Recommendations based on "Sappho's Leap"

A Must-Read: Vogue, Nylon, Chicago Review of Books, Literary Hub, Frieze, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, InsideHook, The Next Big Idea Club,“[Lauren] Elkin is a stylish, determined provocateur . . . Sharp and cool . . . [Art Monsters is] exemplary. It describes a whole way to live, worthy of secret admiration.” —Maggie Lange, The Washington Post“Destined to become a new classic . . . Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought.” —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker: A Literary BiographyWhat kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty.In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flâneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies? Encompassing a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference—among them Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits, Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson. An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives.

It has been more than fifty years since John Waters filmed his first short on the roof of his parents’ Baltimore home. Over the following decades, Waters has developed a reputation as an uncompromising cultural force not only in cinema, but also in visual art, writing, and performance. This major retrospective examines the artist’s influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, soundworks, and videos he has made since the early 1990s. These works deploy Waters’s renegade humor to reveal the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy.Waters has broadened our understanding of American individualism, particularly as it relates to queer identity, racial equality, and freedom of expression. In bringing “bad taste” to the walls of galleries and museums, he tugs at the curtain of exclusivity that can divide art from human experience. Waters freely manipulates an image bank of less-than-sacred, low-brow references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse Divine—to entice viewers to engage with his astute and provocative observations about society.This richly illustrated book explores themes including the artist’s childhood and identity; Pop culture and the movie business; Waters’s satirical take on the contemporary art world; and the transgressive power of images. The catalogue features essays by BMA Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman; art historian and activist Jonathan David Katz; critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr; as well as an interview with Waters by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans.Published in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art.Exhibition dates:The Baltimore Museum of Art: October 7, 2018–January 6, 2019Wexner Center for the Arts: February 2–April 28, 2019

Winner of the National Book AwardA New York Times Bestseller"The queer romance we’ve been waiting for.”—Ms. MagazineSeventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the feeling took root—that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible.But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.(Cover image may vary.)

“Drag embodies the queer possibility that exists within each of us—the infinite ways in which gender, good taste, and art can be lived.”–Sasha VelourThis book is a quilt, piecing together memoir, history, and theory into a living portrait of an artist and an art. Within these pages, illustrated throughout with photos and original artwork, Sasha Velour illuminates drag as a unique form of expression with a rich history and a revolutionary spirit.Each chapter strips off a new layer, removing one tantalizing glove and then another, to reveal all the twists and turns in the life of a queen. As Sasha recalls her own journey, from the women who raised her, to learning the craft of an artist, to success, disaster, and more, she also uncovers the history of queer life around the world that made it all possible.From shamans to “fairies balls,” empresses to RuPaul’s Drag Race (and beyond), The Big Reveal chronicles and celebrates our shared queer pasts. “If we want to be seen as legendary,” writes Sasha, “we have to weave ourselves into history.”From an iconoclastic drag queen comes an equally singular, thought-provoking manifesto that brings necessary and sparkling substance to our understanding of drag, queerness, beauty, and liberation!

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. One of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2023. One of The New York Times' 10 Best California Books of 2023. Longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.“Open Throat is what fiction should be.” ―The New York Times Book ReviewA lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience.When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.” As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.

Winner of Randy Shilts AwardIn the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day.

'A roadmap for a new generation' VOGUE 'Radical, funny and fearless' VANITY FAIR 'Gripping' NYLON An electric, searing memoir by the original Riot Grrrl and legendary frontwoman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre Kathleen Hanna's rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 1980s, '90s, and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today their gutsy, radical lyrics of anthems like 'Rebel Girl' and 'Double Dare Ya' are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from? In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home, to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes blindingly clear, being in a 'girl band', especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or a safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a band took limitless amounts of grit and bravery. But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her - including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Billy Karren; her friendship with Kurt Cobain; and her introduction to Joan Jett - and they were a testament to how the true punk world nurtured and cared for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her later bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement and its decline, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the darkest, hardest times along with the most joyful - and how it all fuelled her revolutionary art, from the 1980s to today.

"A feeling that we could do whatever we liked swept through us in the 60s..."The sexual revolution liberated a generation. But men most of all.We tend to think of the 60s as a decade sprinkled with stardust: a time of space travel and utopian dreams, but above all of sexual abandonment. When the pill was introduced on the NHS in 1961 it seemed, for the first time, that women - like men - could try without buying."It was paradise for men... all these willing girls..."But this book - by 'one of the great social historians of our time' - describes a turbulent power struggle.Here are the voices from the battleground. Meet dollybird Mavis, debutante Kristina, Beryl who sang with the Beatles, bunny girl Patsy, Christian student Anthea, industrial campaigner Mary and countercultural Caroline. From Carnaby Street to Merseyside, from mods to rockers, from white gloves to Black is Beautiful, their stories throw an unsparing spotlight on morals, four-letter words, faith, drugs, race, bomb culture and sex.This is a moving, shocking book about tearing up the world and starting again. It's about peace, love, psychedelia and strange pleasures, but it is also about misogyny, violation and discrimination - half a century before feminism rebranded. For out of the swamp of gropers and groupies, a movement was emerging, and discovering a new cause: equality.The 1960s: this was where it all began. Women would never be the same again.'One of the great social historians of our time. No one else makes makes history this fun' Amanda Foreman'Intimate, immersive, often moving, How Was It For You? subtly but powerfully subverts complacent male assumptions about a legendary decade' David Kynaston'An absorbing study of an extraordinary age. Beautifully written and intensively researched' Selina Hastings'Every baby boomer should read this great and wonderfully revelatory book if only to shout, "Ah yes, that's exactly what it was like for me!"' Anne Sebba'Virginia Nicholson is the outstanding recorder of British lives in the twentieth century... and this account of the 1960s is the most vivid and moving of all her works' Carmen Callil'Essential reading' Marina Lewycka'A dazzling kaleidoscope of facts, feelings and observations' Juliet Nicolson'A hugely ambitious, kaleidoscope of a book' Richard Vinen'Makes it feel like the Sixties have never been away' Hunter Davies'I was there, and she's right' Valerie Grove

In the early 1990s three young people attracted to the ambitious global peacekeeping work of the UN cross paths in Cambodia. Andrew strives for a better world through his life-saving work as a doctor. Heidi, a social worker, is in need of a challenge and a paycheck, and Ken is fresh from Harvard and brimful of idealism. As their stories interweave through the years, from Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia to Haiti, the trio reveal a world of witnessed atrocities, primal fear, desperate loneliness and base desires. They fend off terror and futility with revelry, humour and sex; ask hard questions about the world order America has created, the true power of the UN, and whether there is any possibility for change. This is a startling celebration of the power of humour and friendship, of the limits of human compassion, and the need for a warm body and a cold beer during a Condition Echo lockdown. A book that shows the human cost of global politics and the tragic truth that wars are much more avoidable than our governments would ever admit. A brilliant, provocatively funny and fast moving book.

Authored by one of the most original contemporary thinkers on the subject, this book is an enlightening illustrated cultural history of the sex trade that puts sex workers center stage, revealing how they have lived and worked all around the globe.The history of selling sex is a hidden one―and too often its practitioners are pushed to the margins of history. This book redresses the balance, revealing the history of the sex trade through the eyes of sex workers, from medieval streets to Wild West saloons, and from brothels to state bedrooms. These enthralling tales are brought to life by Whores of Yore creator Kate Lister’s witty and authoritative text, and illuminated by a rich archive of photographs, artworks, and objects offering insight into sex workers’ lives, challenging assumptions about this age-old trade.Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts’ chapters are structured thematically in a broadly chronological order, each one introducing a lively cast of complex and entertaining characters operating in an array of different periods, locations, and settings. In ancient Mesopotamia, the harlot Shamhat was powerful and respected, able to civilize the wild man Enkidu through her charms. In medieval London, Elizabeth Moryng serviced religious clergy under the guise of an embroidery business, though she was eventually jailed for being a prolific panderer and bawd. In the hedonistic floating world of Edo, Japan, Kabuki actresses and geishas entertained and pleasured their patrons. Lister’s engaging and illuminating tales invite readers to look, listen, and reconsider everything they thought they knew about the world’s oldest profession. Together, these captivating tales of sex workers from around the world and throughout history provide a powerful context to contemporary debates about sexuality and the empowerment of women. 500 illustrations