I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.

In 2024, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future. Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others. When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.

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?

In the former United States, sixteen-year-old Noam Álvaro wakes up in a hospital bed, the sole survivor of the viral magic that killed his family and made him a technopath. His ability to control technology attracts the attention of the minister of defense and thrusts him into the magical elite of the nation of Carolinia. The son of undocumented immigrants, Noam has spent his life fighting for the rights of refugees fleeing magical outbreaks—refugees Carolinia routinely deports with vicious efficiency. Sensing a way to make change, Noam accepts the minister’s offer to teach him the science behind his magic, secretly planning to use it against the government. But then he meets the minister’s son—cruel, dangerous, and achingly beautiful—and the way forward becomes less clear. Caught between his purpose and his heart, Noam must decide who he can trust and how far he’s willing to go in pursuit of the greater good.

Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

Art, power, desire, and illusion collide in a hypnotic new novel from Olivia Laing, set in the months leading up to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975. It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the illusionist responsible for realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young apprentice is just what he needs.He brings Nicholas back to Rome and introduces him to the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. In the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism.But Nicholas has a secret, and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amid the rising tensions of Italy’s “Years of Lead,” he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend.Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noir-ish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema. It is a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

Difficult Women on Television Drama analyses select case studies from international TV dramas to examine the unresolved feminist issues they raise or equal labor force participation, the demand for sexual pleasure and freedom, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, and the need for intersectional approaches. Drawing on examples from The Killing, Orange is the New Black, Big Little Lies, Wentworth, Outlander, Westworld, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, Vida, and other television dramas with a focus on complex female characters, this book illustrates how female creative control in key production roles (direct authorship) together with industrial imperatives and a conducive cultural context (indirect authorship) are necessary to produce feminist texts. Placed within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women; the growing embrace of a feminist identity; and the ascendance of post-feminism, this book reconsiders the unfinished nature of feminist struggle(s) and suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic change. This book is a must-read for scholars of media and communication studies; television and film studies; cultural studies; American studies; sociology of gender and sexualities; women and gender studies; and international film, media and cinema studies.

'A great read. A box of delights which is also a thrilling satirical torture chamber.' Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession 'An absolute riot . . . totally compulsive.' Observer 'A modern master of funny, penetrating satire.' GQ'If Phoebe Waller-Bridge had a score to settle.' StylistThe new novel from the bestselling author of Capital What if the year's most talked about TV show was all about your marriage?Kate, thirty years into her marriage, has a seemingly idyllic metropolitan, North London life.Phoebe, a young screenwriter, is the creator of the year's hit TV show, Cheating.When Kate's world takes a darker turn, she thinks she sees details and intimacies in the show that only she and her husband Jack could possibly have known. But who has betrayed who? Who gets to tell whose story?A black comedy of resentment and entitlement, Look What You Made Me Do is the story of two very different women from two very different generations, heading toward a battle only one of them can win.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing - a stunning story of corruption and tragedy in one of the world's great London."A new book by Keefe means drop everything and close the blinds; you'll be turning pages for hours" Los Angeles Times'Patrick Radden Keefe [is] one of the top narrative nonfiction authors of his generation' TIMEIn 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac's parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night - and how a teenager's world of make-believe drew him into the city's terrifying underworld.London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.

“Wise and heartbreaking” (Ann Napolitano), this captivating epic weaves the intimate lives of two Midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.In the small Ohio town of Bonhomie, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual she is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those whom they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship; she will soon learn that he may have perished in a predawn attack in the Philippine Sea. As the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie, but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Twenty-five years later, as another war convulses America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter set in motion a series of events that will upend the next generation of both families as they head toward a new century.Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love, and for goodness.

“The Names is a truly gorgeous, heart-opening novel. I couldn’t put it down, and I’m grateful to have Cora and her children living inside my heart now. What a wonderful book!” —Ann Napolitano, bestselling author of Hello Beautiful The extraordinary debut that Can a name change the course of a life?In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the "one . . . precious life" we are given. The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.

“Every aspect of her body or personality was up for inspection: too big, too small, too available, too hidden, too much, not enough.” A wedding day brings back memories of sisterhood and betrayals; a motorway service station is the site of explosive violence, but also strange bonds; a trip home forces a reminder of a life-changing, lost friendship; a woman confronts her own infidelity; an artist celebrates a life spent in observation. This debut collection movingly explores how women and girls are looked at, look at one another, and look at themselves, and how living as an object can shape their passions, fears, and joys. With a clear eye and dark humour, Danielle Pender considers sex, parenting, grief and class as lenses for the ways in which the world watches women ― and how women are always watching back.

"My Brilliant Career" is the story of Sybylla, a headstrong young girl growing up in early 20th century Australia. Sybylla rejects the opportunity to marry a wealthy young man in order to maintain her independence. As a consequence she must take a job as a governess to a local family to which her father is indebted. "My Brilliant Career" is an early romantic novel by this popular Australian author.

A thrilling and eccentric novel about what it means to make art as a woman, and about the powerful forces of voyeurism, power, obsession, and online performanceWoo Woo follows Sabine, a conceptual artist on the verge of a photo exhibition she hopes will be pivotal, as she plunges deeper into her neuroses and seeks validation in relationships—with her frustratingly rational chef husband, her horde of devoted Gen Z TikTok followers, and even a mysterious, potentially violent stalker. Accompanying her throughout are Sabine’s strange alter egos, from hyperrealistic puppets of her as a baby to the ghost of conceptual artist Carolee Schneemann, who shows up with inscrutable yet sage life advice. Ella Baxter approaches the desire to see and be seen that defines both the creative and romantic act with humor, empathy, and a good dose of wildness, driving Sabine to an surreal and compelling climax that forces her—and us—to reconsider what it means to be an artist and a partner.

Here’s what started the phenomenon: the best seller, for over 15 years, that’s been used by screenwriters around the world! Blake Snyder tells all in this fast, funny and candid look inside the movie business. “Save the Cat” is just one of many ironclad rules for making your ideas more marketable and your script more satisfying, including: The four elements of every winning logline The seven immutable laws of screenplay physics The 10 genres that every movie ever made can be categorized by ― and why they’re important to your script Why your Hero must serve your Idea Mastering the 15 Beats Creating the “Perfect Beast” by using The Board to map 40 scenes with conflict and emotional change How to get back on track with proven rules for script repair This ultimate insider’s guide reveals the secrets that none dare admit, told by a showbiz veteran who’s proven that you can sell your script if you can save the cat.