Book picks similar to
Final Girl by Lauren Milici


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Alone With You in the Ether


Olivie Blake - 2020
    Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. After their meeting, those things do not change. Everything else, however, is slightly different. Both obsessive, eccentric personalities, Aldo Damiani and Charlotte Regan struggle to be without each other from the moment they meet. The truth—that he is a clinically depressed, anti-social theoretician and she is a manipulative liar with a history of self-sabotage—means the deeper they fall in love, the more troubling their reliance on each other becomes. An intimate study of time and space, ALONE WITH YOU IN THE ETHER is a fantasy writer's magicless glimpse into the nature of love, what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken

Excess—The Factory


Leslie Kaplan - 1982
    Whatever our feelings about établissement and French Maoism here at Commune Editions (they aren’t positive), we think the book is incredible, and expect you will too.Get it here: http://communeeditions.com/excess-the...

A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland


DaMaris B. Hill - 2019
    Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes, illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout.For black American women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era’s prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%.* For those women who lived and died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical, social, intellectual--the threat of being bound was real, constant, and lethal.In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, Hill presents bitter, unflinching history that artfully captures the personas of these captivating, bound yet unbridled African-American women. Hill's passionate odes to Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and others also celebrate the modern-day inheritors of their load and light, binding history, author, and reader in an essential legacy of struggle.*(The Sentencing Project)

A Touch of Jen


Beth Morgan - 2021
    In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and New Age mantra they know by heart.Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beach-side paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, Remy and Alicia tumble into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization” looks like?Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.

Eden


Tommy Arlin - 2008
    Inside the fortified compound of Eden in Queens, New York, a man named Harris--infected by zombies--races against time to secure justice before his demise. In a world where the dead mass patiently beyond the walls of humanity's last redoubt, the danger and deceit within far surpasses any evil without.

Enchanting the Elven Mage


Alisha Klapheke - 2021
    An elven warrior. A marriage that might kill them both.Today, Aury learned three things: One, she is the princess. Two, she might be a powerful mage. And three, a brutal mountain elf is on his way to the kingdom for their marriage.Aury can’t escape her newly revealed royal parents quickly enough. If they think she is going to marry some vicious elven warrior mage, they have another thing coming. They claim she’s a mage too, but she has yet to prove it. She heads to the magic military order to get her rune-marked staff and learn everything she can. If she becomes the weapon they need instead of her not-if-she-can-help-it husband, they’ll send the mountain elf packing, right?If they don’t, she will.Filip is certain of three truths: One, he is bound to wed a stubborn mule of a princess. Two, the union will give his people the farmland they desperately need. Three, his nightmare of a bride has wild magic that will probably kill him before their wedding day.But he will die before he gives up on winning her hand.War is coming, and the first battle will be fought in the heart.Inspired by Sleeping Beauty, Enchanting the Elven Mage is the first standalone book in the Kingdoms of Lore fantasy romance series and is perfect for fans of Naomi Novik and Holly Black.

Second Star to the Left


Megan Van Dyke - 2022
    That is, until he recovers from her pixie dust laced kiss with a curse that turns the seas against him. With his ship and reputation at the mercy of raging storms, he tracks down the little minx and demands she remove the curse. Too bad she can’t.However, the mermaid queen has a solution to both of their problems, if Tink and Hook will work together to retrieve a magical item for her.As they venture to the mysterious Shrouded Isles to find the priceless treasure, their shared nemesis closes in. However, his wrath is nothing compared to the realization that achieving their goal may mean losing something they never expected to find—each other.

Sue Ellen's Girl Ain't Fat, She Just Weighs Heavy: The Belle of All Things Southern Dishes on Men, Money, and Not Losing Your Midlife Mind


Shellie Rushing Tomlinson - 2011
     Guided by principles from the ancient Belle Doctrine, the host of radio and television's All Things Southern offers down-home advice on everything from health and fitness-managing thy caloric calculations without going Straight Running Crazy and surviving the Raging Inferno Syndrome (aka hot flashes)-to the Southern art of handling your man (Bubba Whispering). Whether giving business tips or debunking the Big Boned Theory, making political observations or celebrating the inevitable resurgence of big hair, Shellie is an adviser women can relate to and laugh with regardless of their age or which side of the Mason-Dixon they call home.

Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung


Nina MacLaughlin - 2019
    After thousands of years of other people's tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I'll tell it myself.Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid's narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature.Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.

Founded on Goodbye (Mixtape Series, #1)


Kat Singleton - 2021
    That sentence would change my life after my dream job was dished to me on a shiny, silver platter. All I had to do? Hurt Nash Pierce enough to get him writing good music again. The pop icon’s songs were no longer the phenomena they used to be. His team needed another breakthrough album—like the first he’d penned, using his heartbreak as fuel. The plan was simple: I’d go on tour with him as a backup dancer…and make him fall in love with me. I was hired to inspire—to become embedded into every lyric he wrote. Then, I was to set fire to it all—to destroy every feeling we hoped he’d develop for me. It seemed simple enough. Easy, even. I didn’t expect to be consumed myself—to see so much in the man displayed in the tabloids. I didn’t foresee falling for him. It didn’t occur to me that, while attempting to break his heart, I might just shatter my own. Most of all, I never thought I’d fight so hard to hold on to a relationship that had always been founded on goodbye.

With a Hammer for My Heart


George Ella Lyon - 1996
    You never know what will fall from the sky...In this remarkable novel, George Ella Lyon creates characters rich and vibrant as the Kentucky landscape they call home, touching that secret place in all of us where we wait for love's transforming power...You never know what will fall from the sky...

Ain't Never Not Been Black


Javon Johnson - 2020
    Engaging with themes of masculinity, racism, love, and joy, Johnson is at once critical and creative. His spoken word performance transfers effortlessly to the page, with poems that will encompass you. This is a book about blackness and survival, and how in American these are inseparable. In a world of individualism, who can you hold close? In a world of danger, what makes you feel safe? From a poem written in the form of a syllabus, to another about the time his grandmother literally saved his life, Johnson's creative expression is constantly enacting the feminist mantra, "the personal is political."

Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines


Natalie Wee - 2016
    Of words, yes. Of well crafted images ("your name tucked under my tongue, an unraveling string that pulls & pulls".) But more than just that, this book thrills and pulls you in, showing you a history, a lineage, an invitation into Wee’s room, both in its cleanest and messiest moments. This is a stunning work by a powerful writer. The work in this book grabs on to all of the right emotions, and never lets go.”— Hanif Willis-AbdurraqibAuthor of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much*“Natalie Wee’s writing is indicative of a wordsmith-master utilizing all her tools with precision. Wee says the words we think, and then reshapes them, out loud, into beautiful origami-like gifts that hit you like “stray bullets splinter technicolour lovers.” The intricacies of her images walk a fine line that hover closely over genius, and the supernatural. From her well thought-out use of white space, enjambments, and form, Our Bodies and Other Fine Machines tells tales of hurt, pain, lust, love and all that lurks between leaving the “unsayable hung in our mouths.”— Chelene Knight,Managing Editor of Room Magazine*“This debut is breathtaking. Wee’s writing drops you into her world and you do not want to leave. Her portrait of girlhood from an outsider still feels as intimate and relentlessly soft as any old Polaroid plucked from your mother’s scrapbook. The poetry here is raw and refined, bloody and delicate, a whole body of work that turns our elusive moments into fine tuned pieces of machinery. Rarely do I find myself in awe of the beauty of language, both diction and visually. Even the shape of Wee’s words are gorgeous.Though this is Wee’s first collection, she writes with a steady hand and a steadier voice. Wee’s perspective is genuine, honest, and highly crafted. Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines is a bouquet arranged with every blossom and thorn for us to witness.”— Alex Dang!,Author of Are You Proud of Me?*“In Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines, Natalie Wee asks, “What is it like to be made a person / instead of a stranger’s dim shadow?” and reveals, “my bones are heavy with the weight of never having been seen at all.” It is with just such rigor and grace that Wee demands sight throughout this collection. Illuminating myriad ways queer women of color are silenced, dismissed, and unseen, she uses her vibrant voice as a call to attention. At times demure, yet always potent: “Mine was not a magic / of large curses but small misfortunes,” Wee opens a necessary and vulnerable space for the silenced. “My hands have made / some good mistakes,” she confides, but warns, “Do not mistake my silence / for subservience.” These pages are alive with determination to be heard, seen, understood. There is an urgency here one cannot escape, expressed entirely in Wee’s own careful and knowing language. More than remarkable, this book is necessary.”— Jeanann Verlee,Author of Racing Hummingbirds and Said the Manic to the Muse

Barbie Chang


Victoria Chang - 2017
    Barbie’s cultural artifice is unmasked by Victoria Chang’s imagination, lifting the struggle of Asian American experience to mythic levels.

We Need to Do Something


Max Booth III - 2020
    An alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM IFC MIDNIGHT, STARRING SIERRA MCCORMICK, VINESSA SHAW, AND PAT HEALY.A family on the verge of self-destruction finds themselves isolated in their bathroom during a tornado warning.Includes an introduction from Sean King O'Grady (director of the film adaptation) and a brand-new afterword from Max Booth III.