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Showing 1 - 5 of 5 items
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Women biography, Social issues, Family and relationships
Human-narrated audio
Lilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved…
cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger’s devotion to the women in her life took on a new urgency—a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love , this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family. Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger’s life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about identity and desire, and the many ways women create space for each other in a world that wants us small. Seamlessly weaving personal experience with literature and pop culture—ranging from fairy tales to true crime, from Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the “sad girls” of Tumblr—Dancyger’s essays form a kaleidoscopic story of a life told through friendships, and an expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other. Though friendship will never be enough to keep us safe from the dangers of the world, Dancyger reminds us that love is always worth the risk, and that when tragedy strikes, it’s our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due
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)
Women biography, Family and relationships, General non-fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
A bold, poignant essay collection that treats women&’s friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed…
author of Negative Space&“Fiercely felt and finely etched.&”—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy ExamsLilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger&’s devotion to the women in her life took on a new urgency—a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love, this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family.Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger&’s life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about identity and desire, and the many ways women create space for each other in a world that wants us small. Seamlessly weaving personal experience with literature and pop culture—ranging from fairy tales to true crime, from Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the &“sad girls&” of Tumblr—Dancyger&’s essays form a kaleidoscopic story of a life told through friendships, and an expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other.Though friendship will never be enough to keep us safe from the dangers of the world, Dancyger reminds us that love is always worth the risk, and that when tragedy strikes, it&’s our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.
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)
Literature biography, LGBTQ+ biography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Randy Shilts was the preeminent LGBTQ+ reporter of his generation. He was the first openly gay reporter assigned to a…
gay beat at a mainstream paper and one of the nation's most influential chroniclers of gay history, politics, and culture. Shilts wrote three seminal works on the community: The Mayor of Castro Street, on the life, assassination, and legacy of Harvey Milk; And the Band Played On, detailing the failure of politics as usual during the early AIDS epidemic; and Conduct Unbecoming, a history of the US military's mistreatment of LGBTQ servicemembers. Yet the intimate life story of Randy Shilts has been left unwritten. When the Band Played On tells that story, recognizing his legacy as a trailblazing figure in gay activism, journalism, and public policy. Author Michael G. Lee conducted interviews with Shilts's family, friends, college professors, colleagues, informants, lovers, and critics. The resulting narrative tells the tale of a singularly gifted voice, a talented yet insecure young man whose coming of age became intricately linked to the historic peaks and devastating perils of modern gay liberation. When the Band Played On is the authoritative account of Randy Shilts's trailblazing life, as well as his legacy of shaping the history-making events he covered.
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, Literature biography, Journals and memoirs
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
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
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
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
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.