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Title search results
Showing 1 - 7 of 7 items
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Journals and memoirs, LGBTQ+ biography
Human-narrated audio
A blazing new talent's hilarious memoir about coming of age and coming out in Pakistan, moving to America, looking for…
love, and falling in love with himself along the way What do you do when you're too gay for Pakistan, too Pakistani to be gay in America, and ashamed of your body everywhere? How can you find happiness despite years of humiliation, physical danger, and a legion of Brooklyn hipsters who know you only as a queer from Whereveristan? How do you summon the courage to be yourself no matter where you are? Even as a young child in Lahore, Komail Aijazuddin knew he was different—no one else at his all-boys prep school was pirouetting off their desks, or being bullied for their "manboobs," or spontaneously bursting into songs from The Little Mermaid. Aijazuddin began to believe his only chance at a happy, meaningful life would be found elsewhere: America, the land of the free, the home of the gays. But the hostility of a post–9/11 world and society's rejection of his art, his desires, and his body would soon teach him that finding happiness takes a lot more than a plane ticket. Searching for his place between two worlds while navigating a minefield of expectations, prejudice, and self-doubt, Aijazuddin discovered—sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously—that there are people and places he'd need to let go of to move forward. Manboobs is a riotously funny memoir of searching for love, seamlessly blending humor, politics, pop culture, and the bravery required to be yourself. Aijazuddin confidently announces himself as an exciting new voice in humor with his moving and charming reexamination of the American dream and our search for home
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Journals and memoirs, LGBTQ+ biography
Human-narrated audio
In this searing and uplifting memoir, a young Black queer woman fresh out of college adopts her baby brother after…
their incarcerated mother dies, determined to create the kind of family she never had. Growing up, Nikkya Hargrove's mother was in and out of prison. Hargrove, one of the 5 million children dealing with the effects of an incarcerated parent, spent a good portion of her childhood in prison visiting rooms. After her baby brother was born, Hargrove decided to fight for custody–even though she had only just graduated college. We see how she is subjected to preconceived notions that she, a Black, queer, young woman, cannot handle the responsibility. She shares about the shame she feels accepting food stamps, her family's reaction to her coming out, and the joy she experiences when she meets the woman who will become her wife. Whether she's clashing with her brother's biological father or battling for Jonathan's education rights after he's diagnosed with ADHD and autism, this is a woman who won't give up. Hargrove's memoir picks up where Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy left off, exploring generational trauma and pulling back the curtain on family court and poverty in America. Moving and inspiring, Mama is an ode to motherhood and identity, to never giving up, and to finding strength in family and community
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Biography, LGBTQ+ biography, Literature biography, Journals and memoirs
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A poet&’s &“dazzlingly propulsive&” memoir of growing up Black and gay in Knoxville, Tennessee (Kaveh Akbar, New York Times–bestselling author…
of Martyr!). Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart&’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain. &“A memorable portrait of Black gay life, from poverty and adversity to accomplishment and poetry.&” —Kirkus Reviews &“A mammoth creation . . . Just unbelievably rich art right here.&” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times–bestselling author of Heavy
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Asian history, Criticism, General non-fiction
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In imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many…
reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. “Stone maidens”—women deemed physically incapable of vaginal intercourse—might depart from families or marriages to become Buddhist or Daoist nuns. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit. Yet they were often punished harshly for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” suspected of sexual predation, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for many years.Exploring these histories and many more, this book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing. He considers a range of transgender experiences, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular social contexts and penalized in others. Sommer scrutinizes the ways Qing legal authorities and literati writers represented and understood gender-nonconforming people and practices, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book also sheds new light on a range of themes in Ming and Qing law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
LGBTQ+ biography, Literature biography, Criticism
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A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing”…
(Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself. Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Biography, LGBTQ+ biography, Journals and memoirs
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
In this searing and uplifting memoir, a young Black queer woman fresh out of college adopts her baby brother after…
their incarcerated mother dies, determined to create the kind of family she never had. Nikkya Hargrove spent a good portion of her childhood in prison visiting rooms. When her mother—addicted to cocaine and just out of prison—had a son and then died only a few months later, Nikkya was faced with an impossible choice. Although she had just graduated from college, she decided to fight for custody of her half brother, Jonathan. And fight she did. Nikkya vividly recounts how she is subjected to preconceived notions that she, a Black queer young woman, cannot be given such responsibility. Her honest portrayal of the shame she feels accepting food stamps, her family&’s reaction to her coming out, and the joy she experiences when she meets the woman who will become her wife reveal her sheer determination. And whether she&’s clashing with Jonathan&’s biological father or battling for Jonathan&’s education rights after he&’s diagnosed with ADHD and autism, this is a woman who won&’t give up. Nikkya&’s moving story picks up where Bryan Stevenson&’s Just Mercy left off, exploring generational trauma and pulling back the curtain on family court and poverty in America. Mama is an ode to motherhood and identity, and to finding strength in family and community, for readers of memoirs by Ashley C. Ford, Natasha Tretheway, and Dawn Turner.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Journals and memoirs, Poetry
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“It is a confusing thing to be born between generations where the one above thinks nothing is traumaand the one…
below thinks everything is trauma.”From acclaimed novelist and television writer Zoe Whittall comes a memoir in prose poetry that reconfirms her celebrated honesty, emotional acuity, and wit. Riving and probing a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation, No Credit River is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself.Open and exacting, this is a unique examination of anxiety in complex times, and a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally inventive as it is full of heart.