Fucked At Birth by Dale Maharidge

Description

"This is a book ripped from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter to recently thriving downtowns stripped of office workers and service workers. Those catching the brunt of it all, those with the steepest hills to climb, may have been fucked at birth. But for everyone, as Maharidge observes, the feeling of safety is folly. A sharp wake-up call to heed the new Depression and to recognize the humanity of those hit hardest." —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW “Dale Maharidge takes us coast to coast in 2020, down highways along which he first reported decades ago. His honed class awareness—unrivaled among contemporary journalists—reveals that today's confluent health, economic and social crises are the logical conclusion to generations of unvalidated, untreated despair in a wealthy nation. Forget hollow commentary from detached television news studios in New York City. Fucked at Birth is the truth.” —Sarah Smarsh,Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class. Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth. Motivated by this haunting phrase—“Fucked at Birth”—Maharidge explores the realities of being poor in America in the coming decade, as pandemic, economic crisis and social revolution up-end the country. Part raw memoir, part dogged, investigative journalism,Fucked At Birth channels the history of poverty in America to help inform the voices Maharidge encounters daily. In an unprecedented time of social activism amid economic crisis, when voices everywhere are rising up for change, Maharidge’s journey channels the spirits of George Orwell and James Agee, raising questions about class, privilege, and the very concept of “upward mobility,” while serving as a final call to action. From Sacramento to Denver, Youngstown to New York City,Fucked At Birth dares readers to see themselves in those suffering most, and to finally—after decades of refusal—recalibrate what we are going to do about it.

Author

For two decades, Dale Maharidge has been one of America's leading chroniclers of poverty. Alongside photographer Michael Williamson, his bookAnd Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1990, revisiting the places and people of depression-era America, depicted in Walker Evans's and James Agee'sLet Us Now Praise Famous Men. Also with Williamson, Maharidge wroteJourney to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, which Bruce Springsteen has credited as an influence for songs such as "Youngstown" and "The New Timer".

The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

Description

Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell.

Throw on your Von Dutch hats and join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the aughts, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance—a time not so long ago, which many seem to forget.

Author
GRACE PERRY’s work has been published in a variety of outlets, including The New Yorker, New York magazine’s The Cut, BuzzFeed, Outside, and Eater. She is also a longtime, regular contributor to The Onion and the feminist satire site Reductress. Most of her work, comedy and journalism alike, interrogates the intersection of queerness, pop culture and the internet. She lives in LA.

Animal: A Novel by Lisa Taddeo

Description

Joan has spent a lifetime enduring the cruelties of men. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her, she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past. In the sweltering hills above Los Angeles, Joan unravels the horrific event she witnessed as a child—that has haunted her every waking moment—while forging the power to finally strike back.

Animal is a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society.

Author

Lisa Taddeo is the author of Three Women. She has contributed to The New York Times, New York magazine, Esquire, Elle, Glamour, and many other publications. Her nonfiction has been included in the anthologies Best American Political Writing and Best American Sports Writing, and her short stories have won two Pushcart Prizes. She lives with her husband and daughter in New England.

Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

A physician's "remarkable" account of how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences (Minneapolis Star Tribune) -- even for the white voters they promise to help.

Description

In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as physician Jonathan M. Metzl shows in Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. e shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates.

Now updated with a new afterword, Dying of Whiteness demonstrates how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation rather than chasing false promises of supremacy.

Author

Jonathan M. Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and director of its Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. He is the author of several books and a prominent expert on gun violence and mental illness. He hails from Kansas City, Missouri, and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Description

Today's feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. All too often, however, the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. That feminists refuse to prioritize these issues has only exacerbated the age-old problem of both internecine discord and women who rebuff at carrying the title. Moreover, prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others?

In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux. An unforgettable debut, Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.

Author
Mikki Kendall is a New York Times bestselling writer, speaker, and blogger whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Time, Salon, Ebony, Essence, and elsewhere. An accomplished public speaker, she has discussed race, feminism, violence in Chicago, tech, pop culture, and social media on Good Morning America, The Daily Show, MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera's The Listening Post, BBC's Woman's Hour, and Huff Post Live, as well as at universities across the country. In 2017, she was awarded Best Food Essay from the Association of Food Journalists for her essay on hot sauce, Jim Crow, and Beyoncé. She is also the author of Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women's Fight for Their Rights and a co-editor of the Locus-nominated anthology Hidden Youth, as well as a part of the Hugo-nominated team of editors at Fireside Magazine. A veteran, she lives in Chicago with her family.

Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism

Description
Anarcho-Blackness seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism. Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Bey addresses this lack, not by constructing a new cannon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of Black feminist and transgender theory, he explores what wecan learn by making this kinship explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter. If the state is predicated on a racialized and gendered capitalism, its undoing can only be imagined and undertaken by a political theory that takes race and gender seriously.

Author
Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Literature and English at Northwestern University.

We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival

Description

This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: there's never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry—hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike—complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and expand conversations often limited to normative workplaces.

Writing across topics such as homelessness, motherhood, and toxic masculinity,We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival gives voice to the fight for agency and accountability across sex industries. With contributions by leading voices in the movement such as Melissa Gira Grant, Ceyenne Doroshow, Audacia Ray, femi babylon, April Flores, and Yin Q, this anthology explores sex work as work, and sex workers as laboring subjects in need of respect—not rescue.

About the Author

Natalie West is a Los Angeles based writer and educator. She worked as a professional Dominatrix while obtaining her PhD in Gender Studies. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, Autostraddle, Kink Academy, Columbia Journal, and them. She moonlights as a sex work, BDSM, and queer community authenticity consultant for film and television.

Tina Horn hosts and produces the long-running kink podcast Why Are People Into That?! She is also the creator and writer of the sci-fi comic book series SfSx (Safe Sex). Her reporting on sexual subcultures and politics has appeared in Rolling Stone, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel, and elsewhere; she is the author of two nonfiction books and has contributed to numerous anthologies including the queer horror collection Theater of Terror and the feminist essay collection Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World. Horn has lectured on sex worker politics and queer BDSM identities at universities and community centers all over North America. She is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow, the recipient of two Feminist Porn Awards, and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. Originally from Northern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.

MEDUSA by Natalie Sierra

Medusa Natalie Sierra Published by DSTL arts

"Medusa: All the pretty girls have hair/ like the sun. But not me." In this necessary retelling of the myth of Medusa, author Natalie Sierra seeks to return agency and give justice to the long vilified but misunderstood serpent-haired woman. Set in modern day and in the city of Pomona, this collection will transport you into the heart and mind of Medusa and all she endures. Her ultimate goal: justice for herself, the survivors of violence, and all whose lives were cut short by the hands of their oppressors.

Through the blame lay
on someone else’s shoulder’s,
Medusa was shamed.
Banished for desecrating the temple,
though her body and soul
were ravaged by a madman on parade.

Athena, goddess of wisdom,
yes.
But also, goddess of war.
Ever searching for an enemy to combat.
But only the weaker ones,
of course.

What good is starting a war if you’re going to lose it?

—Natalie Sierra

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Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights

Do you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justice?

In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith bring a fresh perspective to questions that have long been contentious. Speaking from a growing global sex worker rights movement, and situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, they make it clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.