Cristy C. Road
At its core, Spit and Passion is about the transformative moment when music crashes into a stifling adolescent bedroom and saves you. Suddenly, you belong.
At twelve years old, Cristy C. Road is trying to balance the values of a Cuban Catholic family with her newfound queer identity, and begins a chronic obsession with the punk band Green Day. In this stunning graphic memoir, Road renders the clash between her rich inner world of fantasy and the numbing suburban conformity she is surrounded by. She finds solace in the closet—where she lets her deep excitement about punk rock foment and, in that angst and euphoria, finds a path to self-acceptance.
“Cristy C. Road is a bad ass. She has a list of published work that leaves me awed and inspired.”
—Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day
“I’m a big Cristy C. Road fan. Spit and Passion is a graphic delight, and the depiction of awkward youth is spot-on, weird, and familiar.”
—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
“Cristy C. Road is the Jack Kerouac of the young queer generation. She’s as brilliant a writer as she is an illustrator.”
—Kate Bornstein, author of A Queer and Pleasant Danger
ISBN: 9781558618077 | eISBN: 9781558618084
Translation by Stéphanie Benson
With humor, rage, and confessional detail, Virginie Despentes—in her own words “more King Kong than Kate Moss”—delivers a highly charged account of women’s lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex and gender, and shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experience of rape, prostitution, and working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she makes the bold, stinging point that when it comes to sex today, everyone’s getting screwed.
“A must read for every sex worker, tranny, punk, queer, john, academic, pornographer—and for all those people who dislike them too.”
—Annie Sprinkle, author of Post-Porn Modernist
“King Kong Theory brings to mind Solana’s SCUM Manifesto, Muscio’s Cunt, and Plath’s The Bell Jar—feminist eloquence without restraint. You will love it.”
—Susie Bright, author of Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir
ISBN: 9781558616578 | eISBN: 9781558616875
Karen Finley
No other performing artist has captured the psychological complexity of this decade as Karen Finley has. In her inimitable style, she has embodied some of the most troubling figures to cast a long shadow on the public imagination, and has envisioned a kind of catharsis within each drama: Liza Minnelli responds to the September 11 attacks; Terri Schiavo explains why Americans love a woman in a coma; Martha Stewart dumps George W. Bush during their tryst on the eve of the Republican National Convention; Silda Spitzer tells the former governor why “I’m sorry” just isn’t enough; and the ghost of Jackie O cries, “Please stop looking at me!” The Reality Shows is a revelation of a decade by one of our greatest interpreters of popular and political culture.
“Karen Finley is a profound theater-artist. Her artistry is due in part to her ability to alchemize “news” and make it art. She takes the viewer by the throat as she screams, cajoles, and seduces us into some awareness of the world at large. Finley’s brilliance lies in this fact, too: her insistence that we look at our respective souls by having us view her characters’ own, even as we want to look away. She is irreplaceable.”
—Hilton Als, New Yorker theater critic
“Finally I had found a feminist writer who didn’t have to chop herself into bits to be comprehended. Instead she casually blurred the line between the personal and the political and refused to ignore the fact that sexuality is wrapped into everything.”
—Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kill and Le Tigre
ISBN: 9781558616714 | eISBN: 9781558616721
Ann Jones
From Lizzie Borden to Jean Harris to Aileen Wuornos, this legendary bestseller tells the raw stories of women who were stripped of their right to dignity and humanity, and responded with the ultimate act of violence.
Nearly half of the women murdered in the US between the ages of twenty-five and fifty are killed by husbands or boyfriends. “Given such circumstances, thousands of women will die. And some will kill,” writes Ann Jones in her powerful new introduction. Under these treacherous conditions, the shocking truth about women who kill is not that they do it, but that more women don’t.
When first published in 1980, Women Who Kill helped establish the battered woman’s syndrome as an admissible defense in court cases. This new Feminist Press edition explores the connections between domestic violence and the return of war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and adds notorious new cases to an extraordinary history of crime and punishment.
“Jones is a sardonic, savagely witty storyteller.”
—Newsweek
“This provocative book . . . reminds us again that women are entitled to their rage.”
— New York Times Book Review
ISBN: 9781558616073 | eISBN: 9781558616523
Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels
Justin Vivian Bond
Hailed as “the greatest cabaret artist of [V’s] generation” in the New Yorker, Mx Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this candid and hilarious coming-of-age tale.
Bond recalls in vivid detail how it looked and felt to first discover Mom’s lipstick (Iced Watermelon by Revlon), and how dreary it could be for a trans/queer kid to join the Cub Scouts. Always haunted by the knowledge of being “different,” Bond began to create intimate friendships with girls, and to feel increasingly at risk with boys. But when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly, Bond couldn’t resist. Their trysts went on for years, making Bond acutely aware of how sexual power and vulnerability can be experienced at the same time.
With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, parenting trans/queer children, and bullying, while being utterly entertaining.
“Thank you, Justin, for your courage in writing the truth of what you went through as a transgender child in this society. Thank you, also, for your sense of humor. This book is very important, and fun to read as well.”
—Yoko Ono
“Justin Vivian Bond is a lightning rod, a solid steel structure in heels that attracts burning chaos and disciplines it into orderly submission. Am I allowed to say that Justin is God?”
—Rufus Wainwright
ISBN: 9781558617476 | eISBN 9781558617544
Safiya Bukhari
Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Safiya Bukhari’s story begins in 1968 when she witnessed and NYPD officer harassing a Black Panther for selling the organization’s newspaper on a Harlem street corner. Compelled to speak up, she was handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car.
In The War Before, Bukhari traces her lifelong advocacy for the rights of the oppressed. These writings provide an intimate view of a woman wrestling with the issues of her time: the legacy of the Panthers, misogyny and racism in the movement, her decision to convert to Islam, the incarceration of outspoken radicals, and the cost to their families left behind. With a preface by Sadiya’s daughter, Wonda Jones.
“She was a warrior-woman who did everything she could to free her people and to free political prisoners.”
—Assata Shakur
ISBN: 9781558616103 | eISBN: 9781558616547