For centuries, people have stitched in good times and in bad, finding strength in the needle moving in and out of fabric. Stitching Freedom explores the embroidery made in prisons and mental health hospitals — those who have embroidered to distract, to reflect or to calm. From Mary, Queen of Scots to Lorina Bulwer, embroidery historian and curator Isabella Rosner unpicks twelve embroidered histories to discover what can be created when freedom is out of reach.

Tam Becket has hated Lord Lyford since they were boys. The fact that he’s also been sleeping with the man for the last ten years is irrelevant. When they were both nine years old, Lyford smashed Tam’s entry into the village’s vegetable competition. Nearly twenty years later, Tam hasn’t forgiven the bastard. No one understands how deeply he was hurt that day, how it set a pattern of small disappointments and misfortunes that would run through the rest of his life. Now Tam has reconciled himself to the fact that love and affection are for other people, that the gods don’t care and won’t answer any of his prayers (not even the one about afflicting Lyford with a case of flesh-eating spiders to chew off his privates), and that life is inherently mundane, joyless, and drab. And then, the very last straw: Tam discovers that Lyford (of all people!) bears the divine favor of Angarat, the goddess Tam feels most betrayed and abandoned by. In his hurt and anger, Tam packs up and prepares to leave the village for good. But the journey doesn’t take him far, and Tam soon finds himself set on a quest for the most difficult of all possible prizes: Self care, forgiveness, a second chance... and somehow the unbelievably precious knowledge that there is at least one person who loves Tam for exactly who he is—and always has.

In this delightfully cozy and creepy YA romp, a cave monster masquerading as a search-and-recovery guide intends to find and eat a lost wizard—but catches feelings for him instead, perfect for fans of TJ Klune and Andrew Joseph White.Theory has a monstrous secret. He isn’t an ordinary search-and-recovery guide at Fiendworld, the world’s premier magical-sinkhole-turned-amusement-park; he’s a cursed, human-eating mantis. But not to worry—he has an excellent solution for his particular diet. Whenever he’s asked to retrieve the corpse of a lost adventurer, he simply snacks on a finger or two. No harm done. That is, until he’s given his latest recover the body of park management’s missing son. Great. Yet another foolish wizard who got lost adventuring, and this time the direct descendant of the very person who cursed Theory in the first place. Worse, when Theory reluctantly sets off on the search, he’s shocked to find the wizard somehow still alive. Nim—the wizard in question—has no desire to be rescued. He’s on a mission to the bottom of the sinkhole, and refuses to return to the surface before he gets there. He may be a subpar wizard, as his parents constantly remind him, but he’s got a positive attitude, an enchanted backpack, and now a mysterious rescue worker to recruit to his cause! Even though said worker is quite rude and seems to be getting Nim into more danger rather than out of it. To survive, Theory and Nim must brave man-eating fish, walls of tentacles, and devastating both their own, and ones the park desperately tries to keep hidden. Along the way, they may just discover that they’re stronger together than apart.

Transgender Marxism collects a set of reflections on the relations between gender and labour, showing how these linked phenomena structure antagonisms in particular social and historical situations. The collection contributes to Marxist Feminism and Social Reproduction Theory through both personal and analytic examinations of the particular social activity demanded of trans people around the world. The aim of the publication is not to provide an exhaustive overview of all trans thinkers using Marxist frameworks, but rather to provide a provocative and illuminating entry point to this mode of theorisation. No one is spared gendered enculturation, but the contributors to this collection argue that transgender people face particular pressures, oppressions, and state persecution. The first part of the book explores particular movements, and lives, through a Marxist lens. The second section emphasises the 'Marxism' in Transgender Marxism, exploring the particular experience of surviving as trans in light of the totality of gendered experience under capitalism. The contributors also consider how the particular case of transgender life offers opportunities to revise and renew Marxist theorising more generally. The final part twins Marxism with other schools of thought, such as psychoanalysis, mainstream psychology, phenomenology, and Butlerian performativity, to offer clearer insight into transgender experience.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than technology in the future. Will AI come and take all our jobs? Will it dominate humanity, hack the foundations of our civilization, or even wipe humans of the face of the planet? All kinds of people seem to think so. From academics to billionaires, artists to fraudsters, journalists to the pope, AI nightmares have gripped the popular imagination. Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent.  Science and tech industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted, and arcane world of AI nightmares in order to demystify what people say about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble, and show how fears about AI reflect very different economic from venture capitalists to AI engineers, from artists to warehouse workers at Amazon. If we want to understand the fears and potential impacts of AI, we must think about capitalism, the economy, and class power in real terms we can confront and wage our struggles on. Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of the violence and alienation at the root of capitalism and its way of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalist may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one where our labor, knowledge, and technologies serves us, rather than us serving capital and its owners.

Reveals the alt-right’s project to claim science fiction and—by extension—the future Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future.

Dr. Therese Blake is a homebody archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. But when her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets. Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a payday to Lissy, who’s been struggling to turn a profit to keep her salvage crew fed and paid. Therese, however, insists on careful academic procedure. She can’t figure it out: Is the anomaly an artificial creation–or a living organism? As the anomaly’s mystery draws the sisters into an obsessive orbit, it turns out neither greed nor science can offer protection from its relentless gravity.

The Power Of Myth launched an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Joseph Campbell and his work. A preeminent scholar, writer, and teacher, he has had a profound influence on millions of people. To him, mythology was the "song of the universe, the music of the spheres." With Bill Moyers, one of America's most prominent journalists, as his thoughtful and engaging interviewer, The Power Of Myth touches on subjects from modern marriage to virgin births, from Jesus to John Lennon, offering a brilliant combination of intelligence and wit.

For fans of Kevin Wilson and Andrew Sean Greer, a helper robot and his 35-year-old ward embark on a mad-cap adventure to save the fate of the family company in this whimsically speculative ode to Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster.Cy wants nothing more than to be useful, raise his utility score, and receive the next update for his operating system. But that’s easier said than done when he's tasked with helping his owner’s 35-year-old son “get out of his funk.” Grayson is nothing like his go-getter, CEO sister Charlotte. He didn’t inherit the family robotics company when their dad passed last year, he doesn’t have a master’s degree, and he just can’t seem to figure out the San Francisco dating scene. He’d rather eat synthesized mozzarella sticks and make pottery at his studio, Kilning Time. When Grayson learns of Charlotte’s plan to sell the company to a tech conglomerate, he panics. It’s not just the family business at stake, it’s all the technology—like Cy—their dad invented over the years. So he does what anyone would he steals the flash drive with his father’s most important work stored on it and plans a corporate takeover. If only he knew what that meant. To make matters worse, a fellow VALET deserts his owner and asks Cy to help him hightail it out of town, Grayson’s first real date—and her dog—keeping showing up at inopportune times, and the behemoth tech company wants this deal closed yesterday. Grayson, Cy, and their trusty golden retriever, Sasha III, must go on the lam until they figure out exactly what to do, and whom to trust. A hilarious, mad-cap adventure that is as tender as it is insightful, Valet asks not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be family.

Instead of a home in need of cleansing, Rosemary finds a closed-off ex-best friend insisting she hadn’t called her and demanding she leave. The last thing Genevieve wants is her ex-best friend poking her nose where it doesn’t belong and making Genevieve hunger for things she can't let herself want. Then something in the old house traps them inside. Danger and proximity lead to buried, unaddressed feelings resurfacing, along with the reveal of a few shocking secrets. What happens when your ex-best friend has the overwhelming urge to kill you? Worse, what happens when you want to let her?

In this seductive, provocative debut, two Afghan men—cast out of their respective countries of birth by circumstances beyond their control—collide in Istanbul, a city that will test their willingness to sacrifice everything for the ones they love.When Delbar—a hapless twenty-something with dreams of becoming a drag queen—is spectacularly outed, he flees the insular immigrant-dense suburbs of Washington, DC to seek refuge with his sympathetic aunt in Istanbul. There, he discovers a vibrant community of dissidents, sex workers, activists, poets, and heretics. Among them are Leif and his boyfriend, Mansur, with whom Delbar quickly develops a blazing fascination. But Mansur also nurses a wounded heart, having left his own family, and his first love, behind in Iran. This time, Mansur’s learned not to dream bigger than his own survival. He’ll keep a low profile, work hard to send money back, and remain faithful to Leif—at least until his refugee status is granted. When riot police descend on attendees of the annual Istanbul Pride march, Mansur and Delbar are thrust into dangerous proximity. With the country surging into authoritarianism, each person must ask  what constitutes a life well-lived, and how high is the price of freedom? Told through the alternating viewpoints of Delbar and Mansur, Bobuq Sayed’s debut is a story of borders and boundaries transgressed, and a deeply engrossing exploration of what it means to make a home at the margins of society. At once an immigrant family saga, a thwarted love story, and a searing portrait of politics made intimately personal, No God but Us is an ambitious introduction to a bold new voice.

Forty years ago, the world nearly ended. Be is an old robot who was there, and doesn’t want to think about what happened, or what role they played in that conflict. They have settled into a life of isolation in the abandoned ruins of an old mill in the former New York Botanical Gardens, disinterested in what has happened in the outside world since they stepped away from the war. Someone out there, though, has not forgotten about them, and when they are attacked, their person vandalized, and one of their leg stolen, they set out to find the thief accompanied by a cyborg dog and a human mechanic. The world has changed, but the recovery from the war is uneven and faltering, and Be begins to suspect a malicious hand trying to rekindle the old conflict and finish what was started. In order to stop them, Be needs to come to terms with both their own past and who they have become, and how everything and everyone else they knew has changed in their absence. Being left alone is no longer an option, and peace may be impossible. This is a story about coming to terms with your past, with who you’ve become and who you still want to be: a tale of resilence and hope, an ode to those struggling to become whole in a world half-broken.

A dynamic re-envisioning of the tarot, including tarot card imagery, that describes how the tarot is queer, that the archetypes are alive, and that tarot doesn’t tell the future; it creates it. Radical Tarot meets the tarot in a space of evolution, deconstruction, and creation, using the historical and common meanings of the cards as a launchpad for digging into limiting beliefs and societal conditioning and unlocking the personal truths beneath. The Fool’s Journey is re-envisioned as a journey to non-binary thinking, the gender essentialism is ousted from the Major Arcana and the Court Cards—and all the cards—are reframed through a non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist, and intersectional lens. The archetypes are re-imagined in modern, progressive, and queered contexts. For Radical Tarot also touches on Charlie’s personal story of how tarot helped them embrace their queerness, leave their marriage, and radically change their life. It speaks to their queer awakening and how tarot became, for them, a tool for social justice and conscious awareness of the world around them. Their words and experience will help anyone who wishes to be closer to their own authentic selves.

Learning in and through the arts can develop complex and subtle aspects of the mind, argues Elliot Eisner in this engrossing book. Offering a rich array of examples, he describes different approaches to the teaching of the arts and shows how these refine forms of thinking that are valuable in dealing with our daily life“Not since John Dewey has an American author written about art, education, and the creation of mind with such power and sensitivity.”—Michael Day, International Journal of Arts Education“A primer for the future. . . . This book will serve as an inspiration for those needing the language to convince policy makers and curriculum developers of the value of the arts in education, while also serving as a vehicle for illustrating the educational aspirations the very best education can offer.”—Rita L. Irwin, Journal of Critical Inquiry Into Curriculum and Instruction“[Eisner] has composed a text that is as insightful and inspirational as the educational research he envisions.”—James G. Henderson, International Journal of Education & the Arts

A lush tale of deadly court intrigue and a modern classic of fantasy by Locus award winner and Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award finalist Katherine Addison The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three half brothers in line for the throne are killed in an "accident," he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir. Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment. Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. All the while, he is alone, and trying to find even a single friend . . . and hoping for the possibility of romance, yet also vigilant against the unseen enemies that threaten him, lest he lose his throne–or his life.

Award-winning author Tanaz Bhathena’s WITCH DAUGHTER is a Persian mythology retelling of the story of Tahmineh, wife, mother, and rumored witch who desperately tries to stop a tragic prophecy in which her husband and son kill each other on a battlefield, pitched for fans of CIRCE and A SONG TO DROWN RIVERS.