Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Despite a veneer of openness, sex remains an extraordinarily complicated business, hard to discuss and surrounded by shame and unspoken desires. This book provides a relief from the loneliness and confusion, explaining how sex truly operates and what it aims at. The book demonstrates that far from thinking about sex too much, we haven’t begun to think about it as deeply as we should.

    Tragedy plus time equals comedy, right?In 2011, comedian Rosie Wilby was dumped by email. .. though she did feel a little better about it after correcting her ex's spelling and punctuation. Obsessing about breakups ever since, she embarked on a quest to investigate, understand and conquer the psychology of heartbreak.That quest proved to be a creatively fertile one, resulting in Rosie's acclaimed podcast The Breakup Monologues. She decided to ask her colleagues on the circuit about their experiences of romantic disaster and recovery, thinking, 'if one group of people have become adept at learning from catastrophe it is comedians. The worst onstage deaths are the performances that enlighten us most about how to improve.' She wondered if comics had been able to transfer this 'fail better' logic to love.This book is a love letter to her breakups, a celebration of what they have taught her peppered with anecdotes from illustrious friends and interviews with relationship therapists, scientists and sociologists about separating in the modern age of ghosting, breadcrumbing and conscious uncoupling. Her plan is to assimilate their advice and ideas in order to not break up with Girlfriend, her partner of nearly three years. Will this self-confessed serial monogamist, and breakup addict, finally settle down?

    His story begins here—before the homemade goat milk soaps and hand-gathered honeys, before his memoir of the city mouse’s move to the country, The Bucolic Plague—in I Am Not Myself These Days,  with “plenty of dishy anecdotes and moments of tragi-camp delight” (WashingtonPost).

    He chronicles the torture of finding a job before the internet when you had to talk on the phone all the time, and fantasizes, as we all do, about who to tell off when he finally wins an Oscar. As Gary himself says, "These are essays from my childhood and young adulthood about things that still annoy me."Original, brazen, and laugh out loud funny, Do You Mind if I Cancel? is something not to be missed.

     A riveting, powerful telling of the story of the grassroots movement of activists, many of them in a life-or-death struggle, who seized upon scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. Ignored by public officials, religious leaders, and the nation at large, and confronted with shame and hatred, this small group of men and women chose to fight for their right to live by educating themselves and demanding to become full partners in the race for effective treatments. Around the globe, 16 million people are alive today thanks to their efforts. Not since the publication of Randy Shilts's classic And the Band Played On has a book measured the AIDS plague in such brutally human, intimate, and soaring terms. In dramatic fashion, we witness the founding of ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), and the rise of an underground drug market in opposition to the prohibitively expensive (and sometimes toxic) AZT. We watch as these activists learn to become their own researchers, lobbyists, drug smugglers, and clinicians, establishing their own newspapers, research journals, and laboratories, and as they go on to force reform in the nation s disease-fighting agencies. With his unparalleled access to this community David France illuminates the lives of extraordinary characters, including the closeted Wall Street trader-turned-activist, the high school dropout who found purpose battling pharmaceutical giants in New York, the South African physician who helped establish the first officially recognized buyers club at the height of the epidemic, and the public relations executive fighting to save his own life for the sake of his young daughter. Expansive yet richly detailed, this is an insider's account of a pivotal moment in the history of American civil rights. Powerful, heart-wrenching, and finally exhilarating, How to Survive a Plague is destined to become an essential part of the literature of AIDS.

    Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite book of the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers.Evaristo's astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a vibrant and inspirational account of Evaristo's life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream and fought over several decades to bring her creative work into the world. With her characteristic humor, Evaristo describes her childhood as one of eight siblings, with a Nigerian father and white Catholic mother, tells the story of how she helped set up Britain's first Black women's theatre company, remembers the queer relationships of her twenties, and recounts her determination to write books that were absent in the literary world around her. She provides a hugely powerful perspective to contemporary conversations around race, class, feminism, sexuality, and aging. She reminds us of how far we have come, and how far we still have to go. In Manifesto, Evaristo charts her theory of unstoppability, showing creative people how they too can visualize and find success in their work, ignoring the naysayers.Both unconventional memoir and inspirational text, Manifesto is a unique reminder to us all to persist in doing work we believe in, even when we might feel overlooked or discounted. Evaristo shows us how we too can follow in her footsteps, from first vision, to insistent perseverance, to eventual triumph.

    For more than a year and a half she ventured into the world as Ned, with an ever-present five o'clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rim glasses, and her own size 11 1/2 shoes—a perfect disguise that enabled her to observe the world of men as an insider. The result is a sympathetic, shrewd, and thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism that's destined to challenge preconceptions and attract enormous attention. With her buddies on the bowling league she enjoyed the rough and rewarding embrace of male camaraderie undetectable to an outsider. A stint in a high-octane sales job taught her the gut-wrenching pressures endured by men who would do anything to succeed. She frequented sex clubs, dated women hungry for love but bitter about men, and infiltrated all-male communities as hermetically sealed as a men's therapy group, and even a monastery. Narrated in her utterly captivating prose style and with exquisite insight, humor, empathy, nuance, and at great personal cost, Norah uses her intimate firsthand experience to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as well as who men are apart from and in relation to women. Far from becoming bitter or outraged, Vincent ended her journey astounded—and exhausted—by the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Having gone where no woman (who wasn't an aspiring or actual transsexual) has gone for any significant length of time, let alone eighteen months, Norah Vincent's surprising account is an enthralling reading experience and a revelatory piece of anecdotally based gender analysis that is sure to spark fierce and fascinating conversation.

    He knows this. Everyone in his small town of Abby, Oregon, knows this. He reads encyclopedias every night before bed. He has a pet ferret called Harry S. Truman. He owns a video rental store that no one goes to. His closest friends are a lady named Lottie with drag queen hair and a trio of elderly Vespa riders known as the We Three Queens.Gus is not normal. And he's fine with that. All he wants is to be left alone.Until Casey, an asexual stoner hipster and the newest employee at Lottie’s Lattes, enters his life. For some reason, Casey thinks Gus is the greatest thing ever. And maybe Gus is starting to think the same thing about Casey, even if Casey is obsessive about Instagramming his food.But Gus isn’t normal and Casey deserves someone who can be. Suddenly wanting to be that someone, Gus steps out of his comfort zone and plans to become the most normal person ever.After all, what could possibly go wrong?

    He provides a proven program for following your heart without losing your sanity.

    In I Would Leave Me If I Could, she reveals never-before-seen poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder.

    At a little after one a.m. on the morning of June 28, 1969, the police carried out a routine raid on the bar. But it turned out not to be routine at all. Instead of cowering -- the usual reaction to a police raid -- the patrons inside Stonewall and the crowd that gathered outside the bar fought back against the police. The five days of rioting that followed changed forever the face of lesbian and gay life. In the years since 1969, the Stonewall riots have become the central symbolic event of the modern gay movement. Renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman now tells for the first time the full story of what happened at Stonewall, recreating in vivid detail those heady, sweltering nights in June 1969 and revealing a wealth of previously unknown material. This landmark book does even more: it unforgettably demonstrates that the Stonewall riots were not the beginning -- just as they were certainly not the end -- of the ongoing struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Duberman does all this within a narrative framework of novelistic immediacy. Stonewall unfolds through the stories of six lives, and those individual lives broaden out into the larger historical canvas. All six came of age in the pre-Stonewall era, and all six were drawn into the struggle for gay and lesbian rights as a result of the upheaval at the Stonewall bar and the events that followed.

    Never one to be shy of the spotlight, Dusty broke the mould as the first female entertainer to publicly admit she was bisexual, and was famously deported from South Africa for refusing to play to segregated audiences during apartheid in 1964, just a year after the launch of her solo career. Combining brand-new material, meticulous research and frank interviews with friends, lovers, employees and confidants, journalist Karen Bartlett reveals sensational new details about the soul diva’s unconventional upbringing, tumultuous relationships and unbridled addictions, including a lifelong struggle to come to terms with her sexuality. Named one of the Sunday Times’s best musical biographies of 2014, this is the intimate portrait of an immensely complicated and talented woman – the definitive account of one of music’s most legendary figures.

    In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.

    Drawing on in-depth interviews with over a hundred women and men, Opening Up explores the real-life benefits and challenges of all styles of open relationships -- from partnered non-monogamy to solo polyamory. With her refreshingly down-to-earth style and sharp wit, Taormino offers solutions for making an open relationship work, including tips on dealing with jealousy, negotiating boundaries, finding community, parenting and time management. Opening Up will change the way you think about intimacy.

    He lived with Mercury in London, Munich and New York, and he was with him when he died.In this book, the most intimate account of Mercury's life ever written, he reveals the truth behind the scandalous rumours, the outrageous lifestyle and Mercury's relationships with men, women and the other members of Queen.From the famous names - including Elton John, Kenny Everett, Elizabeth Taylor and Rod Stewart - to the shadowy army of lovers, fixers and hangers-on, Peter Freestone saw them all play their part in the tragi-comedy that was Freddie Mercury's life.Freestone lived with Mercury in Europe and America for over a decade. From the East 50s apartment in New York to Kensington Lodge, the house in London where Mercury died - not to mention innumerable international hotel rooms and apartments in between - Freestone was always on hand to serve and protect the man he had first met in the Biba department store in the early 1970s. Then, Queen was a largely unknown band. Soon it would be the most glitzy of glam rock bands. Freestone saw the fame arrive and with it the generosity, the excess, and the celebrity friends who came and went."I was chief cook and bottle washer, waiter, butler, valet, secretary, amanuensis, cleaner, baby-sitter... and agony aunt," he writes. "I shopped for him both at supermarkets and art markets, I travelled the world with him, I was with him at the highs and came through the lows with him. I saw the creative juices flow and I also saw the frustration when life wasn't going well. I acted as his bodyguard when needed and in the end, of course, I was one of his nurses."Freestone's best-selling account of a talented and extravagant star's life and death is compelling, entertaining and ultimately, very touching.