bodymap contains work created and performed with Sins Invalid. Bodymap maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve."These poems are a gift for your love for self, your love itself and everyone you love. It is rare that a poet priestess offers words that allow us to emerge reborn with dirt, glitter and tenderness... Revere it. Revel in it. Read it again and again!" —Alexis Pauline Gumbs"Bodymap uses the alchemy of the voice on the page to transform words into an ache in the pit of me. I want what these poems demand: to be free to love & die, to be resurrected in time, & to be restored by desire. Piepzna-Samarasinha has located where this body houses the smirk learned from the sidewalk, the reason to do the difficult, and the blessings for the best worst thing."—Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level "Sharp, yet remarkably compassionate, Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that the poem is no place for tidy inquiry and easy answers. She offers her own tenacious guts and veins on each and every page. Only someone who understands rage and reconciliation and blood and bone can write like this."—Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir and Sub Rosa
Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir
Lillian Faderman - 2003
Her mother, whose family perished in the Holocaust, was racked by guilt at having come to America and left them behind; she suffered recurrent psychotic episodes. Her only escape from the brutal labor of her sweatshop job was her fiercely loved daughter, Lilly, whose poignant dream throughout an impoverished childhood was to become a movie star and "rescue" her mother. Lilly grew up to become Lil, outwardly tough, inwardly innocent, hungry for love and success. A beautiful young woman who was learning that her deepest erotic and emotional connections were to women, she found herself in a dangerous but seductive lesbian underworld of addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Desperately seeking to make her life meaningful and to redeem her mother's suffering, she entered the University of California at Berkeley and worked her way through college as a burlesque stripper. A brilliant student, she ultimately achieved a Ph.D. At last she became Lillian, the woman who in time became a loving partner, a devoted mother, an acclaimed writer, and a charismatic, groundbreaking scholar of gay and lesbian studies. Told with wrenching immediacy and great power, this is an extraordinary memoir: the nakedly honest -- and very American -- story of an exceptional woman and her remarkable, unorthodox life.
We Set the Dark on Fire
Tehlor Kay Mejia - 2019
Depending on her specialization, a graduate will one day run a husband’s household or raise his children, but both are promised a life of comfort and luxury, far from the frequent political uprisings of the lower class. Daniela Vargas is the school’s top student, but her bright future depends upon no one discovering her darkest secret—that her pedigree is a lie. Her parents sacrificed everything to obtain forged identification papers so Dani could rise above her station. Now that her marriage to an important politico’s son is fast approaching, she must keep the truth hidden or be sent back to the fringes of society, where famine and poverty rule supreme.On her graduation night, Dani seems to be in the clear, despite the surprises that unfold. But nothing prepares her for all the difficult choices she must make, especially when she is asked to spy for a resistance group desperately fighting to bring equality to Medio. Will Dani cling to the privilege her parents fought to win for her, or to give up everything she’s strived for in pursuit of a free Medio—and a chance at a forbidden love?
Getting Down To Business
Nicolette Dane - 2017
She’s a rising star at her Chicago tech start up. She’s well liked, she’s funny, she’s smart, she’s pretty. But despite all this, for some strange reason, Amy’s had an absolutely awful love life. It couldn’t possibly be Amy’s fault… right? Enter Josephine Taft, rich and successful tech investor, swooping in to save Amy’s company from financial ruin. In addition to being wealthy and accomplished, Josephine is also a total fox and Amy can’t help but swoon over her. No pressure here. As our quirky heroine maneuvers through this stylized romantic comedy, often butting heads with a whimsical cast of characters, she’ll have to look within to both save her company and get the girl. Will Amy be able to rein in her eccentricities and prove to Josephine that she’s worth the investment?
Fans of the Impossible Life
Kate Scelsa - 2015
She promised her parents she would at least try to pretend that she could act like a functioning human this time, not a girl who can’t get out of bed for days on end, who only feels awake when she’s with Sebby.Jeremy is the painfully shy art nerd at Saint Francis who’s been in self-imposed isolation after an incident that ruined his last year of school. When he sees Sebby for the first time across the school lawn, it’s as if he’s been expecting this blond, lanky boy with mischief glinting in his eye.Sebby, Mira’s gay best friend, is a boy who seems to carry sunlight around with him. Even as life in his foster home starts to take its toll, Sebby and Mira together craft a world of magic rituals and impromptu road trips, designed to fix the broken parts of their lives.As Jeremy finds himself drawn into Sebby and Mira’s world, he begins to understand the secrets that they hide in order to protect themselves, to keep each other safe from those who don’t understand their quest to live for the impossible.
Smut Peddler
C. Spike TrotmanMr. Darcy - 2012
It was an anthology of erotic comics, with contributions from some of the best and the brightest creators. There were three issues, and they were AWESOME. But that was it. The third Smut Peddler mini was followed by a years-long publishing hiatus...UNTIL NOW.
We Play Ourselves
Jen Silverman - 2021
There she meets her next-door neighbor Caroline, a magnetic filmmaker on the rise, as well as the pack of teenage girls who hang around her house. They are the subjects of Caroline's next semidocumentary movie, which follows the girls' clandestine after-school activity: a Fight Club inspired by the violent classic.As Cass is drawn into the film's orbit, she is awed by Caroline's drive and confidence. But over time, she becomes troubled by how deeply Caroline is manipulating the teens in the name of art--especially as the consequences become increasingly disturbing. With her past proving hard to shake and her future one she's no longer sure she wants, Cass is forced to reckon with her own ambitions and confront what she has come to believe about the steep price of success.
Yerba Buena
Nina LaCourNina LaCour
Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her. Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in a holding pattern. In her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, she yearns for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but is unable to commit. On a whim, she takes a job arranging flowers at the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena and embarks on an affair with the married owner.When Sara catches sight of Emilie one morning at Yerba Buena, their connection is immediate. But the damage both women carry, and the choices they have made, pulls them apart again and again. When Sara's old life catches up to her, upending everything she thought she wanted just as Emilie has finally gained her own sense of purpose, they must decide if their love is more powerful than their pasts.At once exquisite and expansive, astonishing in its humanity and heart, Yerba Buena is a love story for our time and a propulsive journey through the lives of two women finding their way in the world.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara - 2015
There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.