In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers’s delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future.
It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a lot.
Becky Chambers’s new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?
Becky Chambers is a science fiction author based in Northern California. She is best known for her Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series. Her books have also been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, among others. Becky has a background in performing arts, and grew up in a family heavily involved in space science. She spends her free time playing video and tabletop games, keeping bees, and looking through her telescope. Having hopped around the world a bit, she’s now back in her home state, where she lives with her wife. She hopes to see Earth from orbit one day.
A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.
When Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as “dad rock,” Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad’s glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock’s emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.
In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe’s allusions to queer longing, Radiohead’s embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen’s very trans desire to “change my clothes my hair my face”—and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis’s own who embody the tenderness at the genre’s heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.
Niko Stratis is an award-winning writer from Toronto by way of the Yukon, where she spent years working as a journeyman glazier before coming out as trans in her thirties and being forced to abandon her previous line of work. Her writing has appeared in publications like Catapult, Spin, Paste and more. She’s a Cancer, and a former smoker.
A dynamic portrait of one queer, Black boy’s experience in 1970s Cincinnati.
Sixteen-year-old Cliffy Douglas’s life is leveling up. An academic superstar on an accelerated path, he’s about to put high school behind him for college on the West Coast. His mentally ill father seems committed to seeking help for both his bipolar disorder and the PTSD brought back from the war in Vietnam. Cliffy even has a boyfriend—a summer romance that just might be the real thing.
But Cliffy’s life is flung into dangerous limbo after a vicious personal assault leaves him hospitalized, and with a terrible secret that threatens to ruin his escape from his claustrophobic family into a larger, more open world. As he recovers from his brutal attack, Cliffy must gather the complicated courage to face his assailant, demand justice, and fight off an encroaching despair that threatens his future.
With Days Running, novelist Shawn Stewart Ruff has created yet another dynamic portrait of one queer, Black boy’s experience in 1970s Cincinnati—chaotic family ties, the friction of shame and self-preservation, devastating violence, unexpected allies, and the desperate desire to break free.
In this dazzling debut collection, Mia Arias Tsang explores the complexity and torture of queer heartbreak with an urgency that will leave you gasping. Flash nonfiction, fragmented vignettes and personal narrative combine to tell the almost-love stories of her young adulthood. From dusty university libraries to Boston-bound BoltBuses, and the icy grief of Somerville to the smoggy shores of Venice Beach, FRAGMENTS OF WASTED DEVOTION spans a country of desire, a galaxy of yearning, and seven years of failing, losing, and finding oneself in love. Featuring original illustrations by Levi Wells.
Mia Arias Tsang is a writer and terminal Sagittarius based in New York City. Her work explores themes of queer desire, intimacy, and disconnect. She lives in Queens with her cat, Peanut (Aquarius), and is currently working on a novel.
Holly Ian Winter is a writer and translator living and creating in Philadelphia. She writes about the beautiful, innate queerness in ourselves, our relationships and the world around us.
As the world collapses, two lovers reconnect to save the world.
In March of 2029, the world faces imminent collapse and catastrophic environmental upheaval. The leaders of the United States have issued a warning that everyone must take a government-issued NeverSleep pill, meant to control intense vertigo, mental distress, and common sicknesses, to survive the world-wide climate crisis catalyzed by an anti-government faction that is trying to melt the polar ice caps.
Jill has hopped from job to job for years expressing malcontent. Having lost her parents as a child, she is looking to settle down and curate a family. Mary thinks Jill just needs some motivation. Jill and Mary were partnered almost a decade ago, broke up, and have started to slowly rekindle their relationship. But the world is changing.
The climate has changed.
Jill and Mary attempt to recouple and explore the NeverSleep, a side effect of the issued NeverSleep pill. The NeverSleep is a lucid dream space where a person can actively rebuild our world to be actualized in the future. Jill and Mary fight to survive in their relationship, carve out their place in the NeverSleep, but all of it could fall apart if the government and the world dissolves before them.
A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.
A poet’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.
This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.
Media coverage tends to sensationalize the fight over how trans kids should be allowed to live, but what is incredibly rare are the voices of the people at the heart of this debate: transgender and gender nonconforming kids themselves.
For their groundbreaking new book, journalist Nico Lang spent a year traveling the country to document the lives of transgender, nonbinary, and genderfluid teens and their families. Drawing on hundreds of hours of on-the-ground interviews with them and the people in their communities, American Teenager paints a vivid portrait of what it’s actually like to grow up trans today.
From the tip of Florida’s conservative panhandle to vibrant queer communities in California, and from Texas churches to mosques in Illinois, American Teenager gives readers a window into the lives of Wyatt, Rhydian, Mykah, Clint, Ruby, Augie, Jack, and Kylie, eight teens who, despite what some lawmakers might want us to believe, are truly just kids looking for a brighter future.
Nico Lang (they/them) is a nonbinary award-winning journalist with over a decade of experience covering the transgender community’s fight for equality. Their work has appeared in major publications, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, the New York Times, Vox, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, The Washington Post, and the L.A. Times. Lang is the creator of Queer News Daily and previously served as the deputy editor for Out magazine, the news editor for Them, the LGBTQ+ correspondent for VICE, and the editor and cofounder of the literary journal In Our Words. Their industry-leading contributions to queer media have resulted in a GLAAD Media Award and 10 awards from the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists (NLGJA). Lang is also the first-ever recipient of the Visibility Award from the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF), an honor created to recognize their impactful contributions to reporting on the lives of LGBTQ+ people.
Set in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life, this story by a master novelist introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and into his father’s firm. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way–except that he is homosexual.
Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after Howards End, and not published until 1971, Maurice was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy. “Happiness,” Forster wrote, “is its keynote….In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him.”