From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we’ll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.In recent years, “white feminism” and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms /em> is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.

Everything is changing– – but everything is also exactly the same. Ingken can’t ignore ice caps stained brown from forest fires, pipeline construction, drought… the whole world somehow persists despite the slow erosion of stability. After a trip to Paris, Ingken returns home ready for a break from drugs. Their supportive partner, Lily, is flushed, excited about a new connection she’s made. Although Ingken wants to be happy for her, there’s a discomfort they can’t shake. Sleepless nights fill with an endless scroll of images and headlines about climate disaster. A vague dysphoria simmers under their skin; they are able to identify that like Lily, they are changing, but they’re not sure exactly how and at what pace. Everyone keeps telling them to burn themself to the ground and build themself back up but they worry about the kind of debris that fire might leave behind. Nino Bulling’s artwork is immediately familiar. Like a conversation with a good friend, their story is told as quiet as it can be loud. Crowds and landscapes squiggle in expressive black and white. Red cuts through panels with energy and persistence, bringing life to what might seem dead. In its most intimate moments, Firebugs asks what it means to transition in a transitioning world.

It’s not easy for anyone to find love, let alone a middle-aged gay man in small-town America. Mike Breck works multiple part-time jobs and bickers constantly with his father, an angry conservative who moved in after Mike’s mother died. When he’s not working or avoiding his father, Mike burns time on hookup apps, not looking for anything more. Then he meets a local guy, Dave, just as lonely as he is, and starts to think that maybe he doesn’t have to be alone. Mike falls hard, and in a moment of intimacy, his pent-up hopes for a relationship rush out, leading him to look more honestly at himself and his future. Winner of the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, Ben Grossberg’s The Spring before Obergefell is about real guys who have real problems, yet still manage to find connection. Funny, serious, meditative, and hopeful, The Spring before Obergefell is a romance—but not a fairytale.

In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived. Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new threat to digital culture, disrupting the infrastructure that secures our digital heritage and impeding access to information at community scale. When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk. Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.

In the shadows of the forest, he waits…A bloody and bewitching monster romance from Desirée M. Niccoli.  A winter hag in training, Astrid spends her days in the Black Forest sharpening her spell craft and flinging axes at tourists, and her nights leaving offerings to the ancient eldritch monster that guards the woods. She’s one sex ritual away from leaving the last trace of her unwanted humanity behind and stepping into her full power.It’s the perfect life. Until a group of unruly humans brings that same deadly monster to her doorstep. Now, her only hope for survival is a plate of poisoned cookies.Gudariks has roamed the Black Forest since it sprouted its first trees, consuming any who violate his beloved land. Lured to the witch’s gate, he is amused at her attempt to poison him with sweets…but spending time with her awakens millennia of repressed desire. Astrid doesn’t shy away from the gentle caress of his claws or his most ravenous attentions.As witch and monster find long-buried heat in the wintery landscape they call home, signs of a dark, lost magic begin to appear in the forest. When a rising supernatural threat has them questioning not only their ability to protect the forest, but Gudariks’s own immortality, their only solution may be to share their strength and create a union beyond mortal comprehension.  

The first-ever attempt to paint a full-scale portrait of the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia during the Asia-Pacific War (1942-5). This book draws on the huge body of available narrative--military documents, bureaucratic records and personal accounts of combatants and civilians, including diaries, memoirs and collected correspondence--most of which have previously been either unknown or unavailable to non-Japanese readers. It examines how the Japanese imperial adventure in Southeast Asia sped up the collapse of the Japanese Empire as a whole, not only through its ultimate military defeat in the region, but also due to its failure as an occupier from the very beginning. Nakano explains the significance of the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia as a learning experience for the occupiers, whether soldiers on the frontlines or civilians on the home front. He uses a synthesis, overlay and juxtaposition of a selection of these narratives, to reassemble the narrative as a whole. This brings into focus the outlook of those Japanese who set out for Southeast Asia with the purpose to urge the region's occupied people to collaborate with Japan to transform the region into an integral part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Many would eventually discover that what required change was Japan and its whole approach to colonial rule, as was realized so quickly in the postwar era. The original Japanese version was published as Tonan Ajia senryo to Nihonjin: Teikoku Nihon no kaitai [The occupation of Southeast Asia and the Japanese: The dismantling of the Japanese Empire]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2012. ISBN: 430922542X.

In order to compete with Western powers, Japan began to rapidly modernize its governing institutions, in the process creating a national population registration and identification bureaucracy, the Koseki system, in 1871. A few decades later, when Japan began to extract natural resources from and militarize Northeast China during its colonial expansion, new identification technologies were introduced to control a growing population of colonial subjects. Against the historical backdrop of these pioneering identification systems in Japan, Midori Ogasawara invites readers to delve into the little-known genealogy of modern-day identification systems, and the colonial roots of the surveillance technologies that saturate our digital lives today. Based on archival research in Japan and China, as well as interviews with the families of Chinese survivors of Japanese colonialism, this book explores the emergence of Japanese identification systems and the transformation of identification techniques in its colonies and occupied areas. Taking a historical and sociological perspective informed by surveillance studies, Ogasawara shows how biometric identification became a powerful means of population control and racialization of ethnic others, a process that helped the Japanese government to classify the Chinese as "desirable" or "undesirable" and to reduce whole persons to mere resources. Tracing it from the Koseki system to colonial surveillance in Northeast China, Ogasawara uncovers the troubling history of identification technology in modern Japan.

Sorcha is over the hook-ups and gay haunts of her twenties. At thirty-one what she wants, more than anything, is to have a baby. Then she meets Chris― with her buttoned-up plaid, 90s heartthrob hair, and grand romantic gestures― and things get serious. Fast. Though Sorcha's friends find her new partner problematic, Sorcha has an explanation for everything. As Chris's moods turn volatile and Sorcha becomes increasingly isolated, Chris paints an idyllic picture of domestic bliss in Cape Breton. Sorcha is all in: if her conservative religious upbringing taught her anything, it's how to save. Plus, Chris promises Sorcha the thing she wants most― a baby. But when Sorcha becomes pregnant and Chris's abuse escalates, Sorcha realizes she must escape the life they've built together, just as she escaped her own stifling family years before. When Sorcha's estranged Aunt Agnes, a retired midwife, messages Sorcha out of the blue, her bothy in the Scottish Highlands seems the perfect place to hide. As the bundle of cells in Sorcha's belly diligently divides, she daydreams that Agnes will deliver the baby and they'll stay in Scotland, where Chris can't find them. And where, just maybe, Sorcha could build the sort of family she's always ached for. Exploring the clandestinity of queer abuse, the fierceness of friendship, and the magic of found family, milktooth is a bold, inventive, lyrical and darkly funny story about finding the strength to cut away what's harmed you and create something entirely new.

In 1968, a seventeen-year-old queer girl traveled to Alaska disguised as a boy. Tracy should have been a boy. Even her older brother Spencer says so, though he wouldn’t finish the thought with, “And I should have been a girl.” Though both feel awkward in their own skin, they have to face who they are—queers in the late 60s. When both are caught with gay partners, their lives and futures are endangered by their homophobic father as their mother struggles to defend them. While the Vietnam War threatens to take Spencer away, Tracy and her father wage a war of their own, each trying to save the sweet, talented pianist. At seventeen, Tracy dresses as a boy and leaves her parents in turmoil, with only the slimmest hope of finding peace within herself. She journeys to a girl with a guitar, calling to her from a photo, "Come to Alaska. We'd be great friends." Maybe even The MoonStone Girls.

Hailed by "The New York Times Book Review" as a "grippingly told" story of "power and relevance," here is the true, untold account of the first American women to prove their mettle under combat conditions. Later, during three years of brutal captivity at the hands of the Japanese, they also demonstrated their ability to survive. Filled with the thoughts and impressions of the women who lived it, "every page of this history is fascinating" (The Washington Post). "We Band of Angels" In the fall of 1941, the Philippines was a gardenia-scented paradise for the American Army and Navy nurses stationed there. War was a distant rumor, life a routine of easy shifts and evenings of dinner and dancing under the stars. On December 8 all that changed, as Japanese bombs rained on American bases in Luzon, and the women's paradise became a fiery hell. Caught in the raging battle, the nurses set up field hospitals in the jungles of Bataan and the tunnels of Corregidor, where they saw the most devastating injuries of war, and suffered the terrors of shells and shrapnel. But the worst was yet to come. As Bataan and Corregidor fell, a few nurses escaped, but most were herded into internment camps enduring three years of fear and starvation. Once liberated, they returned to an America that at first celebrated them, but later refused to honor their leaders with the medals they clearly deserved. Here, in letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts, is the story of what really happened during those dark days, woven together in a compelling saga of women in war.