Berlin, 1938 It is the summer before World War II begins, but Charlotte Kraus doesn’t know it yet. All she knows is the zing of electricity she feels every time her best friend, Angelika Haas, grabs her hand. Charlie would follow Geli anywhere—which is how she finds herself at an underground club one Friday night, dancing to contraband American jazz and swing music, suddenly feeling that anything might be possible. Under the oppressive shadow of the Nazi regime, returning to the club is a risk. But Charlie does, unable to resist the allure of sharing a secret with the girl she can’t stop thinking about, or the thrill of disobeying the Party’s rules. Soon the Swingjugend movement becomes more than a simple escape. It’s a place where Charlie and her friends find acceptance, freedom, and camaraderie among others who are determined not to sit on the sidelines of history. Increasingly terrified by the tightening vise of Hitler’s power, Charlie is drawn to larger and larger acts of resistance—even as Geli, the daughter of a senior Party officer, begins to pull away. But resisting the Nazis is a dangerous proposition, and the war will test what Charlie is willing to risk at the expense of her family, her friends, and the girl she loves.

Aya’s found out that the guy she was interested in isn’t a guy at all—and she’s also realized that she just can’t keep her cool around Mitsuki! The two haven’t quite put a name on their complex, earnest feelings, but they only grow as the pair continues to bond over the music they love. With their senior year at hand, future plans are coming into question…and Aya’s thrown for a loop when a mysterious woman shows up and wants Mitsuki to go overseas!

David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, two lonely, TV-obsessed suburban teenagers, watch the 2009 analog to digital transition in Erin's family basement. Beneath the static that follows the analog switch-off, Erin catches a glimpse of a mysterious universe, the so-called Public Access Afterworld. Soon after that, she vanishes - breaking David's heart and changing his life forever.Fourteen years later, Bethany Peters slaves away at megacorporation GlobalVill's bleak Austin campus. A trans woman and a content moderator working the night shift, she is confronted by an endless stream of the most hideous videos humanity has to offer. But gradually a pattern emerges from the ocean of digital violence in the form of a young streamer, JulesPAA, who slices into their arms in each video before calling out the same Public Access Afterworld.When Bethany ignores the guidance of her corporate overseers and sets out to rescue Jules, she begins an epic journey that sweeps from rural Texas to the heart of American darkness at 1940s Los Alamos - all the way back to that basement where David and Erin had first encountered a world at the edges of reality itself.Can Bethany travel beyond the gates of Public Access Afterworld? And will they ever be able to make it back?

A passionate, powerful memoir by a trailblazing Black transgender activist, tracing her life of transformation and her work towards collective liberation. In 2017, Raquel Willis took to the National Women’s March podium just after the presidential election of Donald Trump, primed to tell her story as a young Black transgender woman from the South. Despite having her speaking time cut short, the appearance only deepened her commitment to speaking up for communities on the margins. Born in Augusta, Georgia, to Black Catholic parents, Raquel spent years feeling isolated, even within a loving, close-knit family. There was little access to understanding what it meant to be queer and transgender. It wasn’t until she went to the University of Georgia that she found the LGBTQ+ community, fell in love, and explored her gender for the first time. But the unexpected death of her father forced her to examine her relationship with herself and those she loved. These years of grief, misunderstanding, and hard-won epiphanies seeped into the soil of her life, serving as fertilizer for growth and allowing her to bloom within. Upon graduation, Raquel entered a career in journalism against the backdrop of the burgeoning Movement for Black Lives, intersectional feminism going mainstream, and unprecedented visibility of the trans community. After hiding her identity as a newspaper reporter, her increasing awareness of the epidemic of violence plaguing trans women of color and the heightened suicide of trans teens inspired her to come out publicly. Within just a few short years of community organizing in Atlanta, Oakland, and New York, Raquel emerged as one of the most formidable Black trans activists in history. In The Risk It Takes to Bloom , Raquel Willis recounts with passion and candor her experiences straddling the Obama and Trump eras, the possibility of transformation after tragedy, and how complex moments can push us all to take necessary risks and bloom toward collective liberation.

A provocative and thoroughly feminist “cult classic” (The New Yorker) about a smart, sensitive, yet deeply troubled young woman fighting to live on her own terms. I am glad I have the radiance. This time I am wiser. No one will know… The radiance drifts blue circles around my head. If I wanted to I could float up and through them. I am weightless. My brain is cool like rippling waves. Conflict does not exist. For a moment I cannot see—the lights are large orange flowers. Ellen has two lives. A single artist living alone on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s, she periodically descends into episodes she describes as “radiances.” While under the influence of the radiance, she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a colorful, glorious, liberating experience for Ellen, and despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, she relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda and the freedom it gives her. In what would turn to be her final published work, originally released in 1979, Elaine Kraf tackles a dark and disturbing subject in an utterly original, witty, and inventive manner. Provocative at the time of its publication and thoroughly iconoclastic, The Princess of 72nd Street is a remarkable portrait of an unforgettable woman.

"There are galaxies within the human mind, and madness wants to risk everything for the daring flight, reckless and beautiful and crazed. Everyone knows Icarus fell.But I love him for the fact that he dared to fly. Mania unfurls the invitation to fly too high, too near the sun..." Tristimania is a stark and lyrical account of the psyche in crisis. It tells the story of a devastating year-long episode of manic depression, culminating in a long solo pilgrimage across Spain. The book is rare in recording the experience of mania and shows how the condition is at once terrifying and also profoundly creative, both tricking and treating the psyche. In exploring its literary influence, Griffiths looks at Shakespeare's work, and examines the Trickster role, tracing its mercuriality through the character of Mercury. An intimate, raw journey, the book illuminates something of the universal human spirit.

The shark was beneath my bed, growing large as the room, large as the lighthouse, rising from unfathomable depths until it ripped the whole island from its roots. The bed was a boat, the shark a tide, and it pulled me so far out to sea I was only a speck, a spot, a mote, a dying star in an unending sky… Julia has followed her mum and dad to live on a remote island for the summer – her dad, for work; her mother, on a determined mission to find the elusive Greenland shark. But when her mother’s obsession threatens to submerge them all, Julia finds herself on an adventure with dark depths and a lighthouse full of hope… A beautiful, lyrical, uplifting story about a mother, a daughter, and love – with timely themes of the importance of science and the environment.