After a rough tumble and maybe-serious head injury, a disillusioned trans poet falls for a charming corporate lawyer in a love story that grapples with the explosive ghosts of relationships past, romantic and familial, from the Lambda Award-nominated author of Bellies, Nicola Dinan “Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.” Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. With a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued with a deep dissatisfaction during what should be the best years of her life. After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity. Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent, a corporate lawyer and hobby baker, whose trad friendship group may as well speak a foreign language, and whose Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. This uncharted territory may have rough terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy. Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage from his gap year in Thailand a decade prior: an explosive entanglement with a mysterious, gorgeous traveler. Voice-driven, warm, and poignant, Disappoint Me is an exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bourgeois domesticity that asks if we are defined by our worst mistakes.

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequencesWhat happened to feminism in the 21st century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and “riot girrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. And what she recounts is harrowing, from the leering aesthetic of American Apparel ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.

A deluxe, annotated edition of Kitchen Confidential to celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain, featuring new photo inserts Over two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now iconic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation and megabestseller. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business. Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade, laying out Bourdain’s more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine. Including a handwritten introduction and annotations done by Bourdain about a decade after the book was originally published, this edition also features previously unpublished photos to accompany the now-classic text.

Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention… Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? Part revisionist history, part historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America. Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queer villains and evil twinks in history.